Mary Coin (20 page)

31.

S
he was due to start again on the treatments the following week. As if her children sensed the worst, they began to visit. Ray’s girls were sweet but shy around their grandmother. They had been kept apart from the family by Ray’s wife, who considered the Coins too low-rent for her aspirations. The woman read copies of
Ladies
’
Home Journal
and looked impatient to leave, but Mary said nothing because Ray’s life was his own. June and Della were tearful, and it had been good to hug them. She was happiest when James returned from the road, but it quickly became evident that his siblings had left him with the dirtiest job.

“Sell my car?” she said. He had taken her to breakfast at a diner where she’d ordered coffee and toast. She didn’t want her children to spend money on her.

“I don’t like to think of you driving,” he said.

“Don’t think of it,” she said.

“You know what I see out there, Mama? Kids with open bottles, high as a kite. I pass an accident nearly every day.”

“Maybe I’m the one who should be worried about you.”

“Come on, Mama.”

“Do you know what would have happened to us all those years ago if we didn’t have a car? We would have died. A car saved our lives.”

“You saved our lives, Mama.”

“How will I get around with no car?” she said quietly.

“Ellie can take you places after she’s finished work. Valerio is home Mondays. And those boys can drive you wherever you need to go if Ellie doesn’t need her car.”

“You want me to be driven around by a couple of ignorant teenagers? They don’t even remember to brush their teeth unless you remind them.”

He smiled sadly. There was probably no one in the world who understood her more than James.

“All right,” she said.

•   •   •

T
he day before she was due for her first treatment at the clinic, she stood by the window, watching Ellie yell at the boys about being late for school. Mary had given away her home and now her car. It was only a matter of time before she would give away her life. Valerio had already returned from his shift and was asleep. The television in his and Ellie’s bedroom was turned up the way he needed it to be so that the buzzers and bells of game shows would block out human sounds that might wake him. After Ellie and the boys drove away, Mary ate a bowl of corn flakes. Then she got her purse and a sweater and left the house. The pain in her stomach was bearable if she sucked in her gut and walked slowly. She waited at the corner bus stop. When the bus arrived, she told the driver she had incurable cancer, and even though it was not a scheduled stop, he let her off directly in front of the Goodwill. The store didn’t open for another hour, and the parking lot was empty. Green garbage bags filled with donations sagged against the double glass doors like people hunkering against the early-morning chill. One of the bags had burst open, as if someone had thrown it there carelessly. Mary thought about what she must look like to the commuters driving down the boulevard: an old woman standing outside the Goodwill next to this spill of yellow and pink and overwashed red, as if she was just another cast-off.

At nine o’clock, a girl with fiercely lined magenta lips unlocked the glass doors and allowed Mary inside. The only other person in the store was a man busily arranging clothing on a circular rack. Mary wandered up and down the aisles. There were so many things on display that no one needed in the first place: garden gnomes and tricolored whirligigs from children’s birthday parties, a fondue set and a heart-shaped waffle iron that were probably used only a handful of times by their owners. Goodwill was a place of once pressing and now useless desires in the form of salt and pepper shakers that looked like a copulating couple, and a Day-Glo lava lamp.

As if her eyes had a homing instinct, she began to notice her former possessions. There were her kitchen table and chairs. There was the lamp that stood by her bed, a price tag dangling from the cream-colored shade. It was a strange feeling to see these things that had once belonged to her, that she had touched and used and sat on. And now they felt no more hers than any of the other items lining the shelves of the store. She realized how silly the idea of owning was in the end. Even with children. The belief that they belonged to you was a lie you told yourself to make sure you would protect them until they were old enough to take care of themselves. But they were never really yours, and the very things you had done to keep them safe might have hurt them in the end.

She walked over to a clothing rack.

“Can I help you, lady?” The man she’d noticed was practically shouting, and Mary realized that he was wrong in some way. His mouth was loose and his words came out smeared.

“I gave some things to the Goodwill a few weeks ago,” she said. “I thought I might find them.”

“You can’t have them back!” he said. “No Indian givers.”

“You know, that’s not really true what they say about Indians,” she said. The man looked at her with alarm and went off in search of the girl with the red lips.

Mary sorted through the racks until she found one of her good dresses, the one she had worn to the christening of June’s little boy. On a wrought-iron plant stand that served as a display rack for rows of creased and worn shoes, she found her white patent-leather pumps. The red hat sat nearby on the bald head of a mannequin. She bought that too.

