Child of My Right Hand (10 page)

Staring at the chain-link protecting a trailer in Roscoe, Ohio, she had a sudden whiff, as if she could again smell Daddy's study, of what it was like to grow up on Kingsbury Court. Her tall, elegant mother (from whom Lizzie got her height) patrolled the kitchen, scorching meat. As a child, Genna had thought all steaks and chops were cooked so dry it hurt to chew. I wasn't born to cook, Doris always said. Later, Genna came to understand that brutalizing food was how her mother stayed so thin and that if she wanted anything palatable, she'd have to look outside the house or cook herself. What a childhood. In the greater world, she stalked around proud yet ashamed because her name was Genna Gordon, while at home, within the crumbling walls, she studied hard and swore she'd get as far as she could from Kingsbury Court. And she had. Dr. Genna Barish, who married a Jew.

Most of the people she'd spoken to this morning, and she'd spoken maybe to twenty in two hours of canvassing, had listened politely, though she understood most intended to vote against the levy. Perhaps she'd changed two or three votes, maybe four or five, by pointing out that the difference in their taxes would be twelve or fifteen dollars a month, but that those twelve or fifteen dollars added together across the district would save buses and sports for the high school, reduce class size in kindergarten and first grade, maybe even bring back Latin and computer programming.

Genna climbed two cement steps to a porch covered in translucent green plastic siding. She knocked, and a small blond boy answered.

“Is your mother or father home?”

“No.” He closed the door. A moment later, it reopened, and a slightly older girl with a pinched face, maybe seven or eight years old, stood beside her brother.

“My brother said my parents ain't home.” She blinked once and then a second time. “But they're industposed.”

“Thank you.” Genna passed the girl a flyer and three rolls of Smarties. “Would you give this to your parents for me?”

The little girl eyed the Smarties. “Ain't supposed to take candy.”

“Save it until your mom and dad are dustposed,” Genna smiled. “They must be very proud of you, dear.”

Genna started up the street. Strangely, she'd never felt her own parents were proud of her, and she'd worked hard to ensure Simon and Lizzie knew she treasured them. Which was it? Were her parents proud, which she somehow didn't feel? Or weren't they? She'd gotten A's. She played varsity tennis. She was pretty enough, and from eighth grade on, when her breasts developed, had never lacked for boys' attention. She wasn't tall and regal like Doris, and she hadn't stayed home and made a great stinking pile of money like her brother Billy, but no one expected that of a girl back then. She hadn't married anyone with money, that must be her crime. Or maybe she never stopped being a reminder of her mother's sole indiscretion.

Genna stopped in front of an enormous sugar maple that had shed half its leaves. Those that remained were crimson. In the words of the Motown song she'd listened to obsessively growing up, Genna used to believe she was a Love Child, never meant to be! Her biological dad? Some random her mother couldn't admit to. A one-night stand, a sperm provider, a knife-point rapist!

“No, Genna,” Doris had assured her, over and over. Finally, during Genna's senior year in high school, Doris produced a marriage certificate with the groom's name x'ed out. “He was just some boy. Then I met Daddy, and we all got on with the lives we should have had.”

Genna thought of all the times her mother had implied she did not have the life she ought, the one in which someone else cooked and she didn't have to worry about money for a new roof.

“Then how come you won't tell me his name?” Genna asked, realizing how petulant and childish she sounded, how come? She stared, furious, at her tall, raven-haired mother, more aware than ever that in her shorter, rounder blondness she resembled someone who wasn't there.

“Because of the foolish notion I see in your eyes right now.” Doris tucked an errant strand of hair, bad hair, into her neck bun, then lit a cigarette from the one already burning in the ashtray. She'd brought it home from her one and only trip to France, when Genna was twelve and Daddy was still a judge. Painted yellow and green in country bistro style, the ashtray's sentiment was black-lettered on its rim:
Les enfants sont les fleurs en le jardin de la vie
.

“But Mom.”

“Because of how it would hurt Daddy. Who has raised and loved you as his own.”

“But Mom.”

“When you're older.”

Then Doris rose from the couch and strode to the kitchen to burn dinner.

Five years later, in May of Genna's first year at grad school, her mother died of cancer, still thin, still elegant, forty-five years old. And if Genna had expected a deathbed confession, some baring of her mother's cloistered soul, she would have been disappointed. But Genna had expected no such thing. She'd met Jack and had decided he would be her future. He visited with her in March, between winter and spring quarters. He fixed little things around the house, ingratiating himself with Daddy, and though her parents insisted he sleep in a separate room, Jack was the only man to make love to her in her girlhood bed.

