Sound Of Gravel, The (11 page)

The house had a tan exterior and dark brown trim. In the center of the front yard was a gigantic oak tree, much taller than the house itself, with thick roots that extended across the entire lawn, making it look lumpy and brown. It was more like a tree with a house than a house with a tree. The shade of the branches helped cool our kitchen and living room all summer long.

The cement porch was the red of the fancy ladies’ toenails I had seen on the TV in my grandpa’s living room. The front door was dark brown with thick, glossy paint that reminded me of chocolate, and it even sounded sticky when we opened it. Inside, we discovered a spacious living room and kitchen surrounded by three bedrooms, and one bathroom—but not a stick of furniture. I thought houses came with that sort of thing. What did come with this house was a musty smell of wet wood. Our empty home looked huge, large enough to hold two families, at least by LeBaron’s standards.

Mom looked happy with her choice, in part because it gave her a reason to spend each Friday evening of the summer, pen in hand, scanning the local
Gazette
for garage sales where she might find furniture, electronics, and small appliances for our new house. One of her first bargains was a secondhand TV, which she plopped down on the carpet in the living room against a bare white wall. It was the first time we ever had our own television set. From that day forward, we spent hours and hours in front of it. Mom told us we were only allowed to watch cartoons, but often she’d sit with us in the evenings and we’d all watch family sitcoms together. She’d sit with Meri resting over her shoulder, laughing at Mr. Drummond, Arnold, and Willis on
Diff’rent Strokes
and Mrs. Garrett on
The Facts of Life
. We could tell that Mom loved watching TV almost as much as we did, but she’d get angry whenever we tried to watch something violent or grown-up shows she called “inappropriate.”

Not only was life different in Strathmore because of the TV, but in California we didn’t have to go to church anymore. There wasn’t a church close by that taught the same things we believed. Mom said she missed going to church, but I didn’t. I was having too much fun.

Mom didn’t have a lot of rules, and the few rules she did have, she didn’t always have the time or energy to enforce. The house could get loud and chaotic. The days of grinding our own wheat, making bread and cheese, and milking cows seemed far behind us. Mom loved chocolate ice cream with nuts in it as much as we did, so there was always plenty of that in the house, along with all sorts of other junk food she’d buy at the grocery store just down the street. We only occasionally had beans and rice and never had to eat mush for breakfast anymore. On Saturday mornings, we’d sit in the living room in front of the TV eating bowl after bowl of cereal that Mom bought in large, clear-plastic bags. So compelling was the Saturday-morning cartoon lineup that none of us even noticed when Mom slipped out to go to her garage sales. Mom would leave seven-month-old Meri with us, and she’d sit on the carpet for hours and stare up at the ceiling while we watched TV.

Mom worried about Meri. She thought she should be crawling or at least rolling over. Meri couldn’t even hold her head up. Around the time we moved into our new house, Mom’s Medicaid application came through, so we spent a lot of that summer taking Meri to doctors to try to find out what was wrong with her. But it seemed that no one ever had any answers to Mom’s questions.

One bright Saturday morning in the middle of July, Mom opened the door of my white, bare-walled bedroom and startled me. “Do you want to go yard selling with me, Ruthie?” she asked in a whisper.

Still half-asleep, I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to miss watching cartoons. The sky outside my window was still pitch-black, and I was warm and comfortable in my very own twin bed. Finally Audrey and I were sleeping in separate beds, and I woke up dry every morning.

“I’ll give you a dollar to spend,” Mom said, sensing my hesitation. As I came to, I began to get excited about going shopping all morning alone with Mom. She never asked Audrey or the boys to come with her, and she hardly ever gave us our own spending money. I rose quietly and tiptoed out the door, wincing as I passed Audrey’s bed and caught a whiff of her urine. Mom smiled apologetically. Whatever influence she’d once had on Audrey had been lost and Mom knew it. Audrey now refused to use the toilet and wore diapers day and night.

Mom drove us to the bigger neighboring towns of Lindsay and Porterville, where the streets were wider and the homes larger. The garages were so big it seemed as if we were shopping at huge department stores.

