FAMILY MEETING - Jeanne M. Leiby
Sara Evangeline no longer catches minnows in the near-dead feeder creek that runs behind the waste refinery because one time last summer she stuck her hand into the stagnant waters and pulled up a hypodermic needle stuck into the fleshy part of her palm. She ran three blocks home just that way, cradling her hand and the needle, afraid to pull it out and oddly intoxicated by the sight of her own penetrated skin. Aunt Dora, a part-time accounting clerk at Wyandotte Hospital, was consulted immediately. She insisted Sara Evangeline be taken to the Urgent Care clinic down by the Detroit River for a tetanus booster and (she whispered this) an AIDS test because you just never know and it’s better to be safe than sorry. Aunt Dora snapped on a pair of dishwashing gloves, doused Sara Evangeline’s palm with hydrogen peroxide, carefully but not all that gently pulled out the needle, wrapped it in paper towels and then in newsprint and then in tin foil. She dropped the whole thing into a Zip-Lock freezer bag and crammed it into her purse that was already bulging at the seams.
Sara Evangeline’s father, Albert – recently laid off from American Steel on Zug Island – wasn’t fond of doctors. And her mother, Eleanor, worried about costs considering the mortgage payment and the money she still owed the dentist for Sara Evangeline’s cavities. But they all knew that eventually they would do just as Aunt Dora suggested, partly because Dora was the only one in the family to go to college and therefore was relied upon in difficult situations. When Sara Evangeline’s older brother Robbie got arrested for car theft, it was Dora who made the hour-long bus ride (two transfers) to the Wayne County courthouse in downtown Detroit to post bail and plead leniency since it was Robbie’s first offense and he was, after all, just a good boy fallen in with a bad crowd.
And they would comply because when Aunt Dora stated her case, when she slammed her dough-white fist against the kitchen counter – a gesture that sent wild quakes up the flesh of her meaty back – she called the whole lot of them stupid northern hillbilly low-class peasant farmer country bumpkin assholes with not one full ounce of good sense. That they would even think of letting their beautiful baby girl (these words pleased Sara Evangeline), beautiful baby girl fall ill with a killer disease – Have you heard of lockjaw? Have you? – that they would, for a single second, consider withholding medical treatment was testament to their collective stupidity, and if that car isn’t backing down that driveway in the next five minutes, I’m picking up that phone, so help me God, calling Protective Services and putting an end to this idiocy once and for all.
Sara Evangeline sat silently at the kitchen table, holding a bag of Birds Eye frozen peas against her palm – to reduce swelling, Aunt Dora said. But there was no swelling. Sadly, Sara Evangeline knew there wouldn’t be any. Ten seconds after the needle came clean, the pain went away, and barely a pinprick remained of her recent brush with death. But Sara Evangeline was pleased – proud – to be the center of attention. Most often, it was Robbie’s exploits that brought the adults together. Because he found more to do after the sun went down, Sara Evangeline was usually in bed when he stumbled in or the cops brought him home. When the voices grew loud and intense, Sara Evangeline padded down the stairs and into the kitchen. Before her eyes could adjust to the bright overhead light, she was ordered back to bed and reminded that people sometimes get their noses broke when they stick them where they don’t belong.
Eleanor and Dora both stood now, on opposite sides of the narrow, stuffy kitchen. Eleanor banged her bony fist against the wall by the telephone – an awkward, sideways swat with no great resonance. But table thumping was no longer permitted. They all remembered the last family meeting and Albert’s heavy-handed table-bound punches, his pointed assertions boys will be boys and then the table’s sudden leeward tilt, the dishes’ slow, steady, almost graceful slide toward dull green linoleum. Sara Evangeline was in bed, but she heard the shattering of ceramics and glass. For three weeks, they ate off paper plates that wilted quickly from creamed corn and baked beans. Aunt Dora went alone to the Salvation Army Store in Southgate because shopping there gave Eleanor a headache, and it shook her pride something fierce.
Most things shook Eleanor’s pride but nothing equaled the umbrage she took at the phrase low-class especially uttered as it was in her own kitchen by her own sister-in-law, who – two years of community college aside – came from the same damn taproot, had yet to find a husband, still lived above her baby brother’s garage, so everybody just better watch who calls who low-class.
* * *
Dead air stillness between insults and white gauze curtains hanging limp against open windows. Two hands waited, ready to resume counter-thumping and wall-swatting, should the need arise.
