All Alone in the Universe Read online

  I realize now that Maureen saw something in Glenna that I could not see. (I leave it to her biographers, or maybe to microbiologists, to discover what that is.) Not that I was trying too hard.

  Anyhow, it felt safer then to leave that topic behind and take this bit of time with Maureen any way I could get it To add it to the little pile of proofs that I hoped would add up to some charm that could eventually ward off Glenna.

  So we squeezed between the dusty bushes to get to the riverbank, where we sank our feet into the silty mud, and sat on the low, bouncing branch of a big old tree that leaned out over the water. We crossed our legs like yogis and tried to balance there with our eyes closed. The shallow part of the river flowed along steadily, but in no hurry, about a foot below our branch, greenish brown, the color of a dollar bill. We opened our eyes and dangled our feet, making whirls and eddies form around them, talking about whatever, one thing or another. The sun must have been moving along up above the trees because the patches of sunlight shifted bit by bit over the moving surface of the water, lighting up patches of our shoulders and legs and the tops of our heads. In a way it was the best afternoon of summer. But it was also like a prediction from the oracle at Delphi; it could mean practically anything.

  six

  WHILE MAUREEN AND GLENNA WERE AWAY AT BORTH LAKE, I believed in the afternoon at the river. I believed it meant something that Maureen had gotten out of the Flaibers’ car. She had promised she would call when she got back. So I knew that she would. Maybe they had stayed a few extra days. Then there would be unpacking. That takes time. And probably the Bercks would be doing some family-type activities. I knew she would call.

  Here are some things you can do while you are waiting for a phone call:

  I. Take a wine bottle that is empty. Mateus has the best shape. Or another kind of bottle, or a jar, if your parents don‧t ever drink wine. Which mine don‧t, but Fran gave me some bottles. You rip masking tape into a gezillion tiny pieces with ragged edges and cover the bottle with them. (See diagram.) Then, with a rag, you put brown shoe polish over the whole thing. Wipe most of it off. When it dries, paint varnish on it. It will look old, like an antique. You can use it for flowers or as a candleholder.

  Suitable for a gift!

  2. Smash a windshield. No, wait,. I don‧t mean like a vandal! You will need parental assistance for this. My aunt Alice told us how. You get thewindshield from a junkyard, and you paint one side of it with all different colors. Let it dry. Wrap it in a large towel or a blanket, and smash it to smithereens with a sledgehammer. Probably your dad will have to do it The driveway is a good place. Then glue the pieces to the outside of a big goblet from Jim‧s Bargain Store, with the painted side in. Don‧t cut yourself! Put grout (like in a bathroom) between the pieces and wipe the surface of the glass bits clean. When the grout is dry, paint it gold. Presto-another candleholder! When you light the candle, it looks like stained glass. You will have enough little pieces of colored glass to make a dozen of these.

  3. So, if you think you now have enough candleholders, find an old wooden cigar box Paint it a nice color. On the lid glue a picture from a magazine. Organically Grown clothing (with the beautiful woman and the deer) or Herbal Essence shampoo ads are good. (“Why do you want your hair to smell like grass?” my dad wants to know.) Varnish over it Inside, on the bottom, glue a piece of felt. Call it a jewelry box.

  You have now made fourteen Christmas presents, and it‧s only August While you‧re in the Christmas spirit:

  4. Blow up a balloon, and knot it Wrap a ton of thread around it and tape the end Dip the whole thing in sugar water with starch in it, and let it dry. Then pop the balloon. The threads stiffen in the round shape, and they make good Christmas ornaments, especially if you hang them near a colored light they have a glittery glow.

  If you‧re lucky, a couple of days have gone by.

  If you‧re not lucky, it‧s only time to watch Hollywood Squares.

  Chrisanne and Tesey and a couple of their friends dragged me along with them up to the pool. They were funny and nice, and they acted as if they were so glad I was there.

  Then Chrisanne suggested to my mom that the three of us go on a shopping trip downtown and maybe even have lunch in Horne‧s Tearoom. My mom said, “Sure.”

