The year I fell for Alberta was the last one we would
live on Blue Cedar Street. It was only a little street, narrow, no sidewalks,
about a half-mile long. It dead-ended on an open field about a mile long and a
quarter-mile wide that was an easement of some kind between the town limits and
the railroad. My grandfather, who had once worked for the B&O Railway,
referred to it as 'the right o' way'. So that's what we always called it in my
family.
Blue Cedar wasn't a busy street at all. It had no
cross streets, since the backyards of the opposite side to ours bordered on the
Lincoln Consolidated Elementary School playground and on a big empty meadow.
The ones on our side of the street bordered on some fields, scrub forest and
swamp, all owned by a man called Botkist, who had sold my father our place and
who planned eventually to drain the low areas and turn the whole thing into a
cheap-housing development. But for now, our street was sort of residual, a
little, perpendicular, upstart appendage to the long-established neighborhoods
on the southern edge of town. It was a generally safe neighborhood for kids and
once our parents considered us old enough, we all pretty much had the run of
the whole street, taking each other's backyards as a kind of continuous
playground that ran from one end of the street to the other on both sides. At
our house "old enough" was eight, and that's how old I was that
summer.
The only places strictly forbidden to us 'older kids'
by our mothers were the swamp and the right o' way—the swamp because, as we
were always reminded, "you can drown in six inches of water" (and
also because there were snakes and quicksand and hornets' nests, among other
dangers in that strange and eerie place that lived in a kind of permanent
twilight), and the right o' way because it was a hangout for the rail bums who
still hitchhiked on the B&O back then. So, of course, those were the places
we reserved for our greatest adventures of all. Once a few of us even built a
really great tree house in an old pinoak on the right o' way, but promptly
abandoned it once we discovered unsavory evidence that a hobo had been sleeping
in it.
We had moved there when I was five, but one late fall
morning when the bathroom window swelled shut for the umpteenth time, unable to
open it for his morning ablutions, Dad simply called up local realtor Harley
Koenig and told him to put the house on the market. Dad had always hated the
place and the neighborhood and couldn't, for the life of him, figure out what
had possessed him to buy it in the first place. Possibly, however, the same
kind of spur-of-the-moment impulse that led him to sell it—and to change jobs
four times in six years.
But that summer, we still had no idea that we would be
moving, and I fell in love—painfully, desperately—with Alberta. As I say, I was
eight that summer. Alberta was thirty-one.
I loved Alberta from the first moment I saw her. I was
fascinated by her willowy frame, her naturally curly, jet-black hair that
already had a few dazzling strands of silver in it, her statue-like pallor and
bright crimson bow of a mouth that contrasted so attractively with the quick,
sharp black of her eyes. I was bewitched by her thin, strong hands with their
slim restless fingers that ended in sculpted red nails that she regularly
touched up and buffed to perfect crescent tips while she sat sipping a cool
drink on her front porch. I was mesmerized by the large gold-loop earrings that
dangled from the tender, pierced lobes of her ears, by the gold and pearl
crucifix that she wore around her slender, tense neck, on a delicate thread of
gold chain just long enough so that the cross lay lightly in the hollow of her
throat, where, if I concentrated hard, I could see her heartbeat. I was
hypnotized too by the almost wire-thin wedding band that hung so loose on her
gaunt finger that I wondered why it didn't just slip right off. Sometimes she
played with that little ring while we talked, slipping it up and down over her
knuckle in between puffs on her ever-present cigarette. I loved to watch her
smoke, a hand-to-mouth gesture, so elegant yet so anxious, almost starved she
seemed for whatever it was that the smoke fed her. I was amazed at how the
yellowed fingers, the hacking, mucousy cough and the nicotine stink of old
Judge Kimble who lived across the alley from us could be so completely
nauseating, while Alberta's clean and gentle pulls on her white-filtered Salems
were utterly captivating. I thrilled to see how the smoke wafted from her
nostrils and mouth whenever I climbed up onto her porch and she said,
"Well, hi honey! How ya doin'? How's your mom?" Or how it burst from
her tight-stretched lips in short, impatient blasts whenever she and her
husband Cyrus were arguing about something.
Needless to say, I didn't like Cy much. He seemed to
always be upsetting Alberta—whenever he was around, that is, which wasn't very
often. He was the head bartender at the Nag's Head Bar & Grill. My father
said Cy was more than a bartender, a kind of junior partner to the owner,
Harmon Weiss, he said. Harmon was also
Chairman of the Town Council and spent more time on his civic duties than at
the bar. What that meant was that Cy worked some long hours. And when he wasn't
working, he spent a lot of time with his pals from the Nag's Head, out squirrel,
pheasant and rabbit-hunting in the fall, spin-fishing in the summer,
ice-fishing in the winter and playing Merchant's League baseball in between.