Albert gave up this fight easily. Maybe he was unsure how to proceed with his daughter’s palm the subject of debate. Or maybe he was stymied by the phrase beautiful baby girl, words wholly unrelated to the rail-thin, mousy-haired, near-teen sitting like stone beside him. Mothers raised daughters. Fathers – with fists and curses – tried to curb the wild-streak violence and irresponsibility they passed on to their sons. In this situation, Albert simply didn’t know what to do.
And then a memory came to him. A cloudy image from his own childhood. A little neighbor girl hustling barefoot through cornfields where now sits a Ford dealership. A rusty nail or maybe it was a rusty spike. Long days of sickness and fear – the neighbors’ parlor curtains drawn. His own Mamma, still in her Sunday best, making and delivering a green bean casserole because during Mass, before the priest said his final Let us pray, he called the little girl by name.
A taboo memory – and not because of the sick little girl whose name Albert heard once and couldn’t remember. Not the rusty nail or even the overwhelming love he still felt for his once-pretty but now-dead Mamma who used to spit-smooth his cowlicks into place.
A bad memory – and not because his Mamma and Daddy still lay in the Ecorse Community Graveyard – because in fifteen years, Albert hadn’t been able to save the money necessary to move their bodies back to Ashtabula, Ohio, to be buried beside their kin, which was their dying wish.
No. As always his childhood memories came burdened with the image of the cornfield. With that came guilt. And not because that’s where Eleanor gave up her sweetness and made them both kneel on cold ground, fingering rosary beads until the sun came up.
Once upon a time, his family owned a farm that stretched from Telegraph Road to the horizon, as far as the eye could see. Now a Ford Dealership bellied up to a McDonald’s, which shared a parking lot with what used to be a Pizza Hut but was now a Beanie Baby Outlet Store and Pawn Shop. Before she died his mother said, Remember, Albert. The land is all that lasts. But he sold anyway because the few remaining old-time farmers bordering Telegraph Road were selling. Because no man in his right mind wanted to compete with the huge commercial farms out on the far west side. Because American Steel was hiring and they promised good jobs, eight-hour shifts, overtime for anyone who wanted it, and benefits.
Twenty-two years old and his parents were dead, Eleanor was pregnant, and Dora needed to finish college. All good reasons for selling the land, he knew that. Nobody – not even Dora – blamed him or ridiculed him or condemned him for his choices. But all the justifications in the world didn’t live up to the one, simple and unspeakable truth: Albert had been afraid that if he didn’t sell, he would die defeated. Their whole lives, his parents had one dream: they wanted to retire to a mobile home permanently secured on the Ohio shore of Lake Erie where the pine trees still grew sky high. But the land does live on forever and small-time farmers don’t retire. They die – mostly from exhaustion.
And then one day their eldest son cleans out their house. He holds an estate sale, and for fifty cents, he sells two hundred glossy AeroStar Doublewide brochures he found under their bed to an old couple from up the road who were forced to sell, who – that very morning – saw their house bulldozed by the Chevy Corporation, who in all of their sixty years hadn’t gotten around to formulating a dream of their own, so they were forced to purchase the fantasies of their dead neighbors.
Albert had a dream once – something vague about an old wooden boat and the Detroit River and a lilac sunset. Eleanor throws her rosary beads off the bow, and he mounts a bassinet to the engine block so the pistons’ hum can lull the kid to sleep.
But now all of it – the lock-jawed body of a little neighbor girl, probably that first set of bone-white rosary beads, definitely the corn, the phantom mobile home, the canopy of pine branches, a wooden cabin-cruiser and the Detroit horizon bruised by the setting sun – all of it excepting his dead parents who were still waiting to go home – buried beneath a solid sheet of concrete. Albert had made a mistake, a truly irreversible mistake, and now regret pressed his body down toward a tabletop that couldn’t hold his weight.
* * *
In this – one of her father’s worst moments – Sara Evangeline started to cry. Not because of the loss – the hypodermic needle, the pain and shock, the goose-bump-raising thrill at the sight of her own penetrated skin, the feeling, finally, that something was happening to her – these things having abandoned her much too quickly. And not because her mother and her aunt were set to start in fighting again. Sara Evangeline cried because Eleanor and Dora, sped up and spurred on the bright afternoon sun, had moved much too quickly to the high-scoring insults. Peas thawed cold water onto her thighs. This brief family meeting had played out too quickly, altered only by Sara Evangeline’s presence and her tears.
Tears which upset Albert and propelled him from the table, out the back door, and into his small garden.
Tears which upset Eleanor, who feared they came from very real pain.
And tears which upset Dora because the argument was over and she hadn’t gotten around to reminding them that she had a college degree and knew about things such as this.
