Shoes on the Wire Read online

  I wished for the view that I had at the lake, looking over the treetops, fish jumping at bugs as the sun went down. Hidden amongst the trees, no one could see me but I could see everyone. People walking up from the dock, boats on the water, my father.

  Blackberry bushes were on my right hand. On my left, the path sloped gradually from the lookout. I jumped up, walking to the blackberry bushes. I shot my hand into the middle of the bush, and pulled a few berries. I ate the berries, which were almost ripe, switching back and forth between that and sucking on the small bloody cuts the stickers had caused on my arm. A little noise from the Project behind. A lot of noise from the planes in front of me, I took my handful of blackberries to the large rock, and read my book.

  On my way back to our duplex, two Project boys stood near the street, kicking at dirt. They had dirty shoes. One of the Project kids asked if I had anything to eat. Tell your mother if you’re hungry, I said. The youngest looked down at the ground, the other one looked at me blankly, and then the blankness turned slowly to a sneer. I thought about the blackberry bushes, loaded with fruit, two blocks away. I might need the berries someday. I kept walking, not saying a word.

  When I got back to our courtyard, people came out of Dorothy’s duplex. They wore flowery dresses and hats and had purses. Their eyes shifted back and forth. I wanted to tell them that I am like them, not a Project girl like the ones who surrounded me the first time I came to the Project, and that I’m waiting for my father to come and get us so that I can go home and live in a house like theirs.

  My chest felt heavy and like I would cry.

  One of the little kids on the monkey bars yelled at me to come -- he even yelled my name -- and give him a boost. But I didn’t help him. I pretended I was someone else, not the girl whose name he called.

  I went down to the little grocery store to get some candy. The owner said I didn’t have to wait outside the door for him to come and get me before I walked in like the Project kids. He said I didn’t look like I would steal anything. He said I looked so wholesome that I had special dispensation from him.

  But Susan, the teenager across the courtyard who has a persecutionist mother, says I look plenty dangerous even though I have poodle hair. She taught me how to smoke a cigarette, complete with blowing a smoke ring. She says that music is the recess of life. She told me about her life. She was supposed to have a baby so she got married and then the baby died before it was born and now Mike says her cooking stinks so he goes home to his parent’s house three times a week. He still loves her, though. I had never heard of anything like that before. I didn’t know what to say so we read magazines.

  My mother has a great time living in the Project. She gets a kick out of the whole thing, she says. That’s what landed us in trouble with The Office, the kind you get kicked out for.

  Chapter VI: Rats

  My mother says every morning that there’s not a thing she won’t say to anyone, not a thing she won’t do, which is the opposite of me. She says how I had a Project fear three months ago and couldn’t leave the porch. She looks at me like I’m inferior. I am trying to be someone who my mother admired, like Joan of Arc. If you ever read a book, you know that heroes get people out of bad scrapes. They stand up for themselves and everyone around them and I don’t. My biggest problem was that I never know what to say.

  My mother has a new job where she has moxie. She says moxie is getting out of bed early, getting there on time, and giving them plenty of lip while you’re at it.

  She gave me an example of moxie. On her way across the courtyard to her new job last week, she walked out our duplex door, and looking to the left, she spied two boxes of De-Con. The boxes were standing up between our duplex and the empty duplex to the other side of ours. The De-Con boxes looked like calico kittens. She reached down and picked up the rat poison boxes, blowing off dirt, shaking the little hand sized orange boxes so that glass pop bottle shards fell back on the ground. She toed dirt over the glass and poison, then used her heel to smash the little pile. She stuffed the De-Con in her purse because then she could prove it to The Office in case she had a Doubting Thomas on her hands.

  She placed one bright orange box on the counter at The Office.

  The Office says they are getting rid of the rats by putting De-Con around the whole courtyard. A child can get into this, she said, but The Office said that’s the only solution they had and that maybe the Project people should stop throwing garbage around outside and then the rats would not set up camp. She told them that if they didn’t pick up the rat poison and get rid of it, she would. They said that they would prosecute her for stealing Office property. She said that the newspapers would like to hear about that.

  The Office said, “Suit yourself.”

  She said, “Of that you can be sure.”

  She beat them to the punch. She called the newspaper. The newspaper called The Office. The Office showed up at our unit with a clipboard. “Gestapo tactics from you people, but that has never scared me,” my mother said. She said she roped and tied them.

  I wish I could be more like her - courageous, having moxie, saying anything to anyone. My mother said, “People never know what I’m going to say next.” She says I could take a lesson from that.

  She even stood up to my aunt who came over to tell my mother to stop calling The Office. “Linda,” my mother said, “I’m not becoming afraid of this place because that’s what they want. Remember, our plan is that I will stay here, not go back to Ambrose. I can’t go back to that. Back to waiting for my husband to come home. He left me. Nobody talks about that. I did what our father would do. I stood on my principles. My husband wouldn’t come home so I did what any sane woman should do. I left him. Remember last summer how I would call you…?”