Despite the fact that I always kind of hoped that Cy wouldn't
come home ever, his absence seemed to
make Alberta sad and upset and I hated to see her looking blue. I always knew
what was bothering her, because she would say things like, "I was
expecting Cy home two hours ago. I swear we'd both have been better off if he'd
married Harmon Weiss." Imagining Cy and the paunchy, mustachioed Mr. Weiss
as a married couple would send me into fits of giggling. And when I got tickled
like that, Alberta would start laughing too, and I liked that a lot because her
face was so beautiful when she laughed, like black-eyed sunshine, sort of.
Whenever my mother mentioned Alberta, like when she
and her younger sister, my Aunt Janet, would sit at the kitchen table drinking
coffee together, it was always, “poor Alberta”. From what I was able to gather,
Alberta had been "the life of the party" when she was younger, and
"the boys were always hot on her trail" back then. And Aunt Janet,
who could always be counted on for a snide comment, would say, "From what
I heard, she was never all that hard to catch.”
I didn't know exactly what they were talking about,
but it always sounded derogatory and made me feel contempt for my aunt.
I once overhead my mother say that Alberta had married
Cy when she was very young. "Couldn't have been more than seventeen,"
Mom said, "and Cy must have been a good twenty-nine or thirty."
Alberta had had a baby right away, a little boy, but
he had died of polio when he was only seven. That had been years before, during
the big polio epidemic, when I was just a baby myself. My mother said it was
probably "a blessing in disguise, judging from the shape most of the
surviving polio victims were in".
I wondered about that little boy. Wondered what
Alberta would think if she’d overheard my mother say that. Wondered why kids
died. Worried I might get sick and die. That should be something your parents
could keep from happening, shouldn't it? I wondered how Alberta felt, not
having been able to keep her little boy from dying.
Still, I could never quite imagine Alberta as
somebody's mother. She was too slim and glamorous and gorgeous, too movie-star
perfect to be worrying about diapers, or Gerber's baby food, or Carnation
formula, or skinned knees and Merthiolate, or any of the other multiple, boring
inanities of motherhood. I would have been content just to sit nearby and watch
her all day. Just to see her pulse beating beneath that elegant crucifix, the
delicate turn of her ankle beneath the strap of her sandal, the thin blue veins
in the backs of her hands, the damp little curls that formed at the nape of her
neck when she swept her hair up into a French roll on particularly hot, sultry
days.
The flirtation began when I would ride my bike by her
house on my way down Blue Cedar to my friend Kevin's. I would wave and holler,
"Hi Alberta!" if she was out on the porch, which she often was in
summer, like as if she got to feeling claustrophobic inside.
She would wave back and say, "Hi honey! Where ya
rushin' off to?"
Sometimes I would see her again on my way back and
when I waved, she would say, "You better get your little butt home, honey.
Your mom must be worried about you."
Then one day when I was going by with nothing in
particular to do, she said, "Hi honey. I just made some fresh lemonade.
Want some?" And I went up and sat on her porch, just the two of us, she in
a pretty cane chair that could have stood a coat of varnish, and I in the porch
swing, where I rocked a little as I self-consciously sipped cold, sweet
lemonade from a translucent-green plastic glass. Alberta seemed relaxed if a
little sad. She drank her lemonade from a sweaty glass tumbler with a lot of
ice and a bright green spearmint leaf in it. Her drink was a darker, tawnier
hue than mine.
"What are you
drinking?" I asked.
"A highball," she said.
"What's that?"
"Something little boys can't have."
I flushed and must have scowled because she
immediately changed gears and started asking me all of the usual questions:
"How's your Mom? Your Dad still over at Superior Blade? Hey, how's that
Aunt Janet of yours? Haven't seen her in ages. Real pretty Janet. You'll be in
fourth grade next year, won't you honey? You're getting to be a big boy, aren't
you?"
And I answered everything as politely and concisely as
possible, a little shy in the actual presence of this beautiful woman that I
had long admired from afar, or from behind my mother's skirt on the rare
occasions when Alberta had come over for coffee and cake. So when she ran out
of questions and I ran out of answers, we just sat there for a while in
silence, with only the gentle squeak of the porch swing chain and the drone of
a neighbor's lawn mower to break the silence.
"I'm gonna have some more!" she said
suddenly and rather emphatically as she stood up. "How 'bout you, little
man?" But I got the idea she really kind of wanted me to go and was just
being polite. So I said, "No thanks. I better be going home." And
after climbing down from the porch swing and handing her my empty glass, I said
good-bye and left.
After that, however, I started dropping by every time
I saw Alberta out on the porch, which was just about every day that summer, it
seemed. And she would offer me lemonade or milk and Oreos and we would talk
about whatever came up: how hot it had been, what new neighbor had moved in,
when the county fair was going to begin, how my grandpa was a euchre partner of
her father's, what pie was our favorite.