Eleanor handed Dora the car keys saying only, Get gas because the tank is near empty and hurry home because I got to get to the grocery store. There isn’t a lick of food in this house, but you’re more than welcome to stay for dinner considering your efforts spent on Sara Evangeline.
* * *
Aunt Dora drove painfully slow, checking her mirrors more often than necessary. She worked in a hospital and knew firsthand how stupid and careless people could be, especially since they talked on telephones instead of paying their full attention to changing lights and oncoming traffic. Dora threaded her way through narrow streets crowded with parked cars. She wore heavy sunglasses to protect her pale blue eyes against UVA, and sweat collected in the deep folds of her face.
* * *
Sweat collected on the backs of Sara Evangeline’s thighs. She’d meant to put on long pants before they left the house because the car’s air conditioning didn’t work, and she didn’t like the feel of her skin stuck to hot, black vinyl. But when a family meeting came to an end and Aunt Dora got her way, things kicked into high gear. A lull in action allowed for, God forbid, Eleanor’s second wind, which usually began like this: I should have been a nun, damn it all to hell. I should have been a nun which was after all my calling and a gift from God. My own sinfulness aside, I know I’m going to Heaven because I’m suffering Purgatory here on Earth (a sign of the cross like swatting at flies), and you people are driving me nuts. Damn it all to hell.
* * *
Eleanor sat alone in the stuffy kitchen. Albert would stay out back tending his sickly tomato plants until the sun went down. Sara Evangeline was safe in Dora’s arrogant but competent hands. And Robbie – Lord Help Us – was God knows where doing what he knew full well he shouldn’t be doing. The floor needed a hard bleach scrub and the clothes in the washer were likely to mildew if she didn’t get them out on the line before dinner.
But finally a gentle breeze was blowing through the kitchen, and for the first time in a long time, Eleanor found herself alone. When she was a little girl and she had a moment of peace, a rare thing in her overly crowded family, she draped her head in thick, black wool, stuck rose thorns into the palm of her hand (thorns collected from her mother’s garden and saved for just that purpose), and she bled for Christ, as she knew was her calling. These days the very best she could manage was a stolen moment locked in the bathroom, praying an abbreviated rosary, and rising only to find her knees cross-hatched with grout marks and arthritic sore until dinner.
She had meant to be a Sister of the Sacred Crucifixion, a Catholic schoolteacher, or maybe even a missionary to Africa. The mid-afternoon breeze smelled like fresh-cut grass and carried with it her sweetest fantasies: a life alone, a small lean-to hut like she saw once in National Geographic, snakes and spiders and monkeys swinging tree to tree – God’s creatures one and all.
Eleanor dropped hard to her knees, her full weight landing on the half-thawed bag of peas Sara Evangeline left in the middle of the floor. The plastic popped open. Peas skittered across the linoleum and the full weight of her sorry life pushed Eleanor toward the floor, splayed her flat in genuflection.
There had to be a single prayer strong enough to save them all – Albert from his sloth, Robbie from his not-so-venial misconduct, Dora from her pride, and even young Sara Evangeline from her bull-headed veracity, which was likely to cause them all grief once she discovered boys. Our father who art in Heaven, Hail Mary full of grace, our country ’tis of thee oh beautiful for spaceship skies, the words twisted and blurred. But instead of the peace of prayer, her head filled with snippets of songs she didn’t know she knew: your looks are laughable, unphotographable . . .and then green alligators and long neck geese, humpty-back camels and chimpanzees. Old TV commercials: my baloney has a first name and anticipation. . . . antic-i-pa-a-tion, it’s making you wait . . . Finally, Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water, a pail of water, a pail of water. She needed to bleach the floor.
But not yet. Eleanor drew herself up to all fours, and crawled toward the bank of cupboards by the sink. She opened the cupboard door and drew out a white, flesh-thin paper napkin, unfolded it, and draped her head like with a veil.
She knew she had her prayers earlier in the week. When, once again, flashing blue lights interrupted her dreams. When the doorbell rang. When she started down the steps knowing full well Robbie was in trouble again. She had them with her when he puked up what looked to be a gallon of Sloe Gin all over her clean kitchen floor. Poorly masticated french fries bobbing on a blood-red sea.
Without a decent Hail Mary, she couldn’t curb the pain of her emptiness. Eleanor rolled onto her back, and through the thin veil of napkin, she saw only the ceiling’s watermarks and cracked plaster. Sometimes people saw holy faces in strange places. Her eldest sister who, before she died, had been a sister at the St. Joseph’s Convent on 38th Street, had once seen the face of a stigmatized Christ in the knotted wood of the telephone pole. Eleanor’s own mother had claimed to hear the harps of heaven on the day Eleanor was born, and she had promised that someday Eleanor would hear them too. But the only sound was the dull hum of a neighbor’s lawn mower.
