When She Would Iron
written by: Christopher Johnson
@cjohnsonwrite
My mother is gone now. She passed on to heaven or hell or wherever in 2010 at the age of ninety. I wrote a very nice memorial to read at her funeral.
We called her Ma. Like Ma and Pa Kettle, who I used to like to watch on the Early Show. All the other kids called their mothers “Mom,” but that seemed so ordinary and predictable to me. I’m the oldest kid, and I started what you might call that precedent—calling our mother “Ma.” Me? I’m Sonny. Sonny Belinsky. That’s who I am. The son of my parents. But enough about me. This story is really and actually about Ma, whose name by the way was Phyllis. But everyone, including Dad, called her Phyl. Like she was one of the guys.
Ma was pretty even keeled, a little distant sometimes, loved to read, loved to talk about man and woman and God and the universe and politics. I only saw her lose her temper once. It was memorable, and I think it had long-last effects. My father, in contrast, got angry all the time. He was an easily irritable man, and the next story I write will be about him. What’s the John Osborne play—Look Back in Anger. You could say that about my father. But as I say, that’s better left for another and perhaps more intense story.
Ma had been pretty when she’d been young. I know that’s kind of weird to say about your own mother, but I just have to say it. She had a longish face like my grandfather’s face—her father’s face. She had high cheekbones and eyebrows that had a bit of an arch to them. Her eyes were green but with little specks of gold in the corners. I noticed the specks one time when I was little when she was dabbing my nose when I was having nosebleed, which I did quite frequently when I was young. She stood five foot seven or eight—pretty tall for a woman.
So, that morning so long ago, she was getting us kids ready for school. Actually, we were getting ourselves ready for school. I was thirteen years old and a freshman in high school. Patsy was ten years old and in fourth grade. Paulie was five years old and in kindergarten. It was half-day kindergarten at that point. Typical suburban family with the house and the lawn and the mom and the dad and the well-trimmed lawn and a garbage disposal and a dishwasher. In Africa, women are toting water from a stream for miles and miles, but we have all the water and more that we need because we’re Americans, blessed by God.
I think Ma worried about me. I was built like a stick figure with a great big face and black hair that my father made me wear in a crew cut, and I was shy and reserved and found it hard to make eye contact with other people because I guess I feared that they would see into my soul or something. I had one close friend, Frank Collins. That was it. I did my homework, but I had this kind of sarcastic side that would come out despite all my efforts to hold it in and be nice and polite.
Patsy was a firecracker with intense blonde hair that she kept cut short almost like a boy’s and a nose that turned up like a ski slope and eyes that cut like a knife and a quick, ironic smile and eyes as blue as the azure sky that leads ultimately into the heavens above us, which I still kind of believed in when I was thirteen years old.
Paulie was five. He was more than a firecracker. He was a firebomber. He had coal-black hair with a crewcut and a well-shaped head and blue-green eyes like the ocean and freckles spread over his face like a sea of marks that made him look more Irish than the rest of us, and he had lost one of his teeth to the tooth fairy and had learned how to whistle through his teeth—this kind of high whistle that made us all laugh. After he whistled, he grinned real wide like he had done something real special. He puffed his chest out, and when he did that, he irritated me. So full of himself—even at the age of five. I think, looking back, that I was kind of jealous.
His best buddy lived across the street. His name was Rory Acuff, and he was another firebomber. He was muscular in a wiry kind of way, and his ears spread out like airplane wings. When Paulie and Rory weren’t in school, they were running around the neighborhood at top speed and wreaking havoc and general annoying the whole neighborhood. More about that later. Paulie—I think my mother had trouble with him, he was so energetic and she was so quiet and academic and conscientious about everything.
Mom packed us all off to school, just like you do in good ol’ America, me taking the bus to Millard Fillmore High School and Patsy riding her bike to school and Ma driving the ever-twitchy-and-never-able-to-sit-still Paulie to kindergarten. She dropped Paulie off, and the house was empty. Dad was traveling on business somewhere that week. He worked for a printing company in Chicago, and he traveled around Illinois drumming up business for the Aacme Printing Company. I asked him once why “Aacme” had two a’s at the beginning, and he said so that company would be first in the yellow pages of the phone book under the category of printing companies. He said the spelling of the company’s name would “generate more sales.” That’s how he said it.
