Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail Read online

  Tobrah kicked her feet against the kitchen-chair rungs. She was eating cereal straight from the box. “It smelled like bad soap.”

  “I have a surprise,” Jackie said. “I have a place for you to go while I’m at work. It’ll be nicer than that place in Oklahoma.”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “Yes, you do. It’ll be fun.”

  “They won’t say my name right.”

  “Well, people around here have a different accent from Oklahoma. They don’t always pronounce things right. You’ll have to be patient.”

  Tobrah disappeared into her room. When Jackie went to get her, she found that the child had made up her bed like a polite guest and placed her doll and bear on the pillow. The bedspread was crooked though, and the sheet trailed to the floor.

  “Don’t you move till I get back,” Tobrah said to the toys.

  When Jackie left Tobrah at Kid World, she wondered what a mother would feel, letting go of her child like this for the first time. During the day, she thought about Tobrah’s parting glance. She seemed calm, not afraid or shy, as if she were used to being dumped somewhere strange. At the end of the day, Mrs. Fields, the day-care director, told Jackie that Tobrah had a high energy level and tended to be bossy. “Her cooperative-play attributes need attention,” the woman said. At a table alone, Tobrah was engrossed in coloring a Xeroxed pig red. Her jeans and T-shirt were dirty and her hair was tangled.

  When they arrived at the house, Tobrah ran straight to her room. Jackie could hear her from the kitchen, where she was unloading the groceries. Tobrah was talking to her toys. “I told you to stay right there! But you’ve been up dancing. I said you couldn’t dance. But all you want to do is dance!”

  In the doorway, Jackie watched Tobrah dash the doll and the bear around, banging them together until the doll’s hat fell off. After she had whipped their behinds and threatened them with no supper, she placed them back on the pillow and gave them new orders.

  “No dancing. No walking around!”

  Jackie had been married twice, once in her twenties and once in her thirties. The husbands were a blur. The first, Carl, was generous but immature. He saw Jackie and himself as a “fun couple.” Her second husband, Jerry, was quiet and sweet, but he hid too much—an attachment to his mother, his secret drawer, even lapses of memory. He frightened her when he began locking himself in the bathroom for hours. She still saw him around town, and they spoke cordially, much the way they had done when they lived together. For the past several years now, she had been going with Bob Burns. They had an understanding. They knew their relationship was wrong according to the church they attended together, but they decided that the legality of marriage was really just a piece of paper. They had worked that out in their minds, and it left them free to love each other, Jackie thought. She wanted to keep up with the times, within reason.

  “I can’t spend the weekend at your apartment,” she told Bob on the telephone a couple of weeks after Tobrah’s arrival. “You’ll have to come here. I can’t drag her around everywhere. I want her to know where she lives.”

  “Are you sure you want me there? I might just confuse her.”

  “No. Come on over. I need you.”

  Bob still wore the same size jeans he wore in high school and even had an old pair to prove it. He golfed and didn’t drink. He was divorced and had two grown daughters, one in the Air Force and the other in Louisville, pregnant. He seemed to find becoming a grandfather a spooky idea, and Jackie had been nervous about how he would adjust to her new situation. As they spoke on the phone now, she gazed at the decal of a brightly colored unicorn she had put low on a window for Tobrah. Nowadays, Jackie seemed to dwell on things she hadn’t noticed before—small things at a child’s eye level, like the napkin holder and the cabinet-door handles. She tried to tell Bob about this. She said, “It makes me think about Jack Frost. Remember those beautiful designs in the windows? Is that something only kids see? I used to see them at my grandmother’s.”

  “Jack Frost doesn’t come around anymore.”

  “How come? Pollution?”

  “No. Double-glazed windows and central heating. You saw Jack Frost in old, uninsulated houses where the windows were a single layer of glass. The frost was moisture condensed on the inside.”

  “I’m amazed. Is that supposed to be progress?”

  She always counted on Bob to know things.

  When he came over that Friday, he was anxious, fuming over something that had happened on the job. He said, “I waited at the loading platform for an hour and a half for this bozo to show up and then come to find out he’s with his girlfriend at the mall picking out a china pattern. He forgot to bring the shipment over.”

