Читать книгу The Last Time I Was Me - Cathy Lamb - Страница 10

Several days later, on my daily multihour crying/drinking walk, I decided to go to see what Rosvita kept referring to at our knitting sessions as the Hell of All Germs of Hell. In other words, the migrant camp. I crossed back toward town, then took a gravel road, which gave way to a dirt road, planted fields.

Miles and miles of planted fields.

My eyes were caught by a row of sheds starting at about ten feet from the road. They looked like they were slouching. I mean it. They were slouching sheds. Each building sagged like it couldn’t possibly stand up straight. The roofs were made of metal. There were two windows in the front of each shed, but they were lopsided, one or two were broken. The doors barely hung on a hinge.

I stared at those doors, all hanging on one hinge. They were like my mind, I thought, my mind was currently unhinged. Still there, still clinging, but with a big gust of wind…well, whoosh, anything could happen.

As I got closer the smell of raw sewage settled over me like a giant rotting toilet. I yanked my t-shirt up over my mouth and nose. Yuck. I assumed that the farmer had used an extrapotent fertilizer on his property.

That’s when I saw the dot.

A tiny little jumping dot. The dot was red.

As I got closer and closer to the red dot, a blue dot with black hair joined it. They ran about in circles, tackling each other.

Children.

In front of the slouching sheds with the tin roofs, almost unhinged doors, and broken windows.

I strode closer to the children so I could tell them not to go into the sheds because they didn’t look safe. I also wanted to inquire where their parents were. This was a huge field; it didn’t seem right that children this young should be out and about by themselves.

When I was twenty yards away, a woman appeared at the door of one of the sheds. She wore a blue shirt and jeans. I blinked. She spoke to the children and the children ran to her and grabbed something out of her hand.

She saw me and froze. I froze.

The truth hit me, ugly and rotten and suffocating.

People lived in those sheds.

This was the situation that enraged Rosvita.

People lived in those sheds.

The only person who should live there is Slick Dick. I felt a wave of bitterness rain down on me like a human-size tsunami.

The woman stood staring at me. I pitied her-who wouldn’t?-but I smashed that smack down. She would not appreciate having to deal with my white-woman pity. I waved my hand.

Reluctantly, it seemed, as if an invisible string were yanking her hand up, she waved back.

I glanced at the fields again, the dilapidated sheds, the huge white house about a half mile away, up on a little hill.

Appalling.

Sickening.

People lived in those sheds.

I jogged past the sheds, past the debris on the ground, past the smell that wrapped itself around me like a viper choking on bile. I jogged back through the fields to the path. I found the river again and continued jogging, the water rustling and bubbling and gurgling, the trees overhead swaying and blowing.

The river offered me no peace the rest of that day.

None.

With every step I took away from the Hell of All Germs of Hell I became more angry. Soon I was livid and knew I would not be surprised if my head blew off with flames of fire.

You see, though I am currently demented and stumbling through life in a wretched manner, I know something valuable: The reason I am in the position I am is because of luck, pure and simple.

People get so snotty about their stations in life, the money they have, the homes, the toys, but what it mostly boils down to is luck. I was lucky to be born in America and not in a war zone in Somalia or Afghanistan. I was lucky to have loving parents not strung out on drugs. I was lucky to have a father who worked hard and provided for his family even after he died. I was lucky to have a mother who insisted I drag my rear through college. I might also mention that I have had plenty of food, water, electricity, and plumbing in my life.

I was not lucky in other parts of my life, but the ability to make a living, to make money, and to have opportunities was all luck.

And this situation was an example of zero luck.

I was furious because the whole situation was personal.

Way too personal. I couldn’t even go there yet. Couldn’t even begin to think of her there. Couldn’t think of the abject deprivation she suffered.

People lived in those sheds.

I stopped by the liquor store and bought the highest quality scotch they had. Yummy.

I took it down to the river with me that night and drank myself into oblivion. I awoke to Rosvita prodding me awake. At first I thought she was a mini-robot using a power drill against my forehead to smash a thousand aching brain cells to smithereens.

“Get up, honey,” Rosvita said. She wore a lacy, green silk robe that billowed behind her and her white gloves. “Your body is awash with alcoholic poisons, your liver struggling, your kidneys squeezing, your blood drenched with drunkenness. You, my dear, are a skinny alcoholic germ and you must come inside this instant.”

I nodded, closed my eyes, fell back against the wet grass.