So, Ma had the day to herself. She was conscientious, so she was going to work. Work. Work. “Idle hands are the devil’s tools,” she would say. That was her motto that she lived by. She would go down into the basement, which looked kind of like a dungeon out of a story by Edgar Allan Poe. I watched her one time, so that’s how I knew what would happen. She sat down at the mangle to iron. For those of you who don’t know, a mangle is an old-fashioned iron with two round cylinders that you feed the freshly laundered but still wrinkled clothes into. It’s kind of a monster, the mangle. When those two cylinders get rolling, you don’t want to stick your hand in there and get it ironed. The mangle squeezed the clothes between those two cylinders, and the underwear and sheets and towels, which had been chaotically wrinkled, came out ironed—you know, straight and pressed and looking just as neat and pretty as you please.
One time I was watching her, and one of Dad’s undershirts came out still a little wrinkled. I had this weird fascination with the mangle. She shook her head in disgust and sent the undershirt back through the mangle again. What a name—mangle! The undershirt came out. She carefully inspected it. There was still a tiny little wrinkle in it. She shook her head. Her face was scrunched up like a prune. Her lips were narrow with disgust. She shook her head in anger. I was glad I wasn’t in her way. She sent the undershirt through a third time. She held it up. She nodded and smiled. Now it was perfect.
As she ironed, she listened to the radio. It played classical music and opera, which at that age I couldn’t stand but now I have come to appreciate it. Once in a while, she stopped ironing and listened to the music and gazed into the crowded, cramped space of the basement. She lost herself in the music and started to wave her arms as if she herself were conducting the orchestra. When she did so, it was as if her green eyes with the golden speck came alive. Her whole body came alive. She lost years off her body. She was no longer this woman alone in a cramped and crowded basement who was sitting for endless hours at the mangle, sitting all by herself and honestly looking kind of lonely. And then a favorite music of hers came on, and her whole entire body came alive, and it was as if she forgot who she was in her everyday self and became this great conductor leading the orchestra through Beethoven or Mozart.
Dad, whose name was Herman but everyone called him Hermie—he was gone a lot. He was traveling and selling printing jobs somewhere in Illinois or Indiana or Michigan, working for the Aacme-with-the-double-a-at-the-beginning Printing Company. He’d be gone for the week and then come home on the weekends. At dinner, the four of us would be there, with Dad’s chair empty at the head of the table, and Ma stared at the empty chair and she had a drink in her hand, and she stared and shook her head as if something were going on inside her head that she didn’t want us to know about because we were just kids. If you know what I mean.
There was this kind of madness or anger lurking beneath the surface, like a scab or something that’s in your body, hidden from view, but once in a while it starts bleeding. Like this one time, I overhead Ma whispering in angry tones to Patsy, and they were in the kitchen. I overhead it all. “Patsy,” Ma whispered real harshly. “Mrs. Henderson called from school today. She’s very angry with you. She says you talk too much in class, young lady! She says you don’t pay attention in class because you’re so damn busy talking to all of your little friends.” I peeked into the kitchen, and Ma was standing over Patsy, who was sitting in a chair. Patsy was staring up at Ma. Patsy was defiant. Ma was frustrated. “Where is your father when I need him?” she muttered. She looked around. He wasn’t there. He was away, getting printing jobs for the Aacme Printing Company.
A few days later, Patsy called me into her bedroom. She looked at me and said, “I’m in trouble at school. Big trouble. Ma came to school, and we talked together to Mrs. Henderson.” She paused. “Mrs. Henderson was mad at me because she says I talk all the time.” She shrugged. “In my opinion, I don’t talk any more than any of the other girls. I’m just being who I am, that’s all. I just don’t think the teacher likes me. Maybe it’s because I’m prettier and younger than her.” Patsy stopped and chuckled. “Well, anyway, then Ma got mad while we were there talking to Mrs. Henderson. But Ma wasn’t mad at me. She got mad at Mrs. Henderson! It was amazing! She said to Mrs. Henderson, ‘Well, I was a teacher, you know, before I had children. I know a thing or two about teaching. Maybe the problem is that you don’t know how to keep control of your classroom. Maybe that’s what the problem is here.’
“I was really really surprised when Ma said that. I just looked at her. I looked back and forth between her and Mrs. Henderson. When Ma said that, Mrs. Henderson drew back, and her face kind of scrunched up in surprise. It was like no parent had ever said something like that to her before. There was this kind of black silence.”