  “I imagine he had more important things on his mind than a load of cement,” said Jackie, taking his cap from his hand. He always took it off indoors, a fact she found interesting and unusual. Most men she knew wore their caps with almost fanatic devotion, indoors and out.

  “You can’t count on young people these days,” said Bob as he searched for a Band-Aid in Jackie’s medicine cabinet. He had a paper-cut from junk mail.

  “Young people? Why, you’re not so old! I hope when I’m fifty I don’t feel like my life is over.”

  After supper, while Jackie was washing the dishes, Tobrah suddenly started flattening pillows on the couch with a spatula.

  “Beat ’em good, hon,” said Jackie. “They need it.”

  “I’m going out to the drugstore to get some antihistamines,” Bob said, looking for his cap. “Does anybody want to come?”

  “Are you allergic to something here?” asked Jackie.

  “No. My nose has been itching all day.”

  “If your nose itches it means somebody’s coming with a hole in his britches,” Jackie said teasingly.

  “I’ve got a hole in my britches,” said Tobrah, giggling.

  Bob pulled on his cap. “Are y’all coming?”

  Jackie said, “No, we’ve got work to do.” She found a second spatula in the kitchen and started whacking the drapes. “The hard part is the places up high,” she said to Tobrah.

  “Aren’t you supposed to beat rugs outside?” Bob asked as he went out the door. They were hitting the couch, the chairs, the shag rug. On their hands and knees, they smacked the rug, sending up fibers and dust.

  Jackie sneezed and Tobrah said, “This is fun.” Jackie experienced a rushing sensation of blissful abandon, something she’d thought only a child could feel. She remembered feeling this way once when she was small—the meaningless happiness of jumping up and down on a bed, bouncing off the walls, chanting, “Little Bo Peep is fast asleep.”

  Tobrah had a way of moving jerkily—as if she were imitating some old comedian or mocking a private memory. She skipped ahead down the strawberry rows, then stopped to pluck a bright berry.

  “Gotcha!” she cried. She had picked up the expression at Kid World and had been applying it to everything.

  Jackie’s friend Annabelle had brought them to a farm south of town to pick strawberries. It was the last of the crop and the patch was drying out. Tobrah had been collecting all sorts of berries—green ones, deformed ones, rotten ones, as well as ripe ones. Jackie felt warm and peaceful. Tobrah’s tan skin glowed bright in the hot morning sun, and now and then she tugged at a handful of hair, stretching the curls.

  “Don’t pick the green ones,” Jackie said, but Tobrah didn’t hear. Jackie said to Annabelle, “I’m not sure when to correct her or when to just let her go.”

  “Wait till she starts school,” Annabelle said sympathetically. “You won’t be able to keep up with her.”

  “She’s always busy with something,” said Jackie. “She’s got a great attention span.”

  “She must not have seen much TV.”

  “I don’t know. She won’t tell much.”

  “She’s repressing her grief.” Annabelle worked in the typing pool at a social services agency and liked to talk knowledgeably about the c
ases she had typed up.

  “What does a little child know about grief?” Jackie asked. She threw a rotten berry across a couple of rows.

  Annabelle shook her head skeptically. “You can take a child that’s been through a trauma and give it all the love in the world and it might take years for the child to start to trust you.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  Instantly, Jackie regretted her tone. Annabelle’s son was in a chemical-dependency program, and Jackie knew Annabelle blamed herself. But Jackie felt as though some kind of safety valve had broken in her. She was becoming impatient with adult ideas. All she wanted to do was play with Tobrah. They had been reading—stacks and stacks of storybooks from the library. Tobrah was rapidly learning to recognize words. They watched videotapes together. They made paper villages and building-block malls, with paper dolls as shoppers. They were collecting stuffed animals, yard-sale bargains. Yesterday they had a tea party. Tobrah had wrapped a ball of yarn around the table and chairs, making a large green spiderweb. Jackie had to cut it apart, and the yarn—five dollars’ worth—was ruined. When Jackie was a child, she would have been punished for wasting yarn, but now she couldn’t even scold Tobrah. Jackie was too much amazed that anyone would have thought of draping yarn in that fashion. It was a creation.

  Now Tobrah was coming toward her, where Jackie was working her hands through strawberry plants. A spider jumped off a leaf. Jackie looked up. Tobrah, clutching several red berries, had red stains on her mouth. Her hair was bright in the loud sun.