  So there we were, driving along and listening to the radio, when my mother decided, right out of nowhere, to pick up a hitchhiker. “Good Lord, look at that god-awful stringy hair,” she said. Then she pulled over to the side of the road to pick him up.

  She told Chrisanne to get in the backseat with me and invited him right into our car. He stooped over to look inside, with his sign that said DOWN TOWN and a wooden box, and asked, “You heading downtown?”

  “Yes, we are,” my mother said. “Where do you need to go?”

  “Krepp Arcade,” he said, “but anywhere downtown is fine.” He climbed in.

  “We‧re going right by there,” said Mom. “We can take you to your doorstep.”

  You would have thought, the way they talked, that he was some long-lost friend. They talked about the weather, his shoeshine business in the Krepp Arcade, his family, how hard it was to get rides hitchhiking, where we all lived, and was he still in school (he wasn‧t).

  Chrisanne and I were mystified. Neither of us remembered Mom ever picking up a hitchhiker before, and we wondered how she had decided on this one. He didn‧t seem like her type. Kind of grubby. On the shaggy side. He had bad grammar. And when he turned toward us, it was hard not to look at the purple blotches spread across his face like a map of islands. Chrisanne and I sat there in our dresses, hands in our laps. This guy was crudding up the niceness of our day. We were glad when he got out.

  “Good luck!” my mother said. Chrisanne and I exchanged glances. We both were thinking, Good riddance.

  “Thanks!” He smiled. His smile was friendly. We waved and smiled, too. Some of his presence seemed to linger behind in the front seat.

  “I might as well stay back here till we park, Mom,” Chrisanne said.

  “He has a hard life,” my mother said. “A hard life ahead of him.”

  “What happened to his face?” I asked her.

  “A birthmark” she said, “like the one on your arm.”

  I turned my arm over and looked at the underside. My own blotches are small, calm, and inconspicuous at room temperature. When I am hot, they get reddish; when I am cold, they turn bluish purple. Most of the time I forget about them, until someone says, “What is that on your arm?” Sometimes they say it in a really rude way, as if it were leprosy or something, and I try to come up with some withering retort, but I usually can‧t.

  “Oh,” I said to my mom. Now I felt bad that I hadn‧t been friendlier. I was polite, but barely. I wanted another chance. “He seemed nice,” I said.

  “Yes, he was a nice boy,” said my mom. “Though you‧d never know it to look at him.”

  Chrisanne wasn‧t paying attention to us. She had found a little runner in her nylons and was painting clear nail polish around it.

  As we walked into Home‧s, college girls in Bobbie Brooks outfits wanted to spray our wrists with perfume. The air itself seemed to be scented, and amid the polished old woodwork and the shining brass and the sparkling glass counters and chandeliers, the rich fabrics and the bustling escalators, remnants of the hitchhiker drifted lightly away. But later, when we waddled back to the car loaded up with paper shopping bags, his ghost seemed to be waiting there in the front seat. And even though he was gone the minute Chrisanne sat down, it started me thinking. Not so much about the hitchhiker as about my mother. Because usually I think I know what she thinks. It‧s not hard to know; she expresses strong opinions in a forceful way on many subjects and after a while you can imagine what her opinion will be on a person or his/her actions. From committing crimes (which is definitely wrong) to choosing sandals with straps between the toes (not wrong exactly, but shows poor judgment). I would have thought that a high school dropout with greasy hair,
hitchhiking, would be someone who had made at least three bad decisions and would have to face the consequences without any help from us. Yet sometimes she reaches out with warmth and kindness to the most unlikely people. Without making a big deal about it, as if anyone with half a brain would have done the same thing. I keep trying to figure out how she chooses.

  What was it, for example, about the hitchhiker?

  I think that in a way my mother is like a proper, immaculately kept house with a secret mark made on the fence by hoboes, to tell other hoboes that a woman lives here who will feed you. If you work. And some people can look at my mother‧s composed face and see the secret signs of welcome.

  Bobby Prbyczka could see them. He had been coming to our house in the morning since June, to have coffee with my mother. I guess he saw her sitting there one day, in her lawn chair on the front porch, and invited himself on up.