“What happened next” I asked, fascinated.
“Well, Mrs. Henderson’s face suddenly turned red. Now she was mad. She said, ‘Well, Mrs. Belinsky, I most certainly do know how to keep control of my classroom! I can very much assure you of that!’
“Both of them were pretty steamed up. Mrs. Henderson stared daggers at Ma, like she suddenly hated her. She said very slowly, ‘Now, Mrs. Belinsky, I want your daughter to starting behaving in class right now! I want her to stop talking during lessons. And that is the end of our discussion! I do not want to take this matter to Mr. Francis, but if Patsy’s misbehavior continues, I will have no other choice’!”
Mr. Francis, as you might have figured out, was the principal of the Eugene Field Elementary School.
Patsy continued, “Then we got up and left. We got out to the car. When we got in the car, Ma grabbed my arm, real hard, like this steel trap or something. Then she shook it. She said in this real cold tone, ‘Young lady, from now on, you are are to be quiet in class and not interrupt lessons by talking to your so-called friends!’ She leaned toward me. She still had her hand around my arm. It was like a vice. It was like a vice, I’m telling you! She was really hurting me! I knew I done wrong, talking so much in class, but she didn’t have to be so mean to me!”
By now, Patsy had gotten all red in the face. She continued, “When Ma stopped squeezing me, my arm was all red. It was really red. It hurt!” Patsy never ever cried. But I saw a tear start to snake its way out of the corner of her eye. She wiped it away. She leaned toward me and said, with steel in her voice, “Don’t you ever ever tell anyone that you seen me cry!”
After that, for a few days, Patsy was real quiet. Dad even noticed it. When he came home at the end of the week after selling printing jobs for the Aacme Printing Company, he asked Patsy if something was wrong. “You’re not your usual ebullient self, honey.”
She just glared at him. She was determined to be quiet. She told me later it was the hardest thing she’d ever done, staying quiet during the incredibly boring and stupid lessons that Mrs. Henderson taught. But she was bound and determined to be quiet and not let the whole dumb thing get to her. She was going to be quiet and obedient. I remember wondering how long that was going to last.
Life went on after that. There was one thing and then another. There were no more complaints from Mrs. Henderson about Patsy. Things returned to normal.
At night, Ma didn’t watch TV with us. Dad did, when he wasn’t away traveling for the Aacme Printing Company. When Dad was home, he liked watching Gunsmoke and Bonanza with us. But Ma—she kept herself apart. We would all be in the family room watching Marshal Matt Dillon or Hoss and Little Joe, but she was in the living room, and she was either knitting or reading. All by herself. Sometimes I saw her by herself, and she looked kind of lonely, and I sat down on the sofa that had roses on vines twirling around on the sofa, but the roses were faded because the sofa was so old. She was knitting all by herself. Just like Penelope in the Odyssey, which we were reading because that’s what all the freshmen in high school read. “You look just like Penelope when she was knitting,” I said, sounding pretty smart to myself.
She grinned. “Well, she said, “at least I don’t have to unravel the knitting at night to fool all the suitors waiting to marry me and thinking that my husband is dead.” I knew she knew all about Penelope and stuff because she’d been an English teacher herself before she got married and started having us kids. She laughed, and I laughed, too. She went back to her knitting. I just sat there and watched. I could tell that she was losing herself in the knitting. She was working her hands, but her mind seemed somewhere else, far away. I asked her, “What are you thinking about, Ma?”
She looked at me, kind of surprised. I think she’d forgotten that I was even there. She thought for a moment. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Sonny, I’m sorry, I forgot you were sitting right there beside me. I was just thinking,” she said. “Just thinking about things. Things the way they are and things the way they could be.” There was something strange in her voice, like she was a little bit sad about something. I was sorry I’d interrupted her in her knitting like good old Penelope. It felt a little bit like my mother was at that moment a stranger to me—a stranger to all of us. She let out this kind of dark sigh and said, “I guess I was on a magic carpet ride for a little bit there.” She smiled. “Do you ever imagine that you’re on a magic carpet ride somewhere, like your imagination is just bursting with possibilities.”
I felt a little embarrassed. I didn’t want to say it, but my magic carpet ride was thinking about girls—pretty girls in my classes that I was too shy to talk to. But I didn’t want to tell Ma that. I didn’t want to tell my Ma about the girls that I pretended to take magic carpet rides with.
