Jean Matthew

published in Missouri Review, 1989

IT’S LOVE, BUDDY

My mother has resurfaced in central Illinois. I read it in the newspaper, Articles from around the Nation. Stone flamingos disappear from lawns, the article said. I know that’s her. I know how she does it. No one thinks twice when they see an old lady around the neighborhood. She makes friends with the dogs in the neighborhood and when she goes back to lift the birds, there’s no trouble. Bones in her pockets and a good idea of the whole neighborhood’s schedule, she’d make a good thief.

When it was cement flamingos, before, she waited, crouched behind a blue hydrangea bush, until the cars passed. The birds were too heavy for her to carry. She left them under the bush and crawled across the lawn to the sidewalk. The phone booth was half a block away.

I answered.

“Can you pick me up?”

She save me directions and knew I would come. She waited under a street lamp, one eye on a lawn jockey. I came in her car, a cut-down Cadillac hearse. One at a time

she brought the birds and put them in a wicker clothes basket in the back. “I left their legs. Couldn’t dig them out.”

“I’m an accessory. I resent it. Every time.”

“Don’t sound like your father.” She lit a cigarette.

“That’s not all he says. He’s going to have to turn you in. You got to cut this stuff

out.”

“He’s gonna turn me in. He’s gotta do his duty. You know how long? Years. Every time his piles bother him, he’s gonna turn me in.”

It was a forty-minute drive, past the end of the bus line. I got out and walked around to open her door.

“You don’t have to help me.”

The curtain at the front window was open. I had left the radio on, the recliner tipped back.

She found dowels in her workshop, cut four of them to length. The flamingos would go behind a Bambi and next to red and white mushrooms. She turned on the floodlight.

The whole width and length of her garden was lit. It was a maze of statuary: many more than seven dwarves; several concrete effigies of Bambi; wooden windmills that set small woodchoppers going; silver, green, and blue reflecting balls, on the ground and on pedestals; three small black jockeys with rings in their tight little fists, wearing red coats and white pants; and three upended bathtubs, in each a blue-robed Mary stood with out- stretched arms. The Marys were also lit from below, small spots of soft light upon their wimpled heads. In between groups of statues were small scenes: a tea service of odd cups, pots and saucers, the cups planted with pansies; a ring of colored bottles around a

patch English daisies; several old rubber baby dolls leaned shoulder to shoulder, unclothed, some with no limbs, or hands, or feet,

heads turned towards a clump of bluebells.

She walked around the edge, dowels in hand. The dew had fallen and her feet were wet. She had left her shoes, turquoise mules, under the hydrangea. Narrow paths went around the statues and she made her way to the spot for the flamingos.

In the morning she sat in her bathroom and listened to me and Charlie talk about her. Her bathroom was at the far end of her side of the house, next to our kitchen. Charlie said the

same things every time: she was a kook and a criminal. I defended her, though never to her face.

“Petty theft, that’s all it is, Charlie. No big deal.”

“Theft is theft. That’s all there is to it. I arrest a lot of people for less.”

I know she sat on the floor, in the middle of the pink plush rug. The room smelled of gardenias. Pink and black were the colors, and there were rhinestone poodles on the toilet top

and the shower curtains. Charlie had refused to set foot inside the door. He had used the woods until she finished his bathroom. It was her house. She built it nail by nail, board by board, pried

with a crowbar from the condemned pickle factory, loaded into the last Caddy and brought home before dawn, a load at a time. She put the plans together from plans in magazines, and every

room and doorway was where she wanted it to be.

I left for work and Charlie went to bed.

Gwinnie was a bird-boned woman, a miniature. She swept her hair up on top of her head, in tight curls she wound around her finger and bobby-pinned once a week.

From the day she met Charlie she had not changed. When her straight skirts with a slit up the back had worn out, she made three more. She created peddle pushers from slacks, cutting them off and using the scraps to make bows at the knees. Cigarette holder, rhinestone-studded pastel eyeglasses, good leather high heels: they were out there and she knew where to find them. What she couldn’t find she made herself, or shopped for on lawns after dark.