  My aunt turned fast toward my mother. Her voice was even madder than her face said she was. She turned patent leather red. “Do I remember last summer? We had just moved into that beautiful house. The furniture was hardly delivered and you called every night. You kept calling and calling, interrupting dinner, calling during TV, calling at midnight. This is supposed to be the best time of my life. Finally, the house of my dreams. We planned and planned this house. We still had the blueprints spread out on the counter and you were calling and calling, ‘Help me, help me!’ I’m finally living in that beautiful house and I have to drive to this hole to help you. I should be lying by the pool. I should be entertaining, having money over. And instead I’m driving to a housing project and parking alongside a car that’s driven by rats the size of dachshunds. I’ve got that big house with that damn pool, complicated landscaping, and children and a husband to cook for. I don’t need my sister ringing the servant’s bell every five minutes.”

  My aunt said we had to go back to Ambrose because my father wasn’t coming to get us. Then she left.

  I get scared about this secret war that my mother and my aunt have. No matter what happened, there was always the opportunity of living in my aunt’s house. Now that she was mad at my mother, we couldn’t move there.

  “I suppose you’re on your aunt’s side,” my mother said in this mad voice. “I can never count on you to stand up for me.”

  People always know what I’m going to say next. I am a quiet, worried person. I secretly worried about Cookie, who hardly ever went to school anymore and she didn’t answer their unit door that much. Who made her stay inside?

  Chapter VII: The Mean Boy

  What can I do to help Cookie? Her clothes look like they’re hanging off a skeleton. She is way too skinny. Her mother is always at work and then Sarah Coventry parties at night. She does not answer their door. I listen carefully but there is no sound from their unit. No TV, no Cookie or Georgie talking. I knock especially loud in case they are upstairs. I knock and then I wait. Cookie and Georgie are inside but not answering their door. Something is wrong. I must have made her mad.

  My feelings are hurt that she hid out from me. Whenever that happens, I go to the lookout a
nd think about it.

  One time she answered their door and was wearing her ruby necklace which she was only supposed to wear for special occasion. She was crying. Her hair was flat on one side, like her head had been pressed into something. Her face was red on the other side. She couldn’t concentrate on what I had said about school although she had the best concentration of anyone I had ever known. She was so skinny that a knife could pass through her.

  I told her not to give all of her dinner to Georgie. She walked away but I followed her. I am waiting for something to happen but I don’t know what it is.

  At the top of the monkey bars, I watch their unit, which is buttoned up. A minute into watching, I saw that the door to Cookie’s unit was open just a little. Just a crack of darkness that I figured was the doorframe. The door was open. I ran across the street to see if she wanted to come over.

  The unit is dark but then I see a magazine on the floor, an empty can next to it. I see Cookie’s face first, her eyes big and she’s crying. A boy is holding her down on their couch. He has one hand over her mouth, and with the other is pulling his pants down on one side, his legs holding her down. I say, “Cookie, are…”

  The boy jumps and runs to the door, pushing me back. Cookie jumps up. The boy is furious. He points his finger at Cookie and yells in a voice that my mother called sulky, “Next time I’m going to get you. I’ll be back. You know I will. I’m going to get you one of these days, Cookie; I’m going to get you. I’ll come back here and I’ll get you.” His voice is loud and he sounds like he’s going to cry.

  “I know it, I know it,” Cookie says, kind of yelling and crying at the same time. The boy kicks something off the porch and runs down the steps.

  Everything happened so fast with no time in between things happening. Then I asked her, “What was he doing?” Cookie cried, hiccupping. That mean boy. He tried to get in whenever she was opening the door. She had put the necklace on, tucked it under her clothes, and gone to the store. When she unlocked the door to get back in, she turned around to say something to Georgie and there that boy was, standing on their porch, shoving her. He ran in like he had been waiting in one of the cars parked across the street.

  Where’s Georgie? The boy told him to go upstairs and wait. He’s upstairs. Then Cookie brought her hand to her neck and said over and over that her necklace was gone. My ruby necklace. Where is it? He had ripped the necklace off of her. She began a scared search on her hands and knees, and I sat down on the floor. Where is it? Where is it? Is it there? We found the pieces of her necklace by a chair.

  The ruby had one bad mark. We sat on the floor, handing it back and forth to each other, turning it over and over. Hurt, but not the worst. “My lucky charm,” she called her necklace.

  “Don’t tell or I’ll get in trouble. The Office will kick us out.”

  We could get some help if we told. She said, “No, I’ll get us in more trouble.” I promised her I wouldn’t tell anyone. Everything will get back to normal. “I’ll get your necklace fixed. I know how to take things to the repair shop and get the receipt.”

  Then Georgie walked in like he always does and Cookie acted like everything was fine. She made him dinner out of a can. We watched Georgie eat.

  It was time for me to go back to our unit, and as I crossed the street I knew I had turned brave. Brave is something you do for someone else. The secret made me the most brave I ever felt. I am her best friend. I will never tell anyone.

  But it boiled up inside of me. I couldn’t stop thinking about Cookie saying she knew he would come back. How he said he would come back. How mad he was that I walked in. Why was he almost crying when he swore at me? How he kicked something off the porch when he ran down the steps.