Eye strain. Neck ache. A sharp pain that ran the full length of her sciatic nerve.
But then Eleanor did hear a voice – a great big thunderous voice coming back at her from the ceiling. Her voice, her voice alone and as loud as she knew how to make it. She was yelling: Screw it and to hell with all of them. Save me, Lord. Save me.
She sat up fast and stunned, dizzied by her quick motion, and the napkin fell to her lap.
“Elly, what in God’s name are you doing?” Albert’s face was sallowed by the backdoor screen. “Peoples going to think I’m beating on you, screaming like that. You lost your mind?”
He let the door slam hard. He tracked in mud and he smashed peas. Albert stepped over Eleanor on his way to the sink; she smelled his sweat and the damp earth that clung to the worn knees of his blue jeans.
Albert held out three half-green, worm-chewed tomatoes. “When this fit passes, why don’t you fry these up for dinner like my Mamma used to do.”
But Eleanor was sick, sick and tired. Enough. “Do you know what, Albert? You and your Mamma can go straight to hell for all I care. I’m going to the movies.”
* * *
Aunt Dora inched the car over the train tracks at Fort Street. She stayed on the side roads until she had absolutely no other choice, and then she turned north into the thick traffic of Biddle Avenue – traffic too thick and slow-moving for a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of the summer. Somewhere close by, an ambulance blared its siren, an ear-piercing shriek answered by the nasalated whine of a fire truck.
“Hell’s bells ringing for Mary and Joseph. We’re going to overheat. I just know it. We’re going to overheat and I do not want to be walking home.” Aunt Dora turned on the heater full-blast. “To reduce the engine temperature,” she said.
This time Sara Evangeline’s tears came quick and easy. She was certain God was punishing her, melting her down like candle wax because she’s been stealing coins from the fountain by the public library again. Taking what’s not yours is a sin, Eleanor had said. And stealing other people’s luck is just downright evil.
Oily sweat streamed down Sara Evangeline’s calves, dampening the tops of her anklets. Hot air pasted her bangs to her forehead. Heat waves rose up off the tarred road and sent the world shimmering.
“That’s it. I’m shutting her down until this traffic starts to move. And you be ready because if I can’t start her back up, you’re going to need to jump out and push us to the side of the road.”
Panic rose in Sara Evangeline’s throat – a bitter taste like bile mixed with peanut butter. “Aunt Dora, I can’t push this car.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, sweetie. We can do whatever we put our minds to doing. That’s how I got myself through college. So if I tell you to get out and push, then you get out and push.” An oncoming emergency vehicle did a sloppy U-turn over the brown-grass median. “Shit to hell, we’re going to be here all day.”
Time was slowing down, Sara Evangeline could feel it. Time was stopping altogether, and she was turning into glass. Her art teacher had said that glass was really slow moving liquid succumbing like everything else to the forces of gravity and age. She was going to die here and now and in this car. She would never start her period or kiss a boy or get a pet cat like Albert kept promising. She would never get to visit the Grand Canyon or make an A in English, and if she died now, she’d be buried like her grandparents, all alone and left to rot under the soot that blew off the coal heaps.
So Sara Evangeline bolted. From the car and the heat and the smell of herself and Aunt Dora’s sweet gardenia perfume. She was down Biddle Avenue, hopping the link fence by the new drug store. She was past the McDonald’s by the river where she glimpsed a small pack of Robbie’s friends, their rusty cars in an awkward line at the water’s edge. As fast as her legs could carry her, she headed toward the park and the frozen custard stand. She still had five stolen quarters tucked into the elastic of her sock. In the park, old men fished from the jetty. Kids climbed on monkey bars. And the river always moved – fast or slow or plate-glass smooth and rippled by the wake of speedboats. The river was cursed with a fierce undertow, and you weren’t supposed to swim. But she could buy herself a small vanilla cone. She could sit next to one of the old men and help him bait hooks. She could take off her shoes and her socks, and she could – if she stretched her legs – dangle her toes in the water.
When she hit the park, she thought maybe it was the circus or small traveling carnival come to town. A crowd of people – an awkward, big crowd for a Tuesday afternoon: men in white shirts and ties, their sleeves rolled up to the elbows, a few old women in matching melon running suits, kids, mothers with stollers, a bearded man with roller blades circling the edge of the parking lot. Many big men in suspendered pants and rubber boots. A fire truck, an ambulance, police cars, and – pulled up close to the river – a tow truck with its crane bent deep into the water.