The house smelled like pickles. She liked dill and vinegar and garlic, mustard seed, bay leaf and sugar, and after ten minutes the nose went numb anyway. And that was part of it; it took ten minutes and anything could change. Then to hell with all those other changes.

Years on Saturday she stood at the back of the Caddy, at a Swap Meet or Barter party, her treasures spread out: two hotel lobby ashtrays, six handkerchiefs with a maroon M in one corner a censer, slightly cracked, and live identical metal banks in the shape of Scottish Terriers, each three feet high and weighing forty pounds. She came home with garden treasures: a small wrought iron church, poles for burning torches; a miniature set of lawn furniture.

“I need a little poodle for this.”

Every summer from the time I was born we spent on the lake, Gwinnie and I. Charlie wouldn’t go and he tolerated our going. Gwinnie erected her summer house barely above the water line, beneath an overhanging cliff. She filled the back of the Caddy time after time and year after year with the same boards, each with a number and letter in one corner, arrows for up, and rebuilt her lean-to in the same spot. It was four loads of boards. When I was a baby I rode in the laundry basket that later went for treasure. As soon as I was big enough, I helped her fit letter to letter, number to number. It took us more than half a day. At lunch we had the sandwiches she packed, the last food from our kitchen until the fall.

Every summer was different, in weather, in what marked it. One summer it rained almost every day, part of the day. We sat in our shelter and watched the wind whip the sand around, the waves high and white, the sky the color of paint flecked metal. We watched, and read to each other. I read her all my favorite stories over and over, she read me articles from the newspapers she stocked up on for summer: aliens were always making babies with earth women, jealous husbands chopped up their wives and mailed them, or froze them, or otherwise got rid of the bodies; and miracle cures, our favorite stories. When the rain stopped we immediately ran out, screaming and laughing and yelling, “Welcome Mr. Sun! We been waiting for you!”

The last summer I went I spent the whole time reading truck magazines. We did take walks, laugh some. She said, “I came here without you before. No need for you to come when you got so much to do.”

We collected beach trash every summer, driftwood, metal in all stages of rusting, beautiful ground glass chips and bottles, soft colors from the sand grinding against them for so long; bones and skeletons of creatures from another planet. Gwinnie made things

with her finds, sculptures that she put on her walls or in her garden or bathroom.

Once a week we went back to the house and refilled our water jugs, washed clothes that we took back to the beach to dry, bought our supplies at the store. I never took a bath during the summer.

On the gazetteer map Taylorville is in south-central Illinois, a crossroads in Christian County, large enough for many lawns, a rooming house, a palm reader, a Christian Mission. I suppose she is staying there, at the Mission, for a few days. She is not really a Christian, but she is a fervent believer in God, her God. “Buddy, you got to believe in something or the universe is nothing but a great big sieve and we all fall through the holes in the darkness out there.” Yes, Gwinnie, I will. Gwinnie only and always, her name and never a title, Mother, Mama. I called him Charlie and neither of them ever said anything about it.

She may have been in central Illinois since she left Kentucky. I have not seen or heard from her in almost two years. She warned me: “I am going to see the USA, but not from my Chevrolet. From the windows of the majestic long distance bus.”

Summers at the lake. Winters in the house, and school. It was not until third grade that I knew she was strange. Of course it was the other kids. But they didn’t taunt, make fun. They asked questions. “Is it the truth your mother built your house herself? From the pickle factory?” “Did your father really arrest her for stealing? Do you steal?” It is true, all of it.

I didn’t steal in school, and in fact Gwinnie told me not to. “I have a disease, kleptophobia, and I can’t help it. I am getting help with it. I only steal after dark now.”

Later Charlie found out she was not going to her counselor and spent every Wednesday afternoon at Woolworth’s, at the lunch counter, eating lemon meringue pie, drinking coffee and smoking pall Malls. “It is working,” she told him. “I have took nothing from that store for eleven weeks, and that’s a damned fine record. So there. I can take care of myself.”