  “Any coffee left in that pot, Mrs. Pelbry?” he said.

  She filled a green mug with milk and splashed some coffee in, for color. After that he came almost every day.

  Mom liked it that he came, in the way that people like it when dogs or cats come right up and nuzzle them and want to be petted. She also liked it in the way that first-grade teachers, one of which she is, like six-year-olds, which Bobby was. But mostly she liked it just because Bobby was Bobby, a skinny little boy with shiny, happy blue eyes. Bobby‧s scrawny legs dangled out of hugely wide, but very short, shorts, and a small shirt stretched around his small chest. His hair was colorless like sand, but in the morning sun each tiny crew-cut hair glowed golden white, his happy eyes sparkled blue, and he was brown with summer. He spoke in an unexpected voice, booming and hoarse, saying words that were unexpectedly polite and grownup-sounding.

  “Looks like another hot one, don‧t it, Mrs. Pelbry?” he would say.

  Or, “I see you‧re painting your gutters. That‧s a very attractive color.”

  Or, “Did you‧re see the fireworks up at Birdvale last night? Spectacular, lust spectacular.”

  “He cracks me up,” my mom would say after he left, but while he was there, she was serious and attentive. Their conversations floated up through my window as I lay in bed, waking up, and I listened. I couldn‧t really help it.

  “How are Mr. Pelbry and the girls?” Bobby started off one morning, as usual.

  “They‧re fine, thank you,” my mother answered. “And how is everyone in your family?”

  “Fine,” said Bobby. “Just fine.”

  He paused.

  “Well, my brother Jerome, he ain‧t fine. He‧s got poison ivy all over his whole body. Even including his eyelids. They‧re swelled shut.”

  “Oh, dear,” said my mom. “Where did he get it?”

  “Down the woods, I guess,” said Bobby. “He don‧t know what poison ivy looks like. I know what it looks like; it has three leaves.”

  “Leaves of three, let it be,” said my mom.

  Bobby laughed. “You must know a lot of poems from being a teacher,” he said.

  “And then my one other brother, Anthony,” he went on, “he was riding his bike yesterday, and he rode off the edge of a loading dock over at that old factory building in Hesmont. He landed on his head and had to get eighteen stitches.”

  “Oh, gracious!” said my mom. “Your poor mother!”

  “My brother‧s the one who had to get the stitches,” Bobby pointed out. “He looks like Frankenstein. But he looks better than Jerome. Jerome looks like the Blob. Anyways, we all got to ride to the hospital in my sister‧s boyfriend‧s car because my mom and my dad was both at work, and my sister‧s boyfriend drives really fast, like a race car driver. And my mom had to meet us there, and she had to leave some lady‧s head in the sink and borrow someone else‧s car, so she was yelling at Marie for not watching Anthony. But Marie can‧t help it if Anthony don‧t look where he‧s going.

  “So then Eileen and James started bawling right in the emergency room. Which turned out really good, because my mom said if we would all just shut up, we could get ice cream after. So everyone did, except for when Anthony got his stitches, and my mom said that don‧t count because anyone would yell who was getting their head sewed up. I even got the kind dipped in chocolate.

  “It was a tremendous day,” he said. “Absolutely tremendous. Except,” he added, “that my mom and dad had a fight since we got home late and there wasn‧t time to cook any dinner. My mom put a bunch of those later Tots in the oven, but my dad said that wasn‧t dinner and he was going down Crystal Bar for a steak sandwich. My mom was steaming. She said, Why didn‧t he get a room there, too?

  “But when my dad come home, him and me listened to the ball game on the radio. Did you hear that game? Did you hear that catch by Roberto Clemente?”

  “Yes, I did,” said my mother. “The one where he practically climbed the wall and reached way up with one hand?”

  “That‧s the one,” said Bobby. “Amazing.”

  Glancing out of the car window, I saw that we were getting close to home. My thoughts rose from the depths of my mother‧s relationships with Bobby and unknown hitchhikers up to the shallows of what was inside all the shopping bags that surrounded me on the backseat I poked through a few of them, looking for my new hair holder. It was the kind Wilma Flintstone might use. I found it at the bottom of a bag, wrapped in tissue. I pulled my hair back to try it out and accidentally glanced out of the car window.