  At school the next day when the girls were making fun of Cookie because she wasn’t there that day, I said, “You wouldn’t be here either if you almost got raped.” Everybody shut up. But I had told the secret, just like I promised I wouldn’t. I tried to make up for my big mouth by watching Cookie’s door every day after school.

  I planned to get her necklace fixed on Saturday. I would take it down the winding street for blocks and blocks. Just thinking of that made my heard pound. I was afraid of the Project places where I had not been. But I could do it.

  But I didn’t because my mother got sick and we didn’t live at the Project for awhile.

  Chapter VIII: My Mother Becomes Ill

  My mother starting saying that I was the enemy and here are all of the reasons why. I told her that I wasn’t. She would point her finger at me anyway and say, “You,” like I was the worst. She walked around the unit saying, “People will stab you in the back. They will let the air out of your tires. They will leave you bleeding on the floor. Like your father did, and you’re so much like him.”

  I feel like I’m in a different world, different than when we lived in Ambrose. Why would she say that about me? I wasn’t the enemy. She says that I’m just one more person who is out to get her. “I suppose you want to run to your father,” she said. Deep inside, I want to call him on the phone. But he seems like a person from a long time ago and like he wouldn’t know about this, so I don’t call him.

  My mother says, “Leaving me alone to contend with all of these complications, the both of you. Some daughter you turned out to be.” It kills me that she sees me that way. She doesn’t see me as me anymore.

  That’s when I decided to do everything she says so she doesn’t see me as against her. So I tried that by cleaning our unit and agreeing with everything she said, but she still pointed her finger at me and said, “You.”

  What would I do without her, she says, and I don’t know. That’s a real possibility, she says, and I can’t think of anything to say. She’s different than she used to be.

  I told her that I am sorry for everything. Sorry for giving her lip and acting up and not being behind her on everything.

  She just walks away from me and gets out her typewriter and tells me to leave her alone for once.

  I figure eventually I will turn into a better person and my mother won’t hate me. There will be a chance to be better, to help; I will figure out how to say the right thing. I do my best to say something nice to her or pick up after myself or vacuum extra. But my mother doesn’t see what I’m doing as special. She says, “It’s about damn time.” But I keep trying.

  I saw my mother fall in the courtyard. It wasn’t a fall caused by tripping or stubbing her toe. She fell onto the ground, like everything gave out in her. Her face was against the cement. I helped her off the cement then our neighbor Dorothy got to us. Dorothy, who walks bent sidewise, said she wasn’t strong herself so my mother leaned on me.

  When we got my mother into our unit, she fell to the floor like a big collapse. She started shaking and she nearly pulled the coffee table on top of herself. Dorothy put a spoon in my mother’s mouth and told me to push the coffee table out of the way. I tried to remember prayers I’d learned in church but they weren’t on the tip of my tongue. I couldn’t think of any way to help. Dorothy called an ambulance and said, “grand mal seizure” over the phone. A minute later, she said, “Your mother has passed out.” The ambulance had a siren on and the ambulance guys got my mother onto a stretcher, lifted her into the back, turned on the siren, and she was gone.

  I was afraid. I wanted to tell her that she had to come back, that I would be good from now on. I kept looking at our front door. Davey had come in and stood looking at the place on the floor where my mother had been. “I don’t know,” I said.

  My uncle picked up Davey and me an hour later. When we got to Grace Point, we took off our shoes and stood in the doorway. Davey looked at me like I would know what to do next. My aunt was at the hospital where my mother was.

  I still couldn’t think of anything to say. I didn’t know if our mother was dead. So I said to him, “Follow me.”

  We watched TV for a little while then got ready for bed. I’m supposed to sleep in the room where my m
other and I slept when we first got here. I tried to have funny ideas that I would tell her about later, but then I cried instead of coming up with anything. I was worried about my mother who was at the hospital. I was worried about Davey because he was upstairs but I didn’t know where. My father was far away, too. I couldn’t fall asleep.

  My aunt said the next morning that my mother was sick and she was having tests to find out what was wrong. “Why didn’t you tell me about her foot jiggling?”

  My mother has been diagnosed with a brain tumor the size of a small grapefruit. I have never heard of brain tumors before and I don’t know if having one the size of a grapefruit is good or bad. My mother will stay in the hospital and have brain tumor surgery tomorrow. We will stay with our aunt and uncle on Grace Point for the whole two weeks that my mother will be in the hospital after she has brain tumor surgery. My aunt will drive us to school each day even though she is so busy she doesn’t know how she will have the time.

  Davey and I are careful not to touch anything at our aunt’s house and we are even more careful not to talk about our mother’s brain tumor because at first when we tried, my aunt wouldn’t say anything. Davey and I watched TV together after dinner, and I told Davey that everything was all right. Finally Davey asked, “She isn’t crazy though, right?” Then my aunt laughed and said it was touch and go but that she wasn’t crazy. She said, “She is the least crazy person to ever walk the earth.”

  Seeing my aunt laugh makes me feel like everything is going to be okay. That’s when it got to be fun on Grace Point because nobody knows about the Project but us.