It eventually got so that if I told my mother that I
was going to Alberta's, she would say, "Oh no you're not! You leave poor
Alberta alone. You must be driving her nuts. Don't make a nuisance out of
yourself." But Alberta always said I was welcome anytime. So sometimes I
would tell Mom I was going to play at Kevin's, and I would even tell myself
that I was, so I wouldn't feel like I was lying to my mother. But then I would
sort of just naturally gravitate to Alberta's front porch.
Once when Alberta telephoned our house for some
reason, I overheard my mother telling her not to encourage me because I was
going to become a real pest. At that particular second I hated my mother for
belittling me and making me sound like a bratty little kid. Alberta must have
said that I was no trouble, because I heard Mom say, "Well maybe he isn't
right now, but you'll play heck getting rid of him when he does get to be a pest, honey." Then my face burned with shame
when I heard her add, "I think he's got a real crush on you."
For a couple of days after that, I avoided going by
Alberta's house. How could I face her? But then Kevin called up and asked if I
wanted to see the new Erector Set he had gotten for his birthday and on my way
past Alberta's, I heard her sing out, "Hi honey! Just opened a package of
Oreos. Want some?" So I knew right then that she didn't hate me for having
a crush on her and I stopped for a while on her porch for a chat with Oreos and
milk, while she sipped her usual lemonade highball.
"Hope I'm not being a pest," I said to my
Redball Jet sneaker laces at the last second before I climbed down her steps to
leave. In answer, Alberta sprang from her chair and rushed over to give me a
hug and a kiss on the forehead. She said, "Oh honey, you could never be a
pest. We're pals, okay? You're always welcome!"
But it was to be a long time before I stopped by
again. For the next few days, I went by Alberta's house three or four times a
day, hoping to see her out on the porch. But no such luck. Then, one day I
heard Mom and Aunt Janet when they were having their mid-morning coffee at our
kitchen table, saying, "…cut her wrists with a straight razor…" and
"…just in time or she would have bled to death for sure…" and
"…still in the psycho ward up at Saint Elizabeth's…" and "…poor
Cy says it's emotional blackmail and he isn't putting up with any more of it—they
haven't gotten along for years, you know."
"Poor Alberta," my mother sighed.
"Poor Alberta?" Aunt Janet snapped, "Poor Cy, the crap he's had to put up with from that bitch!"
"Janet, dear, aren't you getting awfully chummy
with Cy?"
"Well, if it's any of your business, Sis, yes, I
am. He deserves it, poor Cy. He deserves a break, deserves to have somebody
listen to him for a change."
"Poor Cy nothing," I thought. "I hate
him. I hate his guts! Alberta deserves better. She deserves somebody that'll
really love her. She deserves me!"
It wasn't long after Cy moved into a room over the
Nag's Head that Aunt Janet started going out with him regularly and publicly.
He was estranged from his wife, she reasoned, and she was a divorcee, so what
was the harm? Mom was a little upset about it at first. "What will poor
Alberta think of you? And of me! Geez, Janet, try not to make a damned
spectacle out of yourself, will you?" But eventually she lived with the
idea. Cy and my Aunt Janet were an item. I loathed them both for it. But Mom
said I could either be civil to my aunt or be grounded. It was up to me.
Summer was almost over, well into August, when Alberta
finally came home. It embarrassed me that my aunt was gallivanting around in
Cy's car with him while Alberta was still in the psychiatric ward at Saint
Elizabeth's, but I was glad he was out of her life. I saw the ambulance go by our
house and stop at hers the day she got back. I wanted to leave home, go live there,
tell Alberta not to worry, that I would stay with her for as long as she
needed, stay with her forever. As I ran a monolog over in my head, I saw myself
as Glenn Ford or Gary Cooper, someone she would find credible and whose
presence would make her feel safe and loved. But when I looked down at my
skinned, grit-stained knees and worn Redball tennis shoes, I knew the truth—that
I was just a little boy—and I longed to grow up overnight, or for Alberta to mark
time and wait for me to catch up. I loved her almost more than I could stand.
So I did all I could do: pedaled Blue Cedar Street
from end to end, over and over, in hopes of seeing her out on her front porch,
trying but failing to work up the courage to march up there and ring her bell.
She didn't come out on the first day. Nor did she come
out on the second. It wasn't until evening of the third day—a particularly
muggy, sultry day—that she finally appeared. I had been patrolling the street
on my bike all day long and had a feeling that today might be the day. When my
mother called me in for supper, I shoveled down my food as quickly as possible
and immediately asked to be excused.
"Where are you off to again so soon?" my
mother asked, with a hint of suspicion in her voice.