“He's a good one,” her mother acknowledged when they sat alone in the living room, Doris puffing on a cigarette, Genna still trying to get her to stop. (Oh leave me be. It's too damn late.)

“Now you try to hold onto him, Genna.”

Right then if she'd said, “Tell me about my biological dad, ” her mother would have told her. Doris's dark eyes had looked vulnerable, almost frightened. But Genna couldn't or wouldn't ask. Too frightened of what she might learn or content not to know, she was never sure.

Now why am I thinking all this now? Genna pressed the doorbell of the sugar maple house. She didn't have time to answer herself because the door opened. One of Lizzie's teammates. “Oh, hi dear,” Genna said, unable to recall her name, “are your parents home?”

“My mom is.” The girl pivoted, as if to find her mother, then turned back. Steffie? Katie? What was wrong with her she couldn't remember names. “Say hi to Lizzie for me.”

A moment later, the blond soccer mom she'd quarreled with filled the doorframe. Oh yes, Marge.

“Hi,” said Genna. “I'm here to ask you to be smart for Tipton schools.”

Marge grinned, and the skin around her eyes burst into wrinkles. “Goddamn, you made it to Roscoe. Come in.”

Marge's house was stuffed like a too-small suitcase. Two dogs, four cats, a gerbil, a rat and three children, of whom the soccer player, Megan, was the eldest. Family photos lined the living room wall unit, but none featured an adult male. Over Genna's protests, Marge brewed coffee. She rarely drank coffee after breakfast, and she was anxious to knock on doors, but Marge was hard to deny. They sat in a yellow kitchen piled with dirty dishes. Genna sipped her coffee, but refused cookies and a second cup. When she was working her way back to the front door, Marge said, “You know what? I'll go with you. Megan!” she shouted down the bedroom corridor. “I'm going out with Lizzie's mom. You watch Zach and Betty.”

At one house, an old woman nearly broke Marge's foot slamming the door. At another, an old man under a John Deere cap heard them out, then spat on the top step not far from where she stood. “Goddamn, Marge. What would your dad think?”

“You know damn well.”

“But you're still speaking for that trash up Tipton way.”

“Bob Thomas, you can kiss my fat butt. We don't want your vote anyway.”

“You sure as hell ain't got it!”

The old man slammed his door, too. Must be the style, here. Genna looked at Marge whose lips were stretched white with anger, then followed her down the porch steps. Halfway to the next house, Genna asked, “What was that about?”

Marge looked down, giving Genna a glimpse of her dark roots.

“If you don't mind,” she said, “I'd like to show you the school.”

Did Genna want to tour the old school? No. Did she suspect they'd been headed there since she knocked on Marge's door? Well, yes. They retraced their steps to Marge's blue Windstar and climbed in; the van's interior was as disordered as her house. Fast food bags, Dairy Queen cups, all other manner of trash blanketed the floor. The pine air freshener hanging from the rearview could not mask the riotous odor of dogs and kids and wet towels. If the mess embarrassed Marge, who drove like she walked, straight ahead, no nonsense, it did not show. They pulled into the old school lot which may once have been asphalt, but had long ago succumbed. Genna followed Marge up the steps of the one-story brick building. Above the steel fire door, recently painted firehouse red, a carved stone frontispiece read: Roscoe Elementary 1926.

“My dad,” Marge reached into the zipper lining of her purse for a key, “and a few of his cronies keep the place up. Mow the lawn, fix broken windows.” She inserted the key, but it wouldn't turn. “Damn.”

“Let me.” Genna pulled the heavy door towards her, turned the key and felt it ease. The lock sprang; the door opened in; a puff of musty air escaped.

“You're handy,” Marge said. “I like that.”

The flooring was hard, brown linoleum tiles; the walls, once green, were dark with age. Cobwebs shrouded old-fashioned globe lights. Marge ran her fingers along the wall. “My dad and his pals ain't much on cleaning.” She grinned. “Then again, I ain't, either.”

Genna followed her down the windowless hall to the second classroom on the left.

“I had good times in here, all right. Second grade. My mother was the teacher. Boy, did that make me feel special.”

Genna smelled mold, moisture. There was a black blackboard, and two rows of wooden flip top desks, with small cut-outs in the top right corner.

“In Dad's day, these were ink wells, and boys would dip girls' pigtails, he said, just to be boys.”

Genna ran her fingers across a oak desk top. Refinished, in New York or L.A., it would probably fetch a small fortune.

“You might wonder why I'm taking your time.” Marge pushed a hand through her short bangs. “Unless you see how the geezers keep the place up, all these years later? You couldn't understand how much the school meant to this town. How it made us a town.”

