This Old Man Page 10

  Still, I felt better on the cable car, where I belonged. Wing got on at his usual stop, but without the basket. I felt this grip of terror: no basket, Old Man was dead. “Where’s his dinner?” I asked, holding my breath for the answer.

  “Chen. He’s bringing Old Man’s dinner to him,” Wing replied.

  I felt the fury from that street scene rising again. “Where does that jerk get off taking Old Man’s dinner? That’s your privilege, isn’t it, as the first born of the, first born, et cetera?”

  “Now you’re an expert on Chinese culture?” Wing said, with unbecoming sarcasm.

  “Well, I must be some kind of an expert. Look at this.” I thrust the poem under his nose. In my impetuousness, I almost let the paper blow off the cable car, into the San Francisco dampness.

  Wing took the folder inside the cabin, away from the wind. I followed anxiously. “It’s very beautifully done,” he said. “Old Man will like it.”

  “Let’s take it to him now!”

  “Not until Chen has left him,” Wing said bitterly.

  We got off the cable car at the Jackson Street stop and hid out in the lobby of an apartment building across the street from the hospital. The little girls I’d seen there before were playing jacks on the marble stoop, with giggles that sounded like teacups rattling. We waited forever. The girls gave up jacks and began singing that song I’d heard them do before, with the hand signs.

  “What are they singing?” I asked Wing, who was watching the hospital entrance so intently that he only shrugged.

  The Chinese words made no sense, but the repetitive tune and the signs were so familiar. I used to sing it, but what was that song? Then I caught the words the girls couldn’t possibly have rendered into Chinese. “Knick-knack, paddy-wack.” Of course! Knick-knack, paddy-wack, give your dog a bone …

  “There, he just came out,” Wing said. We watched Chen swing Old Man’s basket around in a circle. Even across the street we could hear the plates and spoons clattering inside the basket.

  “Everything will be broken before he gets the damn basket home,” Wing muttered.

  “He’s all but jumped up and down on it. Do you think he enjoys his visits with Old Man?”

  “Not that barbarian. He goes only because my father threatens him. He will put Chen on a boat to Hong Kong if he isn’t good to Old Man.”

  I thought of the coarse, loud voices I’d heard the last time I was outside Old Man’s room and wondered if Chen’s plan was to kill him with harshness and cruelty, to be done with the old pest. Somehow, watching him handle the basket so disrespectfully—now he was inching it down the hill with his foot—made me even angrier than I was over the poor woman on the street. I found myself hoping that Chen would get caught by the police, would get sent to San Quentin, Alcatraz, Sing Sing, Hong Kong. I wanted Old Man never to see Chen again.

  “He’s gone. Let’s go across the street,” Wing whispered.

  I straightened the parchment inside the folder. My poem would be the salve. It would soothe Old Man after his dinner with Chen. He would go to sleep that night with a contented smile on his old face, even if he hadn’t been able to eat a thing.

  Wing knocked lightly on his door; Old Man couldn’t even have heard.

  “Tell me everything he says,” I urged Wing. “Every word, the best you can translate it.”

  “I promise, every word. Now be quiet, so I can go in.”

  I sat on the floor, with my ear pressed to the door of Old Man’s room. Even though I hadn’t been there in a few weeks, the nurses were used to me and no longer asked me to move away from the door. There wasn’t any yelling inside, or the sad bleating voice Old Man had used with Chen. It was so quiet, in fact, that I pushed the door open an inch to listen for the slightest sound. There was nothing. For an instant I thought Old Man had gone to sleep blissfully reading my poem.

  After a while I heard a few whispered words, and Wing came out. “You made Old Man very happy,” he said quietly. “He asked for his glasses. They’re too big for him now. I held them to his eyes carefully. He doesn’t like to have his head touched.”

  “And?”

  “He read it over two or three times. He ran his hands over each character. I felt like—” Wing stopped.

  “Like what, Wing?” I encouraged him, so gently.

  “Like he was touching them to remember them, with his eyes and his fingers both.” Wing sank into a lounge chair.