“Kevin’s,” I said quickly.
"Okay, but just don't stay out until it's too
dark," my mother called after me. "Night's coming earlier now and the
cars can't see you in the twilight. Besides, it feels like a storm’s coming."
Mosquitoes were thick in the early evening air and not
a leaf was stirring. There was a livid tint to the falling sun as columns of
nimbus clouds crept swiftly up on the horizon and billowed there. Thunder
rolled somewhere to the south, so distant that you had to be very still and
listen closely to identify the sound. But a neighbor's dog knew it was coming
and barked at the thunder and then howled, a sad, frightened howl that filled
me with something like sorrow.
Alberta looked so gaunt and inconsistent and immobile
sitting there in her cane chair on the porch the first time I coasted by on my
bike that I wasn't even sure that I had actually seen her, almost as if she
might have been a figment of my imagination. But when I did a roundabout at the
right o' way and headed back, cruising slow, I saw that it was indeed Alberta.
From the street, in the fading light of a stormy evening, I couldn't tell
whether her eyes were open or closed. But I braked my bike at the edge of her
lawn and stood astride the crossbar looking her way, until she finally righted
her head and weakly raised a hand in greeting.
She was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, a flannel one,
despite the heat, but I still caught a glimpse of the immaculate white cuff of
bandage around her wrist. Her voice was weak and froggy, hard to hear at this
range, when she said, "Hiya honey. Long time no see."
It was enough invitation for my eager heart. I leaned
my bike against the old sugar maple in her front yard and made my way up the
concrete steps to her front porch. Her eyes were puffy and bloodshot, her mouth
slack and pale, her skin as white as erasable bond. Even her usually exquisite
curly black hair seemed to droop sadly.
"Come give us a hug, honey," she said in a
hoarse whisper. "I sure need one."
I couldn't think of a thing I would rather do. I
breathed in the smoke-and-soapy fragrance of her as I put my arms around her
neck and pressed my cheek to hers.
"Still buddies?" she whispered, and I nodded
my head, nestled against her face, without breaking our hug. In fact, I hugged
her tighter still in response.
Then I released her and when I glanced at her from
where I stood, rather woodenly, beside her chair, I saw her brush tears from
her cheeks with the backs of her hands, and once again I saw too the white
cuffs of her bandages.
For the longest time, I just stood there beside and a
little to the rear of her chair, with one hand straight down to my side, but
with the other gently stroking her dark, curly hair, the way one might stroke a
beloved cat—calmly, unhurriedly, repeatedly in a soothing, tranquil fashion.
She just closed her eyes and sat there, still as could be, sniffling
occasionally and brushing her cheeks with the backs of her hands.
We went on like that, the two of us, for the longest
time, a magic moment, an interval of great intimacy between two people, age no
longer an issue.
Then I said, "Don't worry, Alberta. It'll be
okay."
She reached up, took my hand and held it with both of
hers against her heart.
"I know it will, honey," she said, and then
added, "as long as I've got you around, anyway."
We stayed like that for a while, she sitting, I
standing, listening to the approaching thunder, knowing the storm was coming
but not caring.
She said, "Honey, won't your Mom be worried about
you?"
And just then, in the distance, over the gathering
storm, we could hear my mother calling my name. "You're a real sweetie, honey," Alberta
said, "but you'd better scoot. I don't want you to get into trouble."
On an impulse, I leaned over and kissed her on the
forehead, a peck, a child's kiss. But then too, a kiss like one a father might
place on his little daughter's fevered brow.
"I'll be back tomorrow," I promised, the
kiss burning on my lips.
"I know you will." She patted my hand and
let it go.
The wind was kicking up dust devils and the sky was
turning black fast. Up the street my mother was still shouting my name,
straining hard to be heard above the wind and thunder.
"Coooomiiiiing!" I shouted back.
A big cold drop of rain splatted on top of my head.
Another one thumped me on the chest, narrowly missing my yearning heart. I
turned toward the porch, where Alberta was still sitting in her cane chair—but
sitting forward now, on the edge, as if she were contemplating getting up, going
in, moving on.
I ran over to my bike and put up the kickstand. A
sheet of rain was sweeping the fields over by the elementary school and heading
our way fast.
On a whim I shouted over the wind, “Alberta!”
“Yes, honey?”
"Wait
for me!"
"What?" she asked, cupping her ear.
"I said, wait
for me!" I cried at the top
of my lungs.
Alberta smiled from the porch and brushed her cheeks
with the back of one hand. With the other, she waved as I rode off toward home
and I heard her call, "I will,
honey! I'll try!"
He’d
hit rock bottom—divorced twice, downsized executive, new job as a school bus
driver. But for a while, he’d seemed happy that way, like the stress was off
and he was cool.