“The real yard sales have nice stuff,” Mom told me as we drove down one quiet, tree-lined street. “But in some of them, people are just reselling what they bought at other yard sales, trying to get a higher price.” Mom prided herself on being able to detect garage-sale wheat from chaff even from a distance. She’d slow the car as we approached every sale, but often we would speed away without even stopping, Mom having already seen that it was mostly overpriced junk. That was my signal to put an
X
through the corresponding ad in the newspaper while she unfolded and refolded an area map and found her way to the next stop.

Absent the usual distracting noise from the television, enjoying a quiet moment as Mom drove from house to house, I was reminded of the mean girl at my old school who’d talked about all the “retarded” people in my family. I started thinking about Audrey and her diapers, the way Luke wouldn’t pronounce words the right way, and how Meri still couldn’t roll over. I had wanted to ask Mom about the girl on the playground for a long time, but I needed a private moment to do it—and private moments in my family were rare.

“What does
retarded
mean?” I asked after a deep breath.

Mom seemed irritated by the question—she cocked her head back and looked at me with an exaggerated wince. “Where’d ya hear
that
word?” Her nose scrunched up beneath the bridge of her glasses.

“A girl on the playground in Mexico told me we had lots of retarded people in our family. She said her mom knew you and that you have lots of retarded babies.”

“Who was it?” Mom demanded, turning into a new neighborhood so fast I had to hold on to the door handle.

“I don’t know. She asked me if I was retarded too.”

“What did she look like?” Mom was almost yelling now. She pulled over to a curb while I stumbled through a description of the girl.

“I don’t know who that is.” Mom realized we were lost and angrily unfolded the map. “Did she say who her mom was?”

“No.”

Mom switched off the van’s engine, took a deep breath, and sat back in the seat with her hands folded over her lap, exhaling slowly through her mouth. “Ruthie, your teacher says that you’re real smart. She sees lots of kids, so she knows. That little girl was just bein’ mean. If somebody asks you a question like that again, you don’t pay any attention to them. You tell them it’s none of their business and turn around and walk away.” Mom looked up at me from the map with red, wet eyes. The anger had been washed away from them, and I felt emboldened.

“Why is Meri going to so many doctors?”

Mom tossed the map into the backseat, started the van, and pulled away from the curb before answering. “Meri is sick. The doctors think she was born with a birth defect, but they don’t know what it’s called. It’s kind of like what Luke has, and they don’t have a name for his either.” Mom made a U-turn in the middle of the street while she fished a tissue out of her purse to blow her nose. “They have to do lots more testing on Meri to find out what’s wrong and how they can help her.”

“Is she gonna be sick for a long time?”

“I really don’t know, Sis. I
hope
she’s gonna be just fine.” We drove a bit before she said, “All families have problems.” She stared intently at something just over the horizon. “We just have to have faith that everything’s gonna work out and be okay.” She looked at me, shrugged her shoulders, and smiled. “Don’t ya think so, Ruthie?”

“Yeah,” I replied, not convinced.

The next yard sale was a good one, with many newer items and almost nothing broken or falling apart, although everything cost more than a dollar, so I kept mine in my pocket. Mom bought an entire box with
BOYS CLOTHES
written on its open flaps. She also lingered for a long time in the book section with her head bent over a box filled with beat-up, old volumes going for five cents apiece. She gathered up an entire stack of coloring books, stood up, and flipped through each to find the ones with the fewest already-colored pages. She settled on a tattered pile of treasures.

“I’ll give ya a dime for all these,” she said to the proprietor. They settled on a quarter, and when we were safely out of earshot, Mom confided that she had gotten a good deal. She was even happier about all the little-boy pants she’d found without holes in the knees. These were rare finds, she said, because boys played rough and usually wore out their clothes before they could be sold.

Thanks to a string of Saturdays with good sales, Mom had the entire house fully furnished before school started again. Thanks to welfare and SSI checks from the government—compensation for Audrey’s and Luke’s disabilities—we had a ready supply of food too, and American breakfasts soon led to American lunches and dinners. By fall, meals of beans and rice were a thing of the past. Now our favorite foods were macaroni and cheese, peanut butter and jelly, hamburgers, and french fries. I sometimes missed a few things about LeBaron—mainly Brenda and Natalia—but I loved strawberry milk shakes and having my own bed.