32.

W
hen she woke, the Greyhound bus was well beyond Santa Clarita and heading toward San Francisco. She was exhausted. The expedition to the Goodwill and then the bus station had worn her down. She hoped she would have the strength to do what she had planned. She looked out her window. Rows of crops were covered with protective tarps. Others were exposed, their leaves green and ready. The pickers were small dots in the distance that didn’t seem to be moving. But she knew those people were in constant motion. Pick, put it in the sack, move forward. Pick, put it in the sack, move forward.

The bus pulled off the freeway at a rest stop. Mary used the break to call Ellie at work, but the girl who answered the phone told her that Ellie had left early for an emergency. Mary called the house. When Ellie heard her mother’s voice, she screamed so loudly that the person making a call at the pay phone next to Mary’s looked over.

“We just spent four hours driving all over creation looking for you,” Ellie said. “We were about to call the police and file a missing-persons report.”

“I’m not missing,” Mary said. “I’m right here.”

“Where?”

“Don’t be more clever than you are,” Mary said.

“Mama,” Ellie said, with the false calm she used when she was angry with her boys, “you cannot just run out on me like that.”

“Honey, I’m not running out on anybody. I’m just taking a little vacation.”

“I’m gonna come get you. I’m gonna call the others . . . I’m gonna . . .”

But Ellie would do nothing, because despite Mary’s age and her health, the rules of the family had been laid down long ago when her children’s lives depended on a mute submission to her sharp looks or warning words. When Ellie was finished exclaiming over all the things she was powerless to do to her mother, she let out a sigh of resignation.

“Oh, Mama. Why do you have to be like you are?”

But that was just it. Mary was the way she was. Her children relied on that. She wondered how they would manage after she was gone. When Doris had died so long ago, it was weeks before Mary could think clearly and remember what she was supposed to do the next minute and then the minute after that. Even though Doris had shown Mary how to get rid of the chiggers that burrowed under skin or how to add potatoes to bread to make it heavy so it would fill a stomach faster, she had never explained how she had survived the death of a husband and the loss of a child. Parents never told their real secrets. They never let you know how they lived in the spaces between working and cooking and running after children and counting dollars. Mary had never told her children about the dread she felt each night while she waited to fall asleep. She had never told them how she survived each day after her last baby boy was gone, after she’d done the most terrible thing a person could do.

“But Mama,” Ellie said, as if reading Mary’s thoughts. “What are we supposed to do now?”

Mary said nothing, holding her secrets close. She told her daughter not to worry, hung up the phone, and boarded the bus.

•   •   •

I
t had been nearly twenty years since she’d read about the photographer’s death. She had seen the obituary in the newspaper. Instead of Vera Dare’s picture, the newspaper had printed the picture of Mary, and for a moment Mary thought she was reading her own death notice. She had felt the loss as if something had been taken away from her in particular, even though, according to the article, the woman had a husband and two sons and several grandchildren who were, no doubt, feeling a sharper kind of removal. Still, there were unhappy things that you lived with so long that you missed them when they were gone. She’d cried when that old Hudson had finally given out, even though it had been unreliable and filled with hard memories. She’d cried the night she’d slept in a real home for the first time after all those years of tents and shacks and backseats. She’d wept for the lock on the door, the key in her hand. She hoped Vera Dare had not suffered, although she knew that probably she had, because most people do. She’d died of cancer just like Mary would die of cancer. Probably Vera sat in hospital rooms and watched the slow drip of medicine move from the plastic pouch down the clear tube and into her body. Most likely she sucked on candies her children gave her not because she thought a ginger lozenge would do any good but because making her children feel useful was worth the lie.

Mary wondered if all the pictures Vera Dare took lived in the photographer’s mind just the way a child does even when you’ve tried to banish thoughts of him, the way a face you’ve forgotten and haven’t seen for so long can come to you when you least expect it. You’re brushing your teeth and you see him looking back at you in the mirror. Your eyes are his eyes that stared up at you while he sucked, as if he was not only drawing milk from your breast but an idea of who he was. You hold a cool peach and feel his cheek in your palm.