The only time I ever stole I took an eighteen-wheeler, to learn to back it up. There was a truck stop on the far side of town and I just went there and drove the truck. I never took it out of the parking lot and the driver was surely asleep in the bunk house. When I was done I filled up the gas tank.

We are single-minded people, Charlie and Gwinnie and me. All Charlie ever cared about was being a cop. He never wanted advances, rank, a desk job. A cop, in a cop car, driving around. He never was shot at or shot at anybody. He always left his gun, unloaded, under the front seat of the car and the ammunition in the glove compartment.

He believed most people were good. I am sure that helped him accept some of Gwinnie’s illegal behaviors.

Gwinnie was single-minded about being herself. When I was a teenager, after my last summer at the lake, I decided she was selfish and I tried to talk to Charlie about how I saw her treating us. The two sides of the house, for instance. If I wanted to see her I found her in her half. She never invited me over there, but now I see that she felt the door was always open, and it was, except on the coldest days. It was a Dutch door and the top was open until she went to bed. More than once I watched her before I hollered out, watched her teaching herself some dance step, her Victrola going, skirts swishing back and forth, maybe a veil on her head, orange lace; watched her play solitaire in the middle of the floor, the cards in rows in front of her, cigarette burning in the big glass ashtray, her

brow creased as she looked for a spot for her card; watched her walk around with a book on her head to improve her posture; watched her teach herself to knit–she knitted a blanket, eleven feet long and four feet wide, blood red, that she gave to the Salvation Army. I waited for her to know I was there, so that I would not interrupt her concentration.

When I asked Charlie what he thought about how she treated us, he said, “How you want to be treated? How you want to change her?”

When I was little I thought she never slept. She was awake when I went to bed and when I got up she was often sitting at the table with her coffee. Charlie was on the night shift for years so he was asleep in the morning. Gwinnie gave me my breakfast, cereal, on our side of the house, and sent me to school. Sometimes she danced around the kitchen to the radio, pulled me up and into her arms, spun me around.

Only once did I go to a classmate’s house after school. We had to take our shoes off at the door and were only allowed in his bedroom. The house smelled like perfume and was so quiet I was afraid to speak. In his room we played with model cars. He talked about the World Series, which I knew nothing about. Gwinnie picked me up and the next day in school the kids made fun of our hearse. “It’s a real Cadillac,” I said.

Even now there is much I don’t know about Gwinnie and I don’t care; and about her and Charlie. I’m like them. I work alone, drive a truck, and that’s all I want to do. I’ve never had a girlfriend, but I’ve never been lonely either, so I guess I can do without one. Charlie said he had never seen or imagined anyone like Gwinnie. I said, You get so mad, embarrassed when she gets arrested, angry every summer when we go away. “It’s love, buddy. That’s all I know.”

On her part, Gwinnie said Charlie fell in love with her and that was that. “I never

been a bad-looking woman, either, and he liked my spunk, even if he didn’t know it.” They met at a policemen’s ball. Gwinnie was there with her brother, Uncle Arnold, her only family. Her ma and pa had died of the flu when she was half grown. Uncle Arnold died before I even knew him. Run down by an old lady too blind to be driving. Gwinnie forgave her.

The only teaching I ever got from Gwinnie and Charlie was from direct questions. Often I would think about things I wanted to ask one or the other, about grandparents or when they were kids, and then I’d ask myself, do I really want to know that? Do I really care? Most always the answer was nope.

So we were our only family, left behind by death or desertion or forgetfulness.

Even that was not really unusual. Many of my schoolfriends lived away from grandparents, aunts, uncles, drawn far from a home by a place to work.

I quit school after tenth grade, bored and tired of it, and right away started working. I answered an ad in the paper and pumped gas, changed flats, checked oil, and grew to love the smells and sounds of engines. Gwinnie taught me to drive that year, taking me out into the country and trading seats with me. I had watched, I had an ear for shifting gears, and steering was easy. The Caddy was smooth, with a low deep engine noise and it felt like riding on air. Up and down the narrow dirt road I went, for hours, until I could manage that car with my eyes closed. It was then I knew that I would live to drive, and the bigger the better, the more to manage the happier.