I asked, “Ma, where do you go on magic carpet rides to?”
She looked at me. Again, she seemed surprised that I was there. Then she remembered. She paused. “Places,” she said, in this kind of distant voice. “Just places.” She paused. “Places far away.” She smiled and touched me tenderly on my shoulder, just in the right way.
One day I came home early. They let us out early at Millard Fillmore High School. Some kind of teacher meetings that they were going to have. Maybe it was around three in the afternoon. Ma called me after I dumped my books in the little table in the hallway. She was in the family room, and she had a bucket of water and a bucket of water and a sponge, and she was wearing jeans and a blue work shirt, and she had her long black hair tied up in a bandanna. She was washing the Venetian blinds. You know, one of the fun things.
“Where’s Paulie?” I asked.
“Oh, he’s out playing somewhere with Rory. Raising hell. Up to no good.” She didn’t smile. She sighed. “I guess I should go out and see what he’s up to—what they’re up to. After all, they’re only five. Only five years old. But I want to get these blinds done. Will you give me a hand washing them? They’re absolutely filthy. They haven’t been cleaned in years. I finally got disgusted and decided to clean them.”
I went upstairs and put on my blue jeans and Bears T-shirt started to help her. With her blue work shirt and bandanna on her head, she looked different. She had that look like she did when I saw her ironing the clothes with the mangle. I had my very own bucket of water and Mr. Clean. They were wooden Venetian blinds. Old style. Ma and me—we started working side by side. I took a sponge and ran it along each individual wooden slat. Ma did the same thing. I watched her. She was so intense. She stared at a dirty slat and ran the sponge along and then squeezed all the dirt out of the sponge and into the bucket. Then she did it again, cleaning the same slat. I would have just moved on, but she was going to get the slat perfectly clean.
It was silent in the house. I started to wonder where the heck Paulie was. Patsy—I knew she wasn’t home because she had clarinet lessons after school. She’d be home later. Dad? You guessed it, he was somewhere in the Prairie State, selling Aacme Printing Company jobs. It was just Ma and me, cleaning the Venetian blinds together. I watched her. I couldn’t believe how thorough she was. After a few minutes, she forgot that I was even there. She was totally concentrated on the Venetian blinds. She kept going over and over each slat. It looked like one slat had a spot of dirt that she couldn’t get out. She kept rubbing it. “Jesus!” she muttered. I was surprised. Usually it was only Dad that cursed like that. She kept rubbing this one spot, but the spot of dirt wouldn’t come out. She kept rubbing.
Then she stopped rubbing. She stared out the window, which faced into our back yard. There was a big oak tree in the middle of our yard, and she seemed to be staring at it. She was wearing her yellow rubber gloves, and sweat was leaking down her face like a little stream. She stared and stared, as if she had forgotten about the importance of cleaning the Venetian blinds. She was on a magic carpet ride somewhere. I could tell. Where was she, I wanted to ask her, but I was afraid of to ask her. Her face, her eyes, had grown quiet and smooth and contemplative.
But something in her eyes–they were troubled. She kept staring at the oak tree. Then, suddenly, I saw something like mercury slip down her cheeks. A smooth, silvery liquid. She turned away from me. She wiped her eyes with her right sleeve. She made no noise at all. I was shocked. I stood there, with the stupid sponge in my hand, and stared at her as she carefully wiped her eyes with her sleeve. I felt like I should do something—walk over to her or something. But I was paralyzed. I felt my heart suddenly beat faster. I didn’t know what to do. It was a very long moment while this was happening. She was turned away from me. I think she had forgotten that I was even there. I heard a very faint sniffling. Then she turned back to the Venetian blinds, and the magic-carpet-ride look was gone. She focused on the Venetian blind. She rubbed and rubbed, and finally the spot she had been working on was gone. She looked at me, wearing a look of intense seriousness. She managed a smile. I could see a glint of silver hanging onto the lower lid of her eyes. I felt helpless.
Paulie came running into the family room. The firebomber had arrived. The firebomb had exploded. The room suddenly filled with his runaway energy. He was without his running pal Rory. He was by himself. And he was covered with mud, from head to toe. Ma looked at him and yelled, “Look at you, Paulie! What in God’s name have you been doing!? You’re filthy, for God’s sake! What have you been doing?’
“Wrestling! Wrestling with Rory!”