Sara Evangeline made her way through the crowd. The gears of the tow truck whinnied. At first she thought, a fish. A great big fish. She knew that wasn’t right, but if not a fish, then what?
A car attached to a cable attached to the crane emerged from the river, its front bumper nose-down toward the blacktop. A ghost-white face pressed up against the windshield. Eyes open. Mouth open and pressed against the glass. A tongue too red for words. Blue eyes open. Marbled, blue eyes open and empty and staring straight at Sara Evangeline from what she knew to be the very edge of the universe.
She didn’t know how she’d gotten to the river’s edge. The crowd hadn’t parted like it did in movies and on soap operas. But she was there. Right there. Next to the car. And her feet were wet from tepid river water.
“Kid. Kid, you got to step back.”
“But I know him.”
She felt hands on her shoulder and she smelled sweat, and then deodorant like Albert wore when Eleanor forced them all to go to church together.
“Kid, don’t look at this.” The hand was around her waist. And then her feet were off of the ground, and her face was being pressed into a damp T-shirt and a well-muscled shoulder. “Nobody needs to see something like this.”
Sara Evangeline didn’t protest. She let herself be carried to the edge of the parking lot. For the third time in one day, she cried. Death had come calling at her house, but he wasn’t looking for her. And she cried because this strong man had an arm around her waist and a hand that was stroking the back of her neck. Because this comfort felt so very, very good.
* * *
Bodies make choices. Minds simply follow like puppy dogs.
When Eleanor had let Albert kiss her all of those years ago, she did so because the cornfield had been recently planted and the sun was low in the sky and there was a breeze. For once, her awkward, skinny body felt almost right. Her arms around Albert’s waist weren’t too long and brittle and bent crooked at the elbows. When he pushed her back into the damp earth, when he ran his tongue along the collar of her shirt, and even when he entered her clumsily and she wasn’t sure what was happening, her body said Okay. You’re doing the right thing, the only thing. Christ will understand.
The day Albert signed over the deed to his parents’ place – just before he locked the front door for the last time – he measured himself on the wall that charted his growth since he was two. He’d been a full inch taller that day, topped out at an even six foot. Because they had no place else to stay, he and Dora cashed the settlement check, and took a room at the Clover Inn, the very best Detroit had to offer. They each requested a third satin-covered pillow and they got it. They had soft, white sheets that smelled like lime, a linen closet of dry towels, and the promise of room service should they choose to pick up the telephone. They didn’t actually order anything, but Dora read the glossy menu until she had it memorized. They drank the last bottle of their parents’ elderberry wine, and fell asleep with the curtains and the windows open because the lights of Detroit looked as big and as full of possibility as a body could hope for.
Albert relaxed – maybe for the first time in his adult life, he relaxed. Before he fell asleep, he made himself a simple promise: he would give himself fully to American Steel only long enough to squirrel away a few thousand dollars. He would move his parents back to Ashtabula, and then he and Eleanor and baby would chase spring. Considering time zones, longitudes and latitudes, it seemed possible to follow damp earth and newly tilled soil every day of your life.
* * *
The only thing Dora’s body had ever known was the places that it did not want to be. At the very same moment Sara Evangeline was ignoring her brother’s bloody tongue pressed up against the glass of a stolen car in favor of a strong shoulder and an earthy, intoxicating smell, Dora had one hand on the wheel, and the other on her rapidly pulsating heart. Her left foot was outside the open door of Eleanor’s very stupid and very dead Chevy Impala car from hell. Damn it all to hell and back, I should have gotten a real degree and I should have been an accountant and I should have passed the CPA exam. I should have been married to a good man ten years ago and have kids of my own so Albert’s rotten, godforsaken selfish offspring would be my embarrassment instead of my pride.
The car rolled forward slowly toward the median. I do not want to be walking home in this heat. I will die very, very dead and no one – not one single body in the whole goddamn world will care.
* * *
Eleanor sat in the cool darkness of the Southgate Cineplex, thinking only that she should have raided Sara Evangeline’s hidden Ziploc baggie of stolen coins, bless this child for she has sinned – maybe not yet, but soon – too soon for me, Hail Mary full of Grace, I sure do wish for some Junior Mints.
* * *
Albert – he was curled up like praying hands into a child’s rusty lawn chair. He held his tired thumb over a wide-open hose aimed at his tomato plants, the rainbowed arcs of spray disintegrating into mud.
Jeanne M. Leiby’s work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Fiction, New Orleans Review, and Greensboro Review. She has won the Flyway Fiction Prize.