“I think I do. Your mom was really your teacher?”

“I'll tell you something. My mom was the only teacher who lived in Roscoe.” Marge walked to the blackboard then turned to face the classroom as her mother must have. Genna tried to imagine Doris a second-grade teacher. Impossible. “Mom was extra strict on me, but I felt like a queen. The spring they closed the building, I was pregnant with Megan. Mom moved up to Reynolds Elementary in Tipton. When she got sick her second year there, breast cancer, Daddy blamed that on the move, too.”

“How old was she?”

“Fifty-eight when she died.”

“My mother died at forty-five.”

“I'm sorry,” Marge said. “How old were you?”

“Twenty-three. We were never that close.” Genna wondered why she was telling this stranger. “I still miss her.”

“Of course you do.” Marge reached into her giant black purse and produced a piece of chalk. “When I get to missing my mom, I come to her classroom and write a note on the board.” Marge turned her back to the room and printed, Hi, Mrs. Williams.

“That's what I had to call her in school, Mrs. Williams. Why don't you write something to your mother? Erase it afterwards, I always do.” Marge set the chalk on Genna's palm. “I'll wait outside.”

Genna rolled the white chalk between her fingers and faced the board. Hi Mom, she wrote. I miss you. She stared a moment, erased Mom and replaced it with Doris. Maybe I should go see Daddy. Genna smudged the board with her palm and walked out of the classroom then out of the old school. Marge waited in the parking lot, blond and blowsy, smoking.

Election Day dawned dry, bright and pretty as any campaign manager could hope for. Returning from the top of the driveway toting the
Cincinnati Enquirer
, which most mornings only enraged them, the air felt so clear and energizing, Jack believed, perhaps for the first time, that the levy would pass. Such a beautiful morning, how could anyone vote against small shining faces, public education, apple pie?

Jack and Genna punched ballots at the middle school after breakfast. The balance of the morning he labored to educate the young minds of Ohio, which, frankly, did not seem much engaged or enlightened by the glories of Renaissance science. From three to five he distributed leaflets outside the Taft Student Center, where most undergraduates were assigned to vote. Distributed, Jack thought, what an old-time, mouth-filling word. Maude distributed freely her favors. Karl sought in vain to redistribute the wealth of the ruling class.

Through Stan Murray, they'd been invited to an Election Night bash at Grandma's Barn. Neither Genna nor Jack had ever been to the Barn, a Tipton fixture, but at eight o'clock, they left Simon and Lizzie in front of the television and drove into Tipton then west out of town towards Indiana. It was full dark and a light rain had begun to fall as they turned onto Miller Road and angled past a field of standing corn. Why, by early November, it hadn't been harvested, or combined, whatever farmers did to corn, he didn't understand. But there was a lot Jack didn't understand about life in the corn belt.

“If the levy doesn't pass,” Genna said suddenly, “we'll have to move back to Cincinnati.”

She turned towards him, and in the dazzle of approaching headlights her eyes shone, he thought, with unshed tears.

“Even if it does,” she continued, “I'm not sure we should leave Simon in that school. It's so awful for him.”

Jack thought, disloyally, Simon's had problems in every school he's attended, maybe it's not the school, it's our son. But he said, “Has something happened you haven't told me about?”

“No.”

Just ahead, an illuminated sign appeared through the murk like a message from beyond: Grandma's Barn—Functions and Parties.

“What about our house?”

“You think I want to move?” Genna smiled a sideways smile. “But kids before houses, I've got that much straight.”

They started up the graveled drive. A large pond, an acre or more, dimpled with rain. Parked cars covered the available lawn on their right. The barn, maybe two hundred feet from where Jack pulled over, loomed through the mist, square and red with white trim, very charmingly barn-like. Genna and Jack crunched up the driveway in the light rain holding hands.

“The levy's going to pass, I just know it.”

“Why, Jack.” She smiled. “That's the most optimistic thing you've said in months. Maybe years.”

Just then, the barn door opened, and the party spilled out into the rain. The interior of Grandma's Barn had been completely redone, down to a high gloss oak floor. At one end of the long room there was an elevated stage. At the other, two half-kegs floated in tubs of ice. Beyond the kegs there was a long bar on which someone had laid out twelve-foot subs parsed into four-inch squares, hot wings, bowls of chips, dip, and enough miniature pigs in blankets to depopulate several miniature hog farms. A crowd of strangers filled four rectangular tables. Who were all these people? Tiptonites. Other party guests surrounded the kegs, watching a projection screen illuminated with the ABC News home page.