As the bus continued its journey, she dozed again, and when she woke and looked out the window, it was as if someone had reached back and grabbed the past by the collar and dragged it forward. The bus sped by so quickly that she wondered, for a moment, whether she had been dreaming of the house with those tiers of oddly shaped windows and that wraparound porch. But when the bus passed the sign signaling that they were leaving Porter, she knew what she had seen. She pressed her face to the glass, watching the rows of orange trees bending at uniform angles in the stiff wind. She stared at the land where she had spent so much of herself. But land was ignorant. It had no notion of what had occurred on it a half century before. It was a sheet of paper on which the stories of thousands of small lives were written over time. And to think that what had happened to her was any more meaningful than what might have befallen another person, or a cow, or an ant—well, there were all sorts of ways people convinced themselves they were above the thick of life, and all of them were wrong. She had avoided Porter for years, tried never even to think of its name. She had convinced herself that if she didn’t acknowledge it, then it would not exist and neither would her longing. But it had always been here. This dirt. Those trees. That house.

When the bus pulled into the Visalia station, she got off. She read the schedule and saw that there would be another one coming through in five hours. The woman behind the ticket counter gave her the number of a local taxi service.

“That’ll be forty dollars,” the cabdriver said, after Mary sat in the backseat and told him where she wanted to go.

“I’ll give you twenty,” she said.

The man looked at her in the rearview mirror. “It’s not a negotiation, ma’am. We charge by the mile.”

“Thirty for the round trip.”

He was about to protest.

“If you’ve got other customers, go ahead and take them,” she said, looking at the empty sidewalk outside the bus station. “But to my mind, thirty dollars is better than zero dollars.”

Once they were back in Porter, she pointed out the house from the highway, and the driver found his way to the service road that ran past the property.

“You want me to pull into the drive?” he said.

“Just stop. Right here.”

He parked the cab on the shoulder of the road. When she did not make a move to get out of the car, he turned around in his seat. “Do you need help, ma’am?”

“I just want to sit here for a minute, if you don’t mind.”

33.

Porter, California, 1935

S
he didn’t question Charlie when he told her he’d arranged for the kind of doctor who would take care of things. The inequality in the relations between them suggested that she had no say in this matter, and she couldn’t risk losing her job. And what would she do with another child? Her kids grew hungrier as they grew bigger. There were times when she’d stand next to Trevor, realize he’d grown another inch, and something would collapse inside her. Ellie was so thin that she hadn’t yet gotten her period. Other women in the camp told Mary to be grateful that the girl wouldn’t be able to make babies yet, but the unnaturalness was upsetting.

One Sunday, she left the little ones under the care of Ellie and Trevor. She walked out of the camp and down the road to the place where she and Charlie usually met. He did not look at her when she climbed into his shiny DeSoto. When she mentioned the fancy car, he admitted that his mother thought he was out driving with a girl named Naomi.

“This Naomi is going to be your wife?” Mary said.

He didn’t answer.

“You do with her what you do with me?”

“No.”

When they rounded a corner, she saw a grand home set back from the road. The house was painted a pristine white and trimmed the color of raspberries. It seemed that there were more windows in the house than there were walls. Some of them were round, some rectangular; the one at the top of a pointed turret was cut in the shape of a crescent moon. The roofline stopped here and rose up there, as if the house had been built in stages by someone dreaming a new dream.

“That’s yours?” she said.

“It belongs to my father,” he said. “But I live there.”

“It’s where you’re going to bring your wife? This Naomi?”

“I suppose so.”

She looked back at the house, which sat proudly on its tuft of lawn.

“She’ll like that,” Mary said. “Any girl would.”

He drove through town, past the shops that were closed for the day, their awnings rolled back against their brick fronts, past the Huntington Hotel and the grand-looking Adelaide Theater and a billiard parlor whose sign was a ball that doubled as an orange. She saw a sign for a doctor’s office hanging outside a detached building, but Charlie didn’t stop his car. Instead, he drove past the end of the main street and out again into farmland. He turned the car down a bumpy road that ran through a grove of lemon trees and headed toward a plain clapboard house. Sheets and shirts and men’s drawers hung on a line strung between two trees. A girl stood on top of a tire swing. She eyed the oncoming car as she lazily worked her hips to get up some momentum. Two small boys took turns kicking a ball into the air. Charlie parked the car a short distance from the house. They both sat in silence, listening to the ticks and groans of the spent engine.

“Just go on in there,” he said finally.

“By myself?”

“I won’t be of any use,” he said.

“I don’t have money.”

“It’s already paid for.”

