Lay It on My Heart (12 page)

“You said not to pick,” I say, my voice nasally.

“I'm not picking,” she says. “I'm extracting. Hold still. And all I'm saying, Charmaine, about the rules, is that with me at this new job, I'm going to need some serious support from you. That should be rule number two. Support each other. I always wanted to be a teacher, and now I'll see if I've got the stuff.”

“You're just a substitute, though. Ow. All you have to do is follow the teacher's notes and tell people if they can go to the bathroom or not.”

“I don't need your back talk.” Phoebe's thumbnails skid toward each other on the side of my nose, and I feel a layer of skin peel away. I wrench my head up from the sofa and clap a hand over my nose. “What I do need, is to hear an ‘I love you' every day.”

I press my fingertip to my nose then hold it up to her, bright and bloody in the glare of the bulb.

“So you're bleeding a little,” she says. “Don't be dramatic.”

While Phoebe gets ready for bed, I slip outside to check for Titus. I like to shut him in at night when I can, but if not, then I'll leave the window open and he'll steal in to sleep in the passenger seat or at my feet and wake me up in the morning to be fed. Tonight the moon is thin as a nail paring. Almost not there at all. There is such a thing called a black-hole moon, which I used to think was how the moon got thinner and thinner each month. Like it was disappearing, little by little, into the overwhelming gravity of the black hole at the center of our own galaxy. What it really means is that once a year the moon sits right in front of the black hole, almost like it's trying to warn us about where it is.

I make my way down to the dock, calling for Titus, hoping he'll come. Then I'm praying he'll come, and I catch myself. In
The Good Word
, my father explains that it's not that you can't ask things of God, it's just that you have to be okay with whatever answer you get back or with his silence. What I want to ask is for Titus to stay inside, where no larger animal can get him and where no teenager, drunken or cruel or both, can catch him and throw him from Tate's Bridge, which is something that you hear about happening down here. I want to ask for my father to be okay, for things just to go back to the way they were. Or maybe even a little better than the way they were, for him to be just a little more like other people, who sleep every night, and for him to pay just a little more attention to Phoebe so that she will love him as much as she loves me and forget about being independent. But even if, like my father says, God's silence is an opportunity to appreciate the power of faith, it's a wretched feeling to ask for something you want so badly and to hear nothing. It's the kind of silence that turns familiar things, comforting things like the presence of the moon or the way the river smells after dark, strange and a little scary.

You can't go wrong, though, with the prayer without ceasing. I don't know how my father manages it even as he's talking or eating. That's the part of him that isn't like other people. The prophet part. I start up now, whispering to the sliver of moon, but later as I'm going to sleep I realize I've stopped again already.

From her loft bed over the dash, Phoebe hears me sigh. “You still awake?”

I don't want to answer, but I do, because our first night here, when she believed me to be asleep, she started to cry, quietly to begin with and then so loudly that the sound carried across the lawn and down the riverbank, where I imagined it spreading out across the water, echoing against the cliffs.

“Isn't there anything you'd like to say to me?” she says.

“I don't think so.”

“Think harder.”

“I'm sorry for back-talking?”

“Something else,” she says. “Remember?”

Then I remember, and even though I would be hard-pressed to say I do not love my mother, the words she wants to hear drop from my mouth like reluctant stones.

“I love you too,” she says. “Good night.”

“I
KNOW WHO YOUR DADDY
is,” Tracy says in the morning, poking me hard in the stomach as soon as I sit down. “The preacher? I watched him make that trailer of yours into a cabin.”

“He's not a preacher,” I say, leaning my head against the dirty window.

“You think you're the only one who's been to church? I'm baptized and everything. Right there in the river.”

“My grandfather was baptized in the river,” I say. “I didn't know they did that anymore.”

“Well, they do,” she says. Under her breath she says, “Dumbass.” Then: “Where do they do it at your church?”

“At the altar,” I say. “You just get a little sprinkle on your head. Some altars have bathtubs behind them. Baptismal fonts.”