It was an off-year, no national campaigns, and not much of local interest except the levy. Jack looked around, feeling out of place, which, he knew, was how Genna felt, only more so. When they were dating, she'd beg him not to leave her alone at parties. For years he didn't, although it wasn't in his nature. At parties, he liked to float, Jack the Giant Barishfly, and he soon left Genna, beer in hand, with some women she seemed to know from Lizzie's soccer team. Jack plunged into the crowd circling the keg to refill his mug, which was where Stan Murray found him.

“Jack,” Stan said, “glad you made it. You remember Marla Lindstrom, don't you?”

Marla wore a short dress the same blue as her eyes. The neck scooped almost to the tops of her small breasts. She looked wonderful. Overdressed, but wonderful.

“Who could forget Marla?”

He'd intended nothing, but it didn't sound like nothing, and Stan, munching his way through a mound of finger food, started to inflate. His eyes bulged; his cheeks swelled. Jack tried to remember the Heimlich. Then Stan coughed a miniature wiener into his palm.

“Stan,” Marla exclaimed, “that's remarkably gross.”

Stan wiped his lips on a napkin.

“Genna and I have been seeing Marla at the high school. Our son's been having some difficulties.” Jack glanced from Marla to Stan, who was still working on his lips and perhaps his dignity. “If the levy passes, perhaps the district can use some of the money for a diversity sensitivity class.”

“Why's that?” Stan felt sufficiently improved to begin gnawing a chicken wing.

“Simon's come out, and he's being harassed.”

Stan set the half-chewed wing on his plate and glanced at Marla.

“It's been bad,” she admitted.

“Sometimes,” Stan said softly, looking around under his dark brows, “I wonder why we work so hard for this school district, it's such a fucking embarrassment.”

“By the way,” Jack asked. “The levy is going to pass?”

“The first results should be up any time.”

They walked towards the front of the barn, where a media station had been set up on a card table: phone line to a laptop patched to a projection screen. A short sandy-haired stranger in a Reds cap sat at the table, typing.

“Jack,” Stan said, “this is…”

But he didn't hear the rest, because just then the projection switched from the ABC home page to a text-only screen from the county board of elections. The computer operator, whoever he was, scrolled down to the Tipton School levy, proposition eight. With three of twelve wards reporting, the vote was 586 Yes, 470 No. The room erupted in hoots and clapping.

“Great!” Jack shouted to Stan, who ignored him and leaned over the computer operator.

“Small,” Stan said. Could the name really be Small? “Can you tell which wards have reported?”

Small moved the cursor, changed screens twice and declared, “One in Tipton city, one in the township, one in Roscoe.”

“What was the vote in Roscoe?” Stan asked.

“This is only one of three wards,” the computer guy said. “But it was 206 No, 152 Yes.”

Jack calculated. “That's like four to three against. That's really good news.”

The room buzzed happily. Stan said, “There are six Tipton city wards, that one in the township, then three in Roscoe, two in Milton. Small, what was the vote in the city ward?”

Small clicked at his keyboard. “Two hundred forty-seven Yes, fifty-two No.”

Jack could feel himself grinning and grinning. Then his eyes found Marla, who was standing close enough for him to smell her light scent, violets or lavender, and for Jack to imagine the weight of her small frame against his.

“Gotta love it,” she said.

The twelve-foot sandwiches shrank to six then four then two, and completely disappeared. The hot wings took flight. Shortly before ten, three more wards reported; two from the city, which voted four to one for the levy, and one from Milton, which voted three to two against. With half the votes counted, the levy was leading 1601 to 1230, and the campaign coordinator, a small dark-haired woman named Eleanor, got up on stage.

“It's too early to know for sure,” she began, “but I want to thank all you volunteers. Not only are we winning big in the city in the student wards—”

Jack smiled at Genna who was standing beside him.

“—but we're running at 40 percent in Milton and Roscoe, twice what we got there last time.”

A cheer went up from the sixty or so volunteers still in the room.

“I know how much work it's been for all of you…”

Small, the computer operator, who was standing just to the side of the stage shouted: “I haven't seen Ellie in weeks!”

Oh, Jack thought, they're a couple.

“…because I know how hard I've been working. But if this trend keeps up, it will be a great victory, not just for those of us who worked for the levy, but for all of Tipton.”

More speeches followed, short and jolly, with everyone thanking everyone. Then Genna wanted to leave to ensure the kids got to bed on time. Jack glanced around Grandma's Barn, which was starting to empty. Pretty soon, it would be just the hardcore waiting for final results, which they'd been told should come between eleven and midnight.

“I'll drive you,” Jack said, “but I want to come back.”