  “I want to go,” she whined. “I’m hot.”

  “I’m ready,” Annabelle said. “My handy’s full.”

  After they took their handies of strawberries to the owner’s house to pay, they poured the berries into large metal pots and plastic dishpans they had brought. Carefully, Jackie set the pans of berries in the back seat of the car, next to Tobrah. Jackie fastened the seat belt for her. As she clasped the buckle and pulled the belt tight, Tobrah’s fingernail accidentally scratched against Jackie’s wrist, drawing blood. It had never occurred to Jackie that a child’s fingernails would need to be trimmed. She stared at the little nails, transparent as fish scales.

  “Does she remind you of when I was little?” Jackie asked her mother.

  “You weren’t that sure of yourself.”

  “Do you think I looked like her?”

  “I can’t see you in her. Maybe I don’t want to. All I see is him.”

  Lorraine paused from glazing a cake to light a cigarette. She tapped it on the counter the way Jackie remembered her father doing his unfiltered Luckies. Lucky Strikes. LSMFT, she recalled, from out of nowhere. Lorraine, in a voice hoarse from smoking, said, “Believe me, she’s better off without her daddy.”

  “Why are you still so bitter?”

  “I reckon I want to be. It’s my privilege.”

  Jackie ducked her mother’s smoke stream. “Did you hate Daddy?”

  “I guess I did, finally. I made him go. I couldn’t stand it anymore. He was always complaining, never enjoying anything.” Lorraine shuddered. “That was the worst part. He was such a sourpuss. He thought he was better than anybody else. He was always growling about the way the world was going to hell. You can’t put up with people like that.”

  Jackie stood over Tobrah, searching for resemblances between herself and the sleeping child. She could see a faint repetition of her own upper lip, the narrow forehead, a certain dark shadow under her eyes. Jackie had heard that computers could create new faces by combining photographs. It amused her to imagine Meg Ryan crossed with Sylvester Stallone; Newt Gingrich and Monica Lewinsky. Sensations from her own childhood floated forth; the taste of grapes from the trellis in the backyard, the sour green tang of the pulp set off by the sweet purple lining of the skin; the sandy texture of a pink marshmallow bunny squatting in Easter grass; the distasteful odor of sloppy joes in the first-grade lunchroom.

  Bob was supposed to visit, but he was late and Tobrah had fallen asleep. He had taken his mother to town. It was Social-Security-check day. His mother didn’t drive, and since his father’s death, Bob ran errands for her and took her places. His mother kept asking them what his arrangement with Jackie was called. She said she couldn’t keep track of the new alternatives to marriage. When Bob and Jackie and Tobrah showed up at church together one Sunday, Bob’s mother was embarrassed, and the congregation itself seemed shaken. Jackie hadn’t been back to church with Tobrah since then.

  Bob came in at ten minutes after nine, bringing ice cream for Tobrah—pistachio, because of the color.

  “She’s already asleep,” said Jackie. “She ate a hot dog, but I haven’t eaten yet. I waited for you—the pot roast is drying out though.”

  “I like it dried out,” he said with a grin. “Like jerky.”

  “Oh, you’re just saying that.”

  “No, it’s true!”

  “You know what Tobrah said? She said bananas smell like fingernail polish.” Jackie thrust a banana under his nose and he sniffed it. “Isn’t that funny?”

  “She’s right,” Bob said, sniffing the banana again.

  He set the ice cream in the freezer and swiped his finger through the whipped cream in a bowl on the counter. Jackie was making a sinful dessert.

  “I think childhood has changed,” Jackie said. “The way I remember it, any kid who said that about bananas would just be laughed at, but nowadays they call it ‘creative.’ ”

  “True,” Bob said. “What I remember is how everything you thought about depended on what you could afford. Nowadays kids have everything, so their minds just run wild.”

  “Yeah. The sky’s the limit.” Jackie slapped down place mats. “I don’t understand it,” she said. “I don’t understand where it all leads.”

  After supper, they watched TV in her bedroom. Jackie was afraid Tobrah would catch them in bed. Tonight they watched a videotape of The Big Easy that Jackie had rented that afternoon. The movie had a remarkably sexy scene, but neither of them stirred. It was after midnight when the movie ended, and they still had their clothes on.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” said Jackie, starting to get out of bed. “I’m going to check on Tobrah.”