“But where, for Pete’s sake! You’re all covered with mud!” Anger lined the innards of her voice. “Where in God’s name were you wrestling?’
“I dunno. Just around.” He grinned the grin of a crazy kid, and somehow his freckles exploded through the dirt that wound in and around his face and seemed to grab hold of his skin like an octopus.
“Well, you march yourself upstairs and take a bath.” I noticed that Mom’s fingers were trembling, and anger and frustration had squeezed her face. Her eyes burned as she looked at Paulie. In that moment, I felt sorry for my little bro. Ma paused. “And after you take a bath, you’re going down for a nap, mister!”
Paulie stared at her in bleak amazement. “No, I ain’t, Ma! I’m five years old! I ain’t taking no damn nap!”
Ma pounced on him. “Well, you most certainly are going to take a nap! And don’t use language like that! As soon as you’ve finished your bath, you are going down for a map, little sir! Oh, for God’s sake!” She looked at me. “Sonny, finish washing the Venetian blinds while I take care of this little. . . .” She didn’t finish her sentence.
She turned around, grabbed Paulie by the arm, and half-led, half-dragged him up the stairs. “Ma, you’re hurting me!” he screamed and tried to pull his arm away from her. But she wouldn’t let go.
I heard the water running into the bathtub. The bathroom door slammed shut. Ten minutes later, it reopened. I heard the shuffling of feet in the upstairs hallway. I heard Paulie: “Ma, I don’t wanna take no nap! I’m five years old! I’m too old to take a stupid nap!” Ma didn’t say a thing, but I could hear the shuffling of feet. Even being downstairs, I could hear scuffling, as if Ma and Paulie were wrestling. He kept screaming, “I don’t wanna take no nap! I don’t wanna take no damn nap!”
I wished Dad had been there. Paulie—he was like suddenly out of control.
His bedroom door slammed shut. I heard his stamping on the floor above us, yelling at the top of his lungs, “I don’t want take no nap! I’m five years old!”
Ma came down the stairs. She looked at me. She was pale, and her fingers were trembling. She fought to control her body, to speak calmly. “That damned boy!” she said, with a mixture of anger and frustration and helplessness. “I wish your father were here. I really do.” She took a deep sigh. “But he isn’t.” She paused. “Well, let’s clean up here. We can finish cleaning the blinds tomorrow. Tomorrow’s Saturday. We’ll finish them then.”
She looked down, and I noticed that her shoulders were trembling and shaking. Her eyes were closed. She breathed deeply. “That boy,” she whispered, almost viciously. She looked at me. “Sonny, I’d appreciate it if you’d empty the buckets and take them into the basement and pour the dirty water into the washtub and squeeze the dirty water out of the sponges. I would very much appreciate it if you would help me that way.”
I did so. Meanwhile, it was quiet on the second floor, in Paulie’s bedroom. Paulie had stopped screaming. In fact, there was no sound at all. It seemed deathly silent up there. He must have actually fallen asleep.
Ma walked into the kitchen. I knew what she was going to do. She was going to light up a cigarette. She smoked one cigarette a day. I knew that. I didn’t know where she hid the cigarettes. I knew that Dad had forbidden her to smoke cigarettes. I remember him saying, “Phyl, it’s bad for you, that smoking. I quit, and you can quit.”
She had just looked away from him and said, “OK, I’ll quit.” I remember that she had just stared at him with ice in her eyes. And she quit, except for one cigarette a day that Dad didn’t know about.
I looked into the kitchen. She was sitting at the kitchen table, resting her chin on her elbow, holding the cigarette like a piece of gold in her left hand, bringing it slowly to her lips, gently inhaling, and then blowing the smoke out in beautiful white-gray rings that rose toward the ceiling and passed through the light that streamed into the kitchen like ghosts through the windows—a kind of light from heaven.
She was unaware of me as I watched her. Her fingers were no longer trembling. He skin had returned to its smooth whiteness. She inhaled again, and there was something beatific, angelic in her face and in her eyes, as if the crisis of Paulie’s getting all muddy and screaming had happened to some other family that was far less perfect than our family was. At that moment, time seemed suspended.
The telephone rang. Cigarette in hand, Ma rose slowly and walked to the hallway and answered it. She raised the receiver in the most elegant fashion to her ear. She listened for five seconds, ten seconds. She listened, and her expression changed—changed instantly, even violently, wrenching her face apart. She suddenly screamed, “What?!!” into the receiver.