  “Old Man, Old Man,” he said heavily.

  I knelt by his chair and took his hand. Maybe he didn’t even notice. We sat that way for about five minutes. The words of the poem were going through my head, over and over, and I imagined the same words, in Chinese, now going through Old Man’s head, like a lullaby as he drifted off to sleep for the night.

  “You’ve been very kind to him,” Wing said.

  I wanted to say, of course. You’re always kind to the people you love, even the ones you’ve never seen. I didn’t say that. Instead I said, “Pammy had a boy last night. Ten Thousand Pieces of Gold.”

  14

  For someone who said she would never have her baby in a hospital, Pammy was having a regular festival. There were flowers and milk shakes everywhere. The nurses had to bring in extra chairs for all the girls who came to visit. Pammy was our hotline to What It Was Like. I heard her tell the story of her labor at least a dozen times, exactly the same way, like lines delivered in a play, to audiences hungry for more and more gory details.

  Besides that, she had her switches. One called the nurse, if she needed anything, such as fresh ice water. One flipped the TV on and off. And her favorite moved her bed. It elevated her feet, bent her knees, and supported her back when she sat up. She sat on a donut cushion and ate three solid meals a day—scrambled eggs, chicken fricassee, beef stroganoff—things she’d never touch at home.

  Unfortunately the party came to an end when the doctor pronounced her strong enough to go home.

  We took her home, and Randy’s mother took the baby. Sylvia was torn up. “It just doesn’t seem natural,” she said, “to wrench the two of them apart.”

  Pammy was very philosophical about it all. “Randy’s folks want him, and they’ll take good care of him and make sure he can go to nursery school and stuff, and have good shoes. I’m gonna get married someday and have lots of other babies, especially now that I know how to do it.”

  Once we got her home, she walked carefully up the stairs to her room and slept all afternoon, got up to soak in a hot tub, and then went back to sleep. We all waited for the sadness to hit her.

  I heard Sylvia on the phone with the Chest Man, telling him how terribly sad it was for Pammy and her baby to be separated. I gathered, from my end of the conversation, that when Sylvia and the Chest Man had a baby, they’d all three crawl into bed and not get up until the kid was at least nine.

  Elizabeth was upset, too, though she tried to hide it from us. Through that long afternoon while Pammy slept, we discussed the situation.

  I said, “She’s done the most reasonable thing, giving the baby to Randy’s family.”

  “Reasonable, but is it normal?” asked Sylvia.

  “Anyway,” Elizabeth told us, “I’ll make certain Pammy doesn’t sign anything until she’s absolutely sure.”

  The next morning, while we were all racing in and out of the shower and tearing through clothes to get ready for school, there was Pammy, calmly slipping into some slim blue jeans and a rainbow-striped knit shirt, looking like your average sixth grader. She stuffed some Kleenex in her purse, grabbed a sharp pencil, and gathered up her books. She was apparently going back to school, to resume being fifteen. We all just stared, but said nothing.

  “You look very perky this morning,” Elizabeth observed at breakfast. I was on my fourth waffle, but Pammy was back to picking at her food, like old times.

  “Well, I’ve missed three days of school already.”

  “There’s no rush to go back,” Elizabeth said. “You’ve got a darn good
excuse. How many girls have babies in the middle of the school year?”

  “No, I gotta get back.”

  Sylvia’s face was wrinkled in displeasure as she chewed to death tiny bits of her dry protein toast. “You don’t mean to say you’re walking to school, do you?”

  “It is not good for a young woman who delivered three days ago to walk thirteen blocks to school,” Elizabeth said firmly. “I think you should stay home today, take it easy over the weekend, and go back to school on Monday.” Elizabeth was so sure Pammy would agree, but Pammy wasn’t the same old Play-Doh Pammy anymore.

  “I’m going to school today,” she said.

  Elizabeth stacked the breakfast dishes at the sink. I saw her shoulders sag as she realized she’d lost this round. She was eleven years older and had never had a baby. Pammy’s judgment had to count for something. “I’ll drive you,” she said, sounding defeated.