She prodded again.

“Go away, Rosvita. I’m going to sleep here tonight. I’ll still pay you, of course.”

“I will not allow you to soak up even earth’s natural germs here on this grass. Come now, dear.”

“Nope.”

“Yes, dear.” I felt that power drill against my forehead.

“Nope, nope.”

“Please. Jeanne. I care.”

It was those two words that did it: “I care.”

Sheesh. These country people and their caring would be the death of me.

I hauled myself up, leaned against Rosvita and wobbled into my blue heaven of a bed.

Two hours later I spent six hours leaning against the white porcelain throne. I threw up, I am sure, my struggling liver, my squeezing kidneys, and my blood awash with alcohol.

I felt like human vomit.

Why must I be such a drunk?

I slept my drunkenness off for most of the next day and when I awoke, Rosvita made me breakfast. Breakfast at 4:00 in the afternoon can be particularly tasty. I also downed about a keg of coffee, then went to town to buy a gift for Rosvita.

Knowing what her taste in art was like, I stopped by three galleries. Each of the shop owners looked so hopeful, I bought three different paintings-one from each. I brought one downstairs to Rosvita that evening. It was a painting of a pristinely clean country kitchen, a gust of wind blowing the red-checked curtains, a little girl eating a chocolate ice cream cone on a stool, the floor gleaming, the counters cleared.

She loved it so much she danced around the room with it, declaring that the artist clearly knew the importance of a clean and sterile kitchen. She hugged me. Danced again with a wriggle and a wiggle.

I went up to my room and out to my deck to examine the stars.

A dull ache still filled my head and I felt like congealed oatmeal, but I was still breathing, at least.

I knew I had to get a hold of my drinking, before it killed me.

Dying still held vast appeal for me, but last night was not good, not good at all. One should not hug toilets for long periods.

I thought of the trigger to my drinking binge: That putrid migrant camp.

When the woman at the shed raised her hand to wave at me, I saw my late grandma in the doorway. My funny, laughing, loving grandma.

Rosa Sanchez had been born in Mexico. She and her parents lived and worked as migrant workers on various farms in the United States. They stayed for the growing season, then moved on. She had told me about working ten hours a day in a field as a young child, her head getting so hot she thought her hair would burn off. She told me about staying in barns and sleeping next to farm animals on some rich landowner’s property. She told me about being cold and hungry and scared and tired. She told me about the white farmer who attacked her mother. When her father fought back in her defense, he lost the job. They almost starved that summer. She told me about never learning to read or write until she married my grandpa and he taught her.

It was a hideous way to live.

And there she was, in my mind’s eye, in the doorway of that pathetic shed.

My grandpa, a white American, with pure Norwegian roots, met my grandmother when her family worked on his family’s farm.

“She was my soul mate, Jeanne,” Grandpa told me. “I knew it when I saw her because my heart damn near jumped out of my chest. I told her she almost killed me that day.”

My grandpa was nineteen when they met. She was eighteen. They married two years later.

He shook his big head, his white hair cropped close to his head. “The only way I could get her to stop talking some days was to kiss that woman. We always ended up in bed after that. Couldn’t help ourselves. Passion and love crosses cultures and language barriers, dear girl, don’t forget that, and your grandma and me were soul mates whose souls talked to each other even though our languages didn’t. But, dear God, she was a talker. Constantly talking, talking, talking.”

My grandparents’ black-haired daughter, my mother, married my father, a white American with British roots and blond hair. I grew up speaking Spanish to my grandma and to my mother, although my grandma spoke English, too. She said she loved this country, she was an American woman now, and she wanted to be able to talk to her neighbors, but she talked Spanish to me so I would never forget where my family was from, what they came from.

And even though my grandpa said Grandma talked all the time, my grandpa decided he couldn’t live without all that talk. One week after my grandma died, after he’d given her a beautiful funeral, he laid down under the giant cherry tree on their land, right where he said they’d made every one of their four children, closed his eyes and died.

After sixty years of marriage, he was done without his wife. He had been in perfect health until that point, too. The doctors said he’d had a heart attack.

How silly. He died of a broken and lonely heart and he willed it upon himself.

As I thought of my grandpa’s love of my grandma and I thought of my grandma bent over double picking strawberries for hours on end as a child and of her poor mother being attacked by some sick landowner who thought her mother was his property, I made a vow to myself: I would get those people out of those sheds.

I swore it.