She let the receiver fall. She didn’t even hang it up. I was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, and she saw me. “That was Ellie Newsome!” Mrs. Newsome was our next-door neighbor. She was Ma’s best friend on the block. “Oh, my God, I can’t believe this!” Ma screamed. She raced out the back door and into the back yard. I followed her.
Ma’s face was distraught, wrenched apart with anger.
When I reached the back yard, I realized why. The back yard was filled with bedding and clothes—Paulie’s clothes—strewn about. We both looked up. The windows of Paulie’s bedroom were open. I caught a fleeting glance of Paulie as he raced away from the window. I looked again at the lawn. His pillows. The sheets from his bed. The blankets from his bed. The jeans from his drawers. His shirts. His cowboy underwear. His Tom and Jerry T-shirts. His belts. His sneakers. His socks. Everything from his bedroom. Everything. I looked up again. Yes, the window was wide open. But he was nowhere to be seen.
The pictures that had been on his dresser. The Cubs and Bears pennants that had been on his wall. All on the lawn. All of it. I looked at all the stuff lying on the ground in the back yard, like a cyclone had hit the house and torn everything apart and sucked it our of the window and onto the ground again. I almost laughed, it all looked so ridiculous. I turned away so Ma wouldn’t see me. It was so absurd that it was almost comical.
But Ma—her face was convulsed with anger. When I saw her, I no longer wanted to laugh. She was standing there, sobbing. The features of her face had all collided together violently. Her mouth had crashed into her nose. Her eyes had collided with her forehead. Her face was all squeezed together in agony. She held her arms at her side and squeezed her hands. She closed her eyes. Tears seeped from them and then began to flow. She wept, and she made no attempt to hide the tears. Her entire body was rigid. She was still wearing the blue jeans and work shirt from cleaning the Venetian blinds. They were loose-fitting, but I could see that her body was shaking, trembling. Her face was as red as the sun. She kept squeezing and unsqueezing her hands.
I stared at her. I stepped away. I was frightened of her. The entire air around her seemed to be filled with her anger. She glanced up at Paulie’s bedroom. He was nowhere to be seen. She kept looking at the window. Her eyes were yellow, like a wolf’s. She stared and stared at Paulie’s open window and then at the clothes strewn crazily and chaotically on the ground. I felt like I should walk over to her and say something or do something. She was so alone and angry. My heart thundered in my chest. I knew and felt and feared that something horrible could happen.
Ma was muttering stuff angrily to herself. I couldn’t understand what she
was saying. I could just tell how very angry she was. I had never seen her like this. I wished desperately for my father to appear suddenly.
She turned her eyes from the clothes on the ground to the open window of Paulie’s bedroom. Fire leaped from her eyes. “I’ll teach him a thing or two!” she spat out. She turned to go inside, her fists clenching and unclenching. She started to walk toward the back door, which led into the kitchen. I saw a blur of orange. It was Mrs. Newsome. She was wearing an orange dress, and her blonde hair hung down in thick strands, and her tanned arms poked out from the sleeveless dress.
Ma had started to walk into the house, walk in an angry trance. Mrs. Newsome stood in front of her and grabbed her gently by the arm. She spoke softly calmly. “Phyl,” she said. “Phyl, please stop. He’s a child.”
Ma stopped. She stopped walking to the back door and into the kitchen. She looked at Mrs. Newsome quizzically, as if this woman—her best friend on the block—were a stranger. Ma stared at Mrs. Newsome, not recognizing her. Mrs. Newsome rubbed Ma softly on her arm. She kept talking calmly to Ma. She said, “We can clean this up. Let it go. He’s only a child. We’ll call Hermie. We’ll tell him what happened. Then you can figure out how to discipline him.”
Ma started to move forward, still determined to go upstairs, reach Paulie, give him what-for. But Mrs. Newsome gently stood in her way and kept rubbing her arm smoothly.
Mrs. Newsome was a nurse. She had this nurse way about her. She spoke softly to Ma. Gradually, Ma loosened her tight, violently clenched fists. “Come over to our house,” Mrs. Newsome said softly. “Have a glass of wine. Come over. Have a glass of wine with me. We’ll talk it over. We’ll talk about things.”
Ma was started to relent. She had loosened her fists. She opened her eyes. She finally seemed to recognize Mrs. Newsome.