  “Can we get a ride?” I asked. “I’ll go tell Jo.”

  Elizabeth turned toward us, with her arms folded across her chest. The yellow rubber gloves stood up like rabbit’s ears. “I suppose.” She sighed. “Go get your books.”

  On second thought, I knew the air would be too thick in the car, with Elizabeth dripping disapproval. “Jo and I will walk, okay?”

  We left ahead of Elizabeth and the others. Turning the corner at Twenty-third and Geary, I asked Jo, “Where’d you go that night while we sweated out Pammy’s labor? I didn’t even know how to work the stopwatch.”

  “Oh, nowhere. Out to the beach. I just couldn’t take it, back at the house, you know?” Jo bounced as she walked, like a dancer. It was contagious. I saw our heads in the windows of the shops, bobbing like life buoys on the ocean.

  “Well, you missed Sylvia at her best. We got all these speeches on how beautiful and natural it was and on Mother Nature and all, until she almost threw up.”

  “Yeah, well, I think the whole thing’s disgusting. I don’t even watch the movies in hygiene. I’m telling you, I will never have a kid. You call me up in ten years and see if I’ve had a kid yet. I won’t.”

  “I think Pammy liked it a lot.”

  “Oh, man, she’s nuttier than I thought.”

  “Do you think she’ll miss the baby?”

  “Miss the baby?” Jo rolled her eyes upward. We passed a store called Knit Knovelties on Geary and Twenty-eighth, and wouldn’t you know that the window was full of baby clothes—blankets, booties, sweaters, bonnets, knee pants, coats, and tiny socks.

  “Look at that stuff,” Jo said. “People dress their little kids like circus freaks. You think a baby with no neck’s gonna feel good in that stupid dress that buttons to her chin?”

  “What do you think babies ought to wear?” I asked.

  “Burlap sacks.”

  Then, I don’t know whatever possessed me, because if I’d learned anything at Anza House it was that you don’t ever ask personal questions, but I asked it anyway: “How come you hardly ever go home on weekends?”

  “Where?”

  “Home.”

  “That’s what I mean. Where?”

  “Doesn’t you father have a place?”

  Jo rubbed her chin, considering how to answer. “Let’s put it this way. When my father’s got a few bucks, he hangs out at some fleabag hotel down on Howard Street. When he doesn’t have a few bucks, he does what he can.”

  “Then how about your mother?”

  “Oh, my mother, yeah. Well, she has a permanent address, up in Vacaville.”

  “That’s not far. It’s just by Sacramento, isn’t it? You could take a bus.”

  “Naw, naw, naw, not this place.” Jo looked me over a minute and apparently found me worthy of her bombshell. “This place in Vacaville, it’s called the Women’s Correctional Facility. My mom’s got a guaranteed place to hang her jeans until her parole comes up in 1989.”

  No more questions, I thought. You don’t ask something like “What did your mother do to get sent there?” It was too close to home. Of course, my mother was lucky. She’d been harassed, but never really arrested. That’s one thing Hackey took good care of.

  “Well, that’s the way it goes,” said Jo. “I come from the real upper crust of society, right?” She fumbled in her purse for a loose cigarette and hung it off her lip to light it. “A few puffs before school starts. One of the big joys in life.”

  “I’m from the upper crust, too,” I said flippantly.

  “Oh, yeah? One debutante to another. Two, standing right here at Geary and Thirtieth Avenue, imagine.” She offered me a cigarette, which I declined, and said, “Aw, hell, just don’t let it get you down, you hear?” She blew smoke rings that I tried to hook before they disappeared into the air.

  Pammy told me that night that Dr. Lazlo, the principal, had been standing at the door of the school when she arrived, and all the color had drained from her face when she saw Pammy get out of the car and come into the school.

  “Pammy,” she had said, nodding lightly, after which she took giant leaps down the hall, probably to warn the other teachers that Pammy was back in school. Everyone seemed upset and nervous about having her back, Pammy said. She couldn’t understand it. Didn’t she belong there, with the rest of the sophomore class?