“You’ve got it all figured out, I guess.”

The door of the house opened, and a woman appeared. She cleaned her hands on her apron. Mary’s stomach turned at the thought of what the woman might be wiping away. Charlie stared at his lap.

“Say my name,” Mary said.

“What?”

“Say my name.”

“Mary,” he said.

“Mary Coin. Say it.”

“Mary Coin.”

She got out of the car and walked quickly past the children. Mary felt certain the girl knew what she was there to do.

The woman led her to a room that was dominated by a table draped in a white cloth. Two chairs stood at the end of the table. A man in shirtsleeves stood over a sink, washing his hands.

“She’s here,” the woman said.

The doctor was young. His face was as unlined as a boy’s, and Mary wondered if, in fact, he was a boy playing at doctoring the way Ray played at being a train conductor. He dried his hands with a dishcloth. His palms were pink.

“You’ve done this before?” he said.

“Have you?” she said, but her bravado fell flat. She had no power in this situation. Charlie had most likely found a doctor who had nothing to do with his family, someone who needed the job so badly he could be trusted, or maybe paid, not to talk. “No,” she said quietly. “I’ve never done this before.”

“Take off your drawers,” the woman said.

“Right here?” Mary said.

The doctor rolled up his sleeves and tossed his tie over his shoulder. “Lay out the instruments, please,” he said to the woman.

Mary started shivering. She turned her back to the others and stepped out of her underwear. There was nowhere to put them so she held them. When she turned around, the woman handed Mary a cup and instructed her to drink. Fumes shot straight up Mary’s nose and she gasped. Then she drank the liquor down quickly, feeling it cut against her throat. Her chest widened out with the drink’s heat. She watched as the woman placed strange-looking instruments on a tray—thin, sharp-tipped lengths of metal, a pair of bent scissors and something that looked like a shallow spoon.

“You can get up on the table now,” the woman said.

Mary did as she was told. She was shaking convulsively.

“It will go easier for you if you calm down,” the woman said, not unkindly. “Now, I need you to slide down to the edge.” Once Mary did this, the woman took her legs and put one, then the other, on the top rung of each chair.

“There will be some pain,” the doctor said. “But that whiskey will help.” He picked up one of the instruments from the tray. “At least it will help you forget,” he said.

“What if I don’t want to forget,” she said.

“This isn’t something you want to remember.”

•   •   •

A
s she walked toward the car, she had no sense of her body. Something had happened to her in the middle of her screaming, and the doctor’s confusion, and then the woman’s anger as she told Mary to quiet down if she didn’t want to get them all arrested. Something had happened when she pushed away the doctor’s hand, upsetting his instrument tray so that it crashed to the floor. She reminded herself to move slowly so as not to arouse Charlie’s suspicion. She made a few noises of discomfort when she sat down in the passenger seat. It was not hard to pretend; she could still feel the man’s cold, pink fingers on her skin. She imagined Charlie had heard her cries, but he must have assumed things were going as planned.

“So, you’re all right, then?” he said awkwardly as he drove back through the lemon trees.

“You got your money’s worth,” she said.

“Oh, Mary,” he said.

She saw that something had changed in him, that he was deflated, as if in the administration of some kind of obligation to his stature he had discovered he was a fraud. Well, they both were now.

“Just take me back to my children,” she said.

Once again, they passed through town, where people gathered by the open doors of a church. It struck her as an amazing fact of human nature that even while people lost jobs and money, they still clung to their habits, their Sunday strolls, their belief in a terrible God. This was endurance, she supposed, this stubborn repetition in the face of the world making no sense. As they passed Charlie’s home once again, she imagined a child growing up there. If it was a boy, he would be taught to uphold some unexplained code of family honor, to ride through the groves in his truck as if on the back of a fine stallion. He would learn how to level a glare that would keep workers from taking too much water, and he would turn into a man who had no idea who he was, just like Charlie had no idea what kind of man he was. If it was a girl, well, she would be like that Naomi, ignorant of the lies that underpinned her life.

Before they came within sight of the camp, Charlie pulled the DeSoto to the side of the road.

“You can make it back okay,” he said.

“Are you asking or telling?”

“I’ll be leaving soon. We have another farm. My father needs me there.”

“If you’re running away from me, I’m not going to say anything to anyone.”

“I’m not running away.”

She opened the car door and stepped out onto the road. “Well, good-bye then, mister.”