  “Isn‧t that Maureen?” asked my mom. “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “I thought she was on vacation,” said my mom.

  “She must be back now,” I said.

  “Do you want me to let you off here?” asked Mom.

  “No, that‧s okay,” I said. “I‧m kind of tired. I‧ll just go home.”

  “Was that Glenna Flaiber with her?” asked my mom. “Yeah,” I said.

  “She‧s starting to look so much like her mother,” said my mom.

  “Yeah, she is,” I said.

  On the fifth or sixth afternoon in a row that I had walked next door to sit with Fran in her carport and suck on lime Popsicles, she asked out of the blue, what I was waiting for.

  “Hmm?” I said.

  “What are you waiting for?” she repeated.

  I tried to think whether something was supposed to happen that day, but I didn‧t think so. “I‧m not waiting for anything,” I said. “Why?”

  Fran nipped a little chunk from her Popsicle and held it in her mouth as it melted. She folded her arms and looked at me. “You‧ve been over here every day this week,” she said. “Now, you know I love you dearly, and I‧m always glad to see you, but this is not like you. You‧re young. It‧s summertime. You‧re supposed to be out running around with your friends. What‧s going on?”

  Oh, I thought. That.

  I didn‧t want to talk about it. I looked out at the street where a couple of Prbyczka kids were drifting by like tumbleweeds. Some drops of rain sent them skittering off toward home, then the clanging of the Goodie-Bar truck brought them closer again, digging in their pockets for nickels and dimes.

  “It‧s starting to rain,” I said. Brown, wet circles the size of pennies were appearing on the concrete beyond the carport. A few, then dozens, then hundreds, and then the raindrops searched in vain for a dry place to moisten. They just had to fall anonymously into the wetness. It was a summer rain, as warm as bathwater. We sat there watching it come down, listening to the drumming on the roof and the dripping from the gutter.

  “You know,” said Fran, “your life isn‧t going to start when this thing happens or when that person calls. Your life is happening right now. Don‧t wait for someone else to make it happen. You have to make it happen.”

  “I know,” I said, even though I didn‧t know that. I didn‧t know it at all, and I didn‧t want to know it either.

  So I just said, “I know.”

  And then I said, “I will.”

  “There are plenty of fish in the sea,” said Fran.

  “I know,
” I said again.

  Maureen didn‧t call. Day after day she didn‧t call. I ran out of good excuses for her not to call, and other kinds of reasons started seeping into my head and filling it with sludge. I could have called her. I kept thinking I would, in a day or two. I mean, what difference did it make, really, who called who?

  One day I told my mom I was going bike riding with someone from school. I told her that we were taking lunches and riding out to River‧s Knob. She seemed happy that I was doing something with someone. But I wasn‧t doing something with someone. I was going by myself; I started out just gliding along as if I didn‧t have a plan. But I think I knew all along that I was going to George‧s garden.

  When I realized that I was going there, I thought it was because I felt so alone and I wanted to be in that beautiful, lonely place. The hot, gritty wind filled my eyes with tears, and some other tears from deep in my heart mixed in with them and streamed down my cheeks. The wind dried them all and left a stinging film. When I reached the comer with the birch trees and benches, the day in April came back to me and a thickness filled my throat.

  I‧m all alone, I said to myself. Then I said it aloud. “I‧m all alone in the world.” I said it over and over. It didn‧t matter; no one was around.

  “I have no friends,” I said. “None. Not any.” I got off my bike and walked it into the grove.

  “I am so alone!” I cried out to the universe. I could feel my face crumpling up. The garden was too far away. I sat down on a bench as the warm tears gathered behind my clenched eyelids.

  “Well, not completely alone,” said a voice. “But if you prefer, I can go away. This trimming will keep.”

  I looked around. It was George. I tried to smooth out my face.

  “Hi, sunshine,” he said.

  “George,” I said. “Hi.” I searched for words. “How are you?”