  “Actually,” Elizabeth said, “you belong at home a few more days.”

  “Shouldn’t she still be in her hut?” asked Jo. “At least for six weeks till she gets the go-ahead from the O.B.?”

  “Go ahead? Go ahead and do what?” asked Sylvia.

  “Ride horseback,” I teased.

  “I never rode a horse,” Pammy said. “Why should I start now?”

  “You guys missed the point. It’s go ahead and—”

  “Never mind.” Elizabeth clearly saw the direction Jo was going in.

  “You know what, Jo? I truly wish you would find a boyfriend and fall hopelessly in love,” replied Sylvia.

  “What a terrible thing to wish on a girl,” Jo said. “Me, I’m all for one and one for all—me. I don’t need anybody. I don’t need anybody at all.”

  The others might have believed that, but not me. I remembered when I felt that way, from about the time I was fourteen, when Hackey’s mother died, until I came to Anza House. I figured that the thing to do with your life is to form detachments, pull away from things that hold you back. Don’t expect anything from anyone else, then you’ll never be disappointed. How many times had I expected Hackey to act like a regular father? He never did it. How many times had I wanted my mother to be a regular pie-baking mother, and she never was? So, by the time I was fourteen I realized that you don’t need a mother and father. You can bake your own pies, sign your own school notes, make your own decisions about what subjects to take, what time to go to bed, what to eat for supper, what to do in the summer. I don’t need them, I told myself. My mother used to try so hard to be a mother. But she never really knew how. If I stopped needing her, I wouldn’t have to watch her struggling to be what I needed, and failing time after time.

  When I turned sixteen, I announced that I was on my own. Hackey was very pleased. In that case, he said, I could go to work. I could have my own apartment, buy lots of clothes. I could even go to school and just work nights and weekends. He was so considerate about working out the details. How thoughtful he was, how heroic and generous to take on a second generation of Janssen women for his noble public service. It was while the details were being worked out that my mother finally woke up and behaved like a proper mother, called the Juvies, and had me sent over to Anza House.

  That’s where the old I-Don’t-Need-Anybody routine fell apart at the seams, because Mr. Saxe, Elizabeth, the girls, Wing, and Old Man poured into my life all at once. That’s why I didn’t believe Jo, not for a minute.

  15

  There was a rumor in the wind that we’d be getting a new girl soon, maybe two. The idea scared me.

  I told Mr. Saxe about it. “It’s not like getting a foreign-exchange student from Australia, you know.”

/>   “You must have seen Grease.”

  “Okay, forget Australia. France, Mexico. This girl we’re getting could be a complete weirdo.”

  “Could be.” Mr. Saxe smiled.

  “Or really sick.”

  “It’s possible,” he conceded. “You’ll just have to adjust. You seem to be good at adjusting.”

  Should I plunge ahead? “Can we talk about something else?”

  “Anything you like.” Since he’d blown up at me, he’d become so cooperative.

  “What I was wondering was, have you ever felt yourself pulled toward someone?”

  “What are you talking about? Tug of war? Falling in love?”

  “No, no, I mean as if you were being pulled, the way a car’s towed.”

  “I’m not sure I know what you’re getting at.”

  “Pulled by someone you don’t even really know?”

  Mr. Saxe nodded slowly. I thought he was piecing things together. “Be specific.”

  “Old Man. There’s something compelling about him.”

  “You’ve been going back to the hospital?”

  “Yes, for two weeks already. It’s okay. No sign of Hackey.”

  “Why do you go?”

  “I don’t know, I can’t help it. He draws me like a magnet. Did you know I’ve never even seen him? He’s never seen me, either. But I feel … dragged by some kind of invisible tow line.”

  “Does this frighten you?”

  Frighten me? No. It excited me. It made me feel like I was being propelled toward some sort of irresistible destiny. “Do you believe people’s lives are all decided for them?”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “Could you please answer one question without asking me a question?”

  “I do not believe our lives are predetermined, no. I believe we have choices. You have choices and control over your life.”

  I wasn’t sure I believed that. “It’s just that, on the other side of the door—”