Mrs. Newsome turned to me. With infinite and extraordinary calmness in her voice, she asked, “Where’s Patsy?”
“At clarinet lessons,” I stumbled. I was shocked, frightened by the look in my mother’s eyes.
“Sonny,” Mrs. Newsome said. “This is what I want you to do.” She was very calm, like some kind of a guru. “I’m going to have a drink with your mother and talk to her. I want you to get go upstairs and get your little brother and bring him down here and start to pick up all this stuff and carry it upstairs. And I want you told fold it all neatly. Do you think you can do that while I talk to your mother? Do you think you can do that?”
I nodded. I went upstairs. I found Paulie. He was hiding in the closet. He was shivering. Fear had infected his eyes. I didn’t know what to say. I finally said, “Come downstairs with me, Paulie, and help me pick up the clothes and carry them upstairs.” It was as if Mrs. Newsome’s calmness had burrowed inside me. I held out my hand to Paulie. I led him downstairs.
Patsy finally got home. She looked aghast at all the stuff strewn all over the back yard. I told her what had happened. “Where’s Ma?” she asked.
“At Mrs. Newsome’s,” I said. “She came over to help Ma. She saw what was happening.” I stared into Patsy’s eyes. I said, “I was scared, Patsy. Thank God Mrs. Newsome came over. She asked us to pick up the clothes and carry them upstairs to Pauli’s bedroom and fold them.
“Yeah, OK,” Patsy said. That was all she said. The three of us started to pick up the sheets and blankets and pillows and jeans and t-shirts and socks and shoes that Paulie had flung out of the upstairs window. We carried them all upstairs. Patsy stared at Paulie. We were both frightened by him and for him. But he was obediently doing what Mrs. Newsome had said. He picked up the stuff that he had thrown out the window and carried it upstairs. Patsy said to him sternly, “Start folding it, Paulie”
We all started folding the shirts and jeans that he had thrown so angrily out the window. We folded them as neatly as he could. Patsy and I put the sheets and the blankets back on Paulie’s bed, and then we put on the comforter that sat on top of the sheets and blanket. Paulie hung up the shirts that he had yanked off their coat hangers. As he did so, he sniffled. He looked down at the ground. Even at five years old, he knew. He knew he had done something.
He ran back downstairs, grabbed another armful of stuff, and carried it back upstairs. He folded the stuff as neatly as he could. He hung up some of the stuff and put other stuff in the drawers of the chest, where it belonged. It took us about an hour, carrying all the clothes that Paulie had thrown out the window. We finished. The lawn below was back to normal. There were no clothes lying chaotically and disobediently on the lawn.
Ma was still over at Mrs. Newsome’s. I was burning with curiosity. It was past five o’clock by now. Patsy and I looked at each other. “What about dinner?” Patsy said. “We gotta eat.”
“Can you see what we got in the fridge?” I said. I started to move away, move toward the Newsomes’ house next door.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to go over to the Newsomes’ house?”
“Why? We gotta make dinner. You and me.”
“Because I have to. I just have to.” I walked over. I tiptoed up to the back window of the Newsomes’ house. I just had to do this. I was burning. I just had to see what was happening. I tiptoed up to the back window and raised myself up on tippy-toes. I could see into the Newsome’s house.
There Ma and Mrs. Newsome were. They were sitting at the kitchen table. They each had a glass of wine in front of them. They were sitting very close together. I stared at Ma. She and Mrs. Newsome were talking vehemently to each other. Ma started to cry, and Mrs. Newsome took her by the arms and held her. I stared. And even though I was thirteen years old and was too old to cry, I felt tears form like liquid globes of mercury in the corners of my eyes, just like I was a little kid—a damn little kid. I wiped the tears on my sleeve. I sniffled, just like a little kid. But oddly enough, I didn’t feel ashamed of myself—not at all. I watched as Mrs. Newsome put her arms around Ma and hold her, just like you would hold a child—a precious child. Ma gave in. She relaxed. She let Mrs. Newsome hold her. It was just like in a painting—a painting that some great artist had done. Mrs. Newsome held Ma in her arms for a long time. A long time. Finally I went home and helped Patsy make hot dogs, beans, and macaroni and cheese for dinner. The three of us—Patsy and Paulie and me–we ate. We ate all by ourselves in the family room and watched Bonanza.
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