He dropped Genna and started back to the Barn. The rain had stopped, and mist rose from the blacktop as he drove west from Tipton. Though the first trip had felt interminable, it wasn't more than fifteen or twenty minutes from their house. Hell, it wasn't more than fifteen or twenty minutes from anywhere to anywhere in greater Tipton, and Jack turned onto Miller Road with a sense of urgency. He pulled into the driveway for Grandma's Barn, parked near the pond and looked around. Perhaps twenty cars remained, but none that he recognized, especially not a certain silver Beetle. He crunched up the driveway as shadowy clouds crossed the moon. He'd been over and over the numbers, and it was all but a mathematical certainty the levy would pass. They'd be able to stay in town.

Inside, he looked for familiar faces. Eleanor and Small were still there; Small hunched over the laptop, clicking, stringy hair falling out the back of his Reds cap. Eleanor and several of the other levy officials leaned against the bar watching the projection screen. Jack approached Eleanor.

“We haven't met,” he said. “I'm Jack Barish. I worked with Stan Murray and TUTS.”

“You guys did a great job.” She smiled and squeezed his hand.

“Any more updates?” For a small woman Eleanor had a fearsome grip. “When I left to drive my wife, six wards had reported.”

“Not yet,” said one of the others.

Then Marla reentered from wherever she'd been. “Hey, Jack. I thought you'd left.”

“I came back.” He found himself grinning. Stepping away from the others, he added softly, against everything that was reasonable and good, “I was hoping you'd still be here.”

Marla didn't answer, but he knew she'd heard him; her eyes gave this blip of recognition. Then a cry went up. Not because Jack had said what he shouldn't have and found in Marla's eyes confirmation of what they'd both suspected, which is why he was silently shouting, Huzzah, huzzah! Oh, God no! But because new results had posted. With ten of twelve wards reporting, the Tipton School levy was 63 percent Yes, 37 percent No.

“Quite a night,” Marla said. “Isn't it, Jack?”

It was quite a night.

***

Helen, the shift manager, loved Fry Guy so much she'd scheduled him Thursday and Friday four to eight, Saturday one to eight, Sunday noon to seven. Twenty-two times six, one hundred thirty-two dollars (Simon was an early whiz at multiplication; math and musical gifts often appearing in tandem, hinting at some genetic link), more money than he'd had at one time, except for the day after his Bar Mitzvah when his parents let him keep two hundred. They'd claimed the rest for his college fund, but Simon believed they'd spent it; when he suggested using Bar Mitzvah money to buy him a car, Mom and Dad's faces got long and weird, like, What money?

His dad's big face wore that same pissed-off money expression right now. It was Saturday morning, and they were driving to Cincinnati for Simon's weekly session with Yevgeny Keratin, the Ukrainian-born vocal coach he'd been studying with since eighth grade. Yevgeny foretold a fabulous future, “Ef only Simon vould vork harder.”

Yevgeny had been a wunderkind, with his own fabulous future foretold, until his mother emigrated to Israel. Three months later, Yevgeny was expelled from the Kiev Conservatory. How Yevgeny, who was short and broad and looked like the men in Dad's family, smooth-cheeked with very white skin and dark hair, made his way from Kiev to Cincinnati, Simon didn't know. But Yevy loved Simon's voice. Vhat an instrument! he'd exclaim. Like a grown man's. Simon, who disliked lessons on adolescent principle, especially with men (which reminded him of studying math with Dad), had been happily making his way to Yevgeny's studio one evening a week for three years, and since they'd moved, on Saturday mornings.

Between Yevy's and the Fry Guy, Simon was scheduled from nine in the morning to eight at night. He was meeting Peter soon afterwards so he needed to be driven home to shower then back to the movie. He also needed an advance of oh, fifty dollars from the paycheck he'd get next Thursday. But would Dad say yes? Did he ever? No! He got this whacked-out look with that throbbing thing in his neck, then started muttering about financial responsibility, how Simon was always borrowing against his allowance, and now that he had a job, he needed to learn to save and wait until payday. And blah, blah, blah. Simon had screamed. You never say yes. You make me feel like crap!

For twenty minutes they'd ridden in radioactive silence, Simon with his seat cranked as close to horizontal as he could manage, eyes sealed, plotting revenge. If Dad didn't start showing him more respect, he'd move out. Dad could be lying half-dead in the street, bleeding from his nose, ears, eyes and everywhere else. Simon would pretend he didn't know him and keep right on walking.

“Simon.” Dad touched his shoulder; Simon feigned sleep deep as the ocean. “We're almost there.”

Simon slit his eyes as if Dad were a big-nosed vermin.

“I've been thinking, Simon.”

I doubt it.