  Bob caught her arm. “You check on babies—not five-year-old girls.”

  “I want to see if that fan is too much air for her.” She flinched. “Do you think I’m being too protective?”

  “I’m afraid you’ll let yourself get too attached to her.” He reached his arm around her tenderly. “Kids are a mess,” he said. “They always know how to hurt you.” He shooed a curl away from her forehead.

  “But Dad gave her to me. Maybe that was his way of making up to me after all these years.” She sat up straight against the backrest. “The bastard,” she said. “He left me when I wasn’t much older than Tobrah. And now he ups and leaves her too. Well, we’ll show him!”

  “You’re going a little overboard, Jackie.”

  “Bull noodles! What has my life amounted to? No kids. Two lousy marriages. I’m sure it was his fault, ruining things right at the start.”

  “You’re too hard on yourself, Jackie,” Bob said. “Maybe you shouldn’t be the one to bring her up.”

  She opened her paperback. Words raced before her eyes. She was barely conscious of the book, wondering if it was upside down. She saw herself sitting there, not concentrating, not grasping what was in the book or what was going on with Bob. Tobrah and Bob and Jackie, an oddball little family. Jackie pictured them in a movie—the wacky mom, the long-suffering dad, the precocious child. Or, the desperate mom, the sad-sack dad, the devil child.

  Jackie usually slept late on weekends, and one Saturday she woke up to find that Tobrah had eaten most of a jar of peanut butter. Jackie didn’t know what prevented the child from walking out the door, running away. Sometimes the little girl seemed filled with secret knowledge—probably only stuff learned from TV, Jackie thought—and at other times she seemed to have just come out of a hole. Her
favorite books were The Hungry Princess and The Foolish Cat, which Jackie thought were for younger children, but she wasn’t sure anymore what was appropriate. At the grocery one day, Tobrah had wanted to buy cat food and stationery, and Jackie had had to stop and try to think why they couldn’t buy them. Jackie started liking pizzas and tacos, kid food. One evening they even had fluffer-nutters and Cokes for supper. That was Tobrah’s worst day at Kid World. Melissa McKay had come with her My Little Pony and wouldn’t let anybody comb its tail. Several of the children had broken into tears.

  After supper, Tobrah soberly colored in her coloring book, working with fierce concentration. The crayons lay scattered on the kitchen table. As Tobrah shifted position, a dandelion crayon rolled over the edge of the table. Jackie caught it. Tobrah was coloring a ballerina surrounded by clowns. She explained, “This lady is telling the clowns about her comb she lost, and they said the man that found the comb would be a prince. If she could find him and he had the comb she would be a princess.”

  “That sounds like Cinderella.”

  Tobrah shook her head vigorously. “This lady don’t have any mean sisters. Nobody makes her work.”

  “But Cinderella wanted to work,” said Jackie. “Cinderella decided not to marry the prince. She decided to go to medical school and be a doctor.”

  “No, she didn’t! You always tell it that way. You don’t tell it right.”

  “Everybody has to work,” Jackie said, rolling a sepia crayon between her fingers. “My mother worked at the same plant where I work. She had to be on her feet eight hours a day. And she didn’t have a prince. It was just her and me.”

  “Can we have a gerbil?”

  They had seen gerbils in a pet store the day before.

  “We can’t have pets here. It’s not allowed in a house this small.”

  Jackie felt guilty about the lie, but she couldn’t imagine cleaning up after an animal. She remembered the summer days when her mother went off to work and left her alone. She was really too young to be left alone. She watched TV and listened to records and played solitaire. She hadn’t minded. She liked it. Nobody bothered her. Tobrah never seemed lonely either. It pleased Jackie to recognize this kinship with her sister. She remembered playing by herself, working on long, absorbing projects. Her paper dolls lived in shoe-box houses on a cardboard street, with house plants for trees. She had created a whole town once, with streets made of neckties and stores full of tiny objects (thimbles, buttons, and candy). The names came drifting back to her. Mulberry Street, Primrose Street. The town was named Wellsville, because nobody ever got sick there. Jackie had had pneumonia the winter before she built Wellsville.