“Whatever that means,” Tracy says. “We had my sister's baby baptized, too, but now my mother says if the Lord wants anything else he can come down and tell her himself with a tongue of fire. She says she'll kill me if I get pregnant before I'm through school. What?” she says at the look on my face. “You want a baby?”

“No.”

Tracy cocks her head. “You got something against babies?”

I blink hard, caught in the net of a question with no good answer. “No. Do you want a baby?”

“Hell, no.”

“Then what're you asking me for?” I say. I take a deep breath and add: “Dumbass.” I've never called anyone a name before, and I like the tiny, stunned gap of silence in its wake.

Half of Tracy's mouth twists into a smirk. “You got a scab on your nose,” she says.

Outside it's getting light, the slow, gray way it does down at the bottom of the gorge. I never knew all the different ways dawn could look. The rim of the cliffs above glows brighter and brighter as we climb, and my eyes well up against it. We're nearing the set of trailers where the Child of God lives. The bus hisses and stops. I close my eyes with dread. This is the point of the morning where I start pretending to be asleep.

“Here he comes,” Tracy says in a low voice. Then, as if she wants to see if I am really drifting off, she tells me, “Sometimes he picks a girl to sit on his lap. He can't finger nobody, but they can sit there and feel his you-know-what.”

My eyes pop open. I look doubtfully toward Ravenna.

“She don't drive every night,” Tracy says. “She's got her class.”

“I know you're not about to smoke that on my bus,” Ravenna says as Cecil Goode makes his way up the ramp. His head appears over the first seat, an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

“You're early,” he says around the cigarette.

“Same time I get here every day.”

“If you say so,” says Cecil when he reaches the top of the ramp.

“I say that and a whole lot more,” says Ravenna.

“A
whole
lot more,” Cecil agrees. He shoulders his way down the aisle. “You got more words in one morning than most people got all day.”

“Pearls of wisdom,” Ravenna says, “cast before swine.”

Ravenna doesn't move the bus, though, until Cecil's settled himself in. When the rest of us first get on, we have to get to our seats fast before she lays on the gas and whatever we're carrying goes flying. But Cecil she waits for, sassing him the whole time, letting him sass her back, even though he's a kid and white, and even though people down here say “nigger” this and “nigger” that like it's just information. And he always lets her have the last word, even though she's black and a woman.

When Cecil reaches our seat, he leans over Tracy. “Hold on to this for me,” he says, “and don't smoke it, neither.” Tracy pinches the cigarette from his mouth and opens her purse. “Girl?” Cecil says, and I almost answer “She won't” for her, out of distress, but then he's looking right at me with his light amber eyes. “What?” he says. “You want your own cigarette?” I open my mouth and try to look somewhere else, which ends up being at his empty sleeve. My neck burns. “Look at me,” he says. “You were all fired up to look a second ago.” He knocks Tracy's shoulder with his gleaming chrome claw. “What's her name?”

“Charmaine,” Tracy says, dropping the cigarette into her purse.

“No,” I manage to say.

“Her name's Charmaine,” Tracy says, screwing up her face at me like I've gone crazy.

“No, I don't want my own cigarette,” I say.

“Listen up, ladies' man,” says Ravenna. Her eyes appear in the sliver of one of the complicated rearview mirrors. “I got a route, here.”

Cecil Goode just nods like he's amused. He moves on by, and I let out my breath.

“Cousin,” Cecil says from two seats back. “You tell your friend there that if she likes to look, there's a lot more to see.”

“I'm a telephone operator now?” Tracy calls back to him. “You hear?” she says to me.

“Yeah.”

“You scared?” Tracy says.

I shrug and try to move my eyebrows bravely, carelessly.

“You are,” she says. She digs her pen into the seat in front of us, opening up a space between stitches. “You really are a dumbass. He's only mean because he likes you, and he only likes you because you're prissy.”

I don't know what's hardest to believe, that Cecil Goode likes me, that I am prissy, or that prissy could be why he likes me.