I am happy, even now with Gwinnie off and Charlie gone. The events came together. Charlie had never had a sick day, of course. He started feeling tired, and one night he was too tired to go to work. Tn the middle of that night Gwinnie and I took him straight to the hospital. She convinced them it was an emergency, and we had no doctor

to call. I had never been to one. Never had Charlie or Gwinnie even thought about it. In the emergency room I felt I knew why, that this was the strangest place and situation I had ever seen, truly alien. They took Charlie away and Gwinnie and I sat and smoked. She tapped her foot and she looked tired, lines on her face and her curls falling. I did not know to be frightened. I don’t know if she did either. We sat until dawn, then we went out to a diner for breakfast, ham and eggs and grits and coffee, both of us. When we got back a doctor talked to us. Charlie had a mass, a tumor, a cancer, and it was throughout his body. There was nothing we could do, except take him home.

It took Charlie almost two months to die, and the last few weeks he slept or was out of his mind the whole time. We took turns taking care of him, feeding him, helping him onto a slop jar, holding his hand. He never said a word, not one word, after we got home. On the way home from the hospital he had said, too bad. Rotten goddamned luck.

I have no picture of Charlie, though I suppose I could have gotten one from the force, the one he used on his ID. He was a medium guy, medium height, medium brown hair, medium weight. He parted his hair on the right and he took care of his own uniforms. His hands were large, short thick fingers, thin gold band on his left hand. He was flat-footed and that was why he spent every evening before work with his feet elevated on a hassock. On his days off he went fishing, or worked around the house.

Sometimes he went drinking with his friends, and often they would come over, always standing in front of the house, never coming in. Gwinnie always stayed out of Charlie’s way. He never asked me to go fishing with him, and I asked her why not.

“Maybe he ain’t really going fishing. Ever think of that?”

I have a picture of her. She took it in the machine at Woolworth’s. It was a strip of six pictures, and in all of them she was making a face: stuck out tongue, fingers in her

ears, cross-eyed, rubber face. And one of her with her mouth open, head thrown back, laughing. You can only really see her in the one or her cross-eyed. But l keep the one of her laughing behind it in my wallet.

I am glad we never had a phone, especially now. The house is quiet. I check on her side once a week. Dust is beginning to settle but I can’t do anything about it. I don’t even like going in there, but I worry about a leak in the roof, the refrigerator breaking down, a dripping faucet. I miss Charlie because he was always in the chair, every night. He always asked how I was doing, how was school, how was the job, how was life as a truck driver. He listened when I answered.

Charlie’s funeral was big and sad. There was a horse with an empty saddle from the force, many men in uniform, and their wives I guess. Gwinnie was in black with a veil so dark you couldn’t see her face. She stood aside, at the rear of the crowd, and when it was over I looked for her, but the Caddy was gone. Charlie’s friend Dick gave me a ride home. “Take care of your mom,” he said.

“I don’t need to. She can take care of herself,” I told him.

But I did take care of the finances. I helped her fill out the papers for the pension. We worked out a budget for her, and Charlie had left her well off, monthly, because they owed nothing.

When she first left I heard from her every month, a note about money, wiring some. But then we worked it out with the bank and now they take care of it. I could find out exactly where she is from them, but I don’t need to know.

What I would like to know is what she is doing with the stuff she is stealing. Does she have someone to pick her up? Is she taking light things and giving them the next day to Goodwill or Salvation Army? I have followed her travels, been able to guess where she

was going, through the newspaper. Charlie read it every day and after his death I took it over. I see now that it is a good thing, with the news or Gwinnie in it.

If I was going over the road I would look for her, just to make sure she is doing all right. But I’m on local hauls now, which does mean I can take care of the house. She will be back; at least she did not say she would not be. She’s halfway across the USA now, the other half to go.