When first grade began again in August, I found myself in an unexpected situation: I was the tallest girl in my class. Sometimes I played with my former classmates at recess or lunch, bragging about the fun I was having in my second year of first grade and making them wish they’d been held back too. Because we were no longer living across the street, my brothers and I began taking the bus to and from school, which I thought was an adventure. I was glad to be back at Strathmore Elementary, and even gladder to be out of the house, where Audrey was acting scarier than ever.

Now twelve, her attacks came more and more frequently. Her patterns shifted constantly, so we could never know when an attack was coming or how to stop it. Mom began to suspect that what was troubling Meri was the result of an injury Audrey had caused, that maybe Audrey had picked Meri up and thrown her to the ground when no one was looking. Audrey was more than a decade older than Meri, yet Mom was changing Audrey’s adult-size diapers more often than Meri’s.

I looked for every reason in the world to avoid the little home Mom had made for us, and when my number one excuse, school, failed me, I took refuge at my grandparents’ house. Throughout that fall and winter, I went there every day after school. I was always welcomed by Grandma’s homemade corn bread, fresh out of the oven.

One afternoon in late fall, I stopped by their house on my way home from school, and Grandma was just taking a cake pan of corn bread out of the oven. I sat down with Grandpa at the kitchen table, and Grandma served us both a square piece on white saucers with tall glasses of milk on the side. She had already smeared honey and butter in the middle of mine, but Grandpa liked his plain. He crumbled his piece up into his glass of milk and started eating it with a teaspoon. Grandma stood at the kitchen sink in her light blue housecoat washing dishes.

“How come you guys didn’t come to visit us when we lived in Mexico?” I asked. I loved being with my grandparents, and they seemed to love being with us, so I couldn’t figure out how come they had never come to visit when we lived in LeBaron. Did they only love us if we lived in California?

Grandma stopped scrubbing the cake pan and glanced over her shoulder at me as if she wasn’t sure how to respond. Grandpa set his spoon onto his saucer. “Well, it’s kind of a hard place to get to from here, Sis,” he said with a serious but caring tone.

“But didn’t you guys used to live there too? When my dad was alive?”

Grandma dried her hands on a yellow hand towel, served herself a piece of corn bread with sliced raw onions on the side. Grandma liked raw onions with everything. She pulled a chair out from under the table and sat next to Grandpa, across from me. “Living in Mexico has been hard on your mama,” she said with a hint of disappointment. “It’s hard to make a livin’ for a big family like yours. When we used to visit, your mama already had three little kids and was pregnant with you. She lived in a tiny, little one-bedroom trailer with no electricity. Had nothin’ to eat but beans out of a big, dusty gunnysack. She never had any money and had to ask for eggs from her sister wives, or anything else she needed for that matter.” My grandmother had always been open about her disapproval of Mom’s way of life, but I had never heard her describe it with such sadness. “Ruthie, it broke our hearts to see your mom livin’ like that.”

“When your dad was alive,” Grandpa added, “all of our daughters lived in Mexico. Three of them were married to polygamists.”

“Your aunt Kim almost married one of your uncles who had a bunch of other wives too, but luckily she decided not to.” Grandma shook her head and bit into her onion slices. The whole kitchen smelled like sharp, tangy onion and sweet corn bread. Kim was Mom’s youngest sister; she left Dad’s church when she was only eighteen.

“Your mama and her sisters were all livin’ in tiny trailers or adobe homes, and their husbands were hardly ever home. Your mama was alone most of the time. So young and on her own with all you kids.” Grandpa looked down at his glass of corn bread and milk, and the look on his face made it obvious that the memory made him sad.

“Your daddy had too many wives, and he kept marrying more, women even younger than your mama, and she was just a teenager.” Grandma shook her head and a hint of bitterness slipped out of her mouth with her words. “We just couldn’t believe it. There was no way he could take care of all those wives and all their little kids. And his American wives were collecting welfare in the States. It just wasn’t right.”