“You know what
prissy
means?” Tracy asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “Do you?”

“You think I'm stupid?”

“No one ever called me ‘prissy' before.”

“You're all carry-your-books-to-school-every-day. You talk like people on TV.”

“Which ones?”

Tracy throws up her hands. “All of them. Or like a teacher. You talk like a teacher, through your nose, like you think you're better than everyone.” She pinches her nose with her thumb and forefinger. “At my church you just get a little sprinkle,” she says in a high nasal, wiggling her shoulders back and forth. “Baptismal font. I don't want my own cigarette.”

“I don't sound like that.”

“I don't sound like that,” says Tracy, sounding more like me than I care for.

“Girl,” Cecil Goode calls from his seat.

“She don't want to talk to you,” Tracy says. “She don't want to talk to nobody on this bus.”

I open
A Wrinkle in Time
. I am halfway through it the second time, and if I could, I would tesser myself right off the bus. I stare at the page like I'm reading, but it's impossible to read with Tracy glowering at the side of my face.

“She just wants to read her prissy book,” says Tracy, ducking her head to look at the cover. “Wrinkle Dinkle.”

The road curves upward, the bus chugging into gear like something settling into place far beneath me, like a reminder. Not praying. Not praying. I am as bad as the vestal virgins, whose only job was to stay awake and wait for the bridegroom, and they couldn't even do that much.
Inhabit me, O Lord God
, I whisper to myself.

“You're not supposed to do that,” Tracy says. “Read with your lips moving. I thought you were smart.”

 

Mrs. Teaderman says we are transcribing, through freewriting, a record of our movement from the
prison
of the unconscious to a
prism
of the unconscious. She writes both
prison
and
prism
on the board, with a big arrow to indicate the right direction.

After freewriting, if you are called upon to share what you wrote, you may say “Pass” and it won't hurt your grade. You may also write DO NOT READ at the top of your entry if you have written something you don't want even Mrs. Teaderman to read when she collects them. She says that the movement from
prison
to
prism
can sometimes be very private, which makes the boys snicker.

Phoebe is fine
, I write to my father, though I know he has seen her briefly in and around his sleeping.
We are fine down at the river. I think I am going to see you very soon. Once everything is okay with the medication. How is the medication going?

As we write, Mrs. Teaderman patrols the rows on her long legs. Today she wears the red slacks with a billowy pink top, and she looks like a flamingo, the way she steps and stops, steps and stops. “The truth can set you free,” she says from somewhere behind me. “But it can also bind your hands. Inventiveness can be a ray of light in the prison of the unconscious.”

I think about Seth and the play he's doing with Dr. Osborne, and then I am writing, inventively, that I'm the one who will be in a new play. I pick Ruth, for its strong female lead.
I have to sit at the feet of Naomi and receive her wise counsel
, I write.
Boaz and Naomi haven't been cast yet
. I can see the whole thing—myself in Old Testament dress, acting out the motions of collecting leftover wheat on the threshing-room floor.

In activity, Kelly-Lynn measures my tiny ponytail with her fingers. “Better,” she says. “Maybe next you should think about cutting out junk food and pop. Your clothes are tight.”

“I never drink pop,” I say. Before I can stop myself, I say what Phoebe says about pop: “We can't afford it.” I wish I hadn't said it, but it doesn't matter, anyway. Everything you say to Kelly-Lynn passes over her and disappears, like a flock of migrating birds.

“What's the matter with your nose?” she says.

“Nothing,” I say, touching the scab. Down on the gym floor a dodge-ball game is going on, more than fifty kids on each half of the basketball court. I spy Tracy's red hair just as she hurls the rubber ball hard into a girl's knee.

“We used to be poor, too,” says Kelly-Lynn. “We lived in an apartment before my mom met my stepdad. Then again in between my stepdad and Rob. And my dad was poor, he said, because he had to send us money for the apartment. I had to wear my mom's pre-diet fat clothes. Everything hung off me.”