The Walking People (42 page)

The rest of the family talked nonstop about the move, Greta and Michael describing the house, even collaborating on a rough sketch so Eavan and James would understand. Eavan colored the sketch with crayons to show the green grass her mother told her would feel like velvet under her toes, the black shutters, the white shingles, and then she stuck it under a magnet on the fridge. There was a driveway, a
garage, five windows facing front. The sketch gave no hint of neighbors, and when Julia came home from work late at night, winded from a hurried walk from the subway with her keys clenched tightly in her fist, she'd sip apple juice at the kitchen table and wonder how far the next houses were. If they'd drawn the sketch from a slightly greater distance, say ten feet back, twenty, would she be able to see the start of their new neighbors' houses at the very edges? How much grass did one family need? The driveway, as Eavan had rendered it, was jet black, shiny with the wax of the crayon, and empty. Where did people walk to when they stepped out their front doors? Her father would no longer have to circle every block from Ninety-sixth to Seventy-sixth in search of a parking spot. No more planning days around alternate side of the street parking. No more yelling at each other to decide which of them would run out to Second Avenue with dimes if no street spots could be found.

Julia didn't know the first thing about buying a house, but she was sure, after the accident, that moving would be called off. She couldn't say exactly what one had to do with the other, but they were connected, she was positive. She'd been the one to get the call from her father's friend Ned Powers, and she ran to the park on East End where Greta brought Eavan and James most evenings she was off. Julia, Eavan, and James watched Greta rush off, arm raised for a cab before she even reached the curb. Julia had seen her mother hail a cab only a few times in her life, and the idea of her taking a cab all the way to Long Island brought home the seriousness of what had happened. People died where her father worked. She'd seen the documentaries of men covered in mud and operating machinery a hundred stories under the sidewalk. You can't call an ambulance when you're that far underground. First you had to be brought down the tunnel to the shaft. Then you had to be lifted to street level in the cage. She'd taken a class on the city's infrastructure at City College. "Hogs," her professor had called these men, and his abbreviation of what they called themselves, as if he were more familiar with their work than Julia was—Julia who brought her father's mud-caked clothes to the Laundromat once a week and tiptoed around the apartment all day when he worked the graveyard shift—was infuriating.

"What happened?" Eavan had asked.

"Nothing," Julia said to Eavan. "She forgot to turn off the stove."

"She's taking a cab?"

"Yeah, she's tired. Long day."

With a cross glance at Julia, Eavan kicked up some sand with the toe of her sneaker and marched away. A few minutes later she marched right back and said, "I'm nine years old, you know."

"I know, kiddo."

That night, after putting Eavan and James to bed, Julia had slept on the couch and waited for Greta to come home. At a little after one o'clock the locks turned slowly in the door, giving out two soft clicks. Greta pushed the door open. Without speaking, she jerked her thumb over her shoulder to ask if the other two were really asleep.

"They're out cold," Julia said, and sat up to listen. "How is he?"

"I don't know how long they'll keep him," Greta said. "Maybe all week. Maybe more. My God, he was lucky. You should see the cut of him, Julia. A matter of two inches, and he would have been killed."

But he would be himself again, that much Greta was sure of. And as Greta went on about how lucky they were, Julia's thoughts floated beyond the day's emergency to the month ahead. Her father was safe in a hospital that turned out not to be on Long Island after all. He was strong. He'd be fine. But surely a scare of this size meant that they wouldn't be tackling any other major change. They'd stay in the city. They'd go on the way they always had. They'd been happy in this apartment. Now they'd been lucky as well.

"What will happen with the house?" Julia asked, interrupting Greta as she described the union's complicated policy on workman's compensation.

"The house?" Greta asked.

"Moving. Will they be angry now if we change our minds?"

Greta blinked, tilted her head toward Julia as if she'd missed part of the question. "Why would we change our minds? Don't you want to get out of the city?"

"Why would I want to get out of the city?" Julia asked. From the moment her parents had broken the news about moving, getting out, getting something of their own, it was as if they had confessed to leading secret lives, complete with secret dreams, secret preferences. She'd given serious thought to staying. If she found two roommates, they could divide the rent three ways, and if she got a good job, she might actually have some pocket change left over. For a whole week she had passed time on the subway thinking of who she might ask to move in. There were girls in her classes she'd become friendly with, there were girls who used to live in the neighborhood but had moved away, there were girls from high school who still lived with their parents and might jump at the chance to move out. They could decorate the place in their own style, paint the walls bright blue and red. They could spread a huge zebra-print rug on the floor where Greta's old rugs had been.

As Julia tried to decide who to ask, she pictured different faces sitting across from her at the table, on the other end of the couch. She rotated the faces of her girlfriends in a way that reminded her of James popping the heads off Eavan's Barbies, rolling them across the kitchen floor, and then reattaching them at random so that Malibu was wearing a business suit and Disco was wearing a formal gown. Every time she settled on someone, she got a feeling in her stomach that she'd regret it. It was one thing sitting next to someone in class. It was another thing to come home to them every day and have conversations about whose turn it was to clean the toilet, who'd forgotten to chain the door.

For months now, her friends had been striking out in navy suits, low-heeled pumps, pearl stockings, résumés in hand. Julia, in all her rushing about, finishing papers for class, waitressing five nights a week, deciding whether to stay or to go, hadn't even started looking.

And what would her mother do? The question came to Julia at the oddest moment—as she was finishing up the last essay of an art history exam and her No. 2 pencil broke, the jagged tip leaving a faint trail across the page of the blue book before falling to the floor. Who would watch Eavan and James if Greta got called in to work an evening shift and Michael was already at work? Where do you go for favors in the suburbs when the neighbors are so closed off in their own set of rooms, their own square of velvety green lawn?

"I thought everyone wanted to get out of the city," Greta said, rubbing her eyes. "I always thought of this as temporary, I suppose. Until
we got on our feet. Well, it took a little longer than we thought, but we're on our feet."

"I didn't know it was temporary," Julia said. "Twenty-two years isn't temporary." She didn't feel like arguing. She wondered if the house in Recess would ever give her that feeling of coming through the door and being settled, of all the frustrations of the day seeming suddenly minor the moment she inserted her key in the lock. "It just surprised me, is all," Julia said. "Did you ever think of moving back home? That would make more sense to me."

"No, love. Now go on in and go to sleep. I'm sleeping here." Greta patted the couch. "The hospital might ring very early in the morning."

 

Anyone who might have entered the Ward apartment in late June 1986 would not have guessed that they were moving in a matter of days. Everything was the same as it had always been, or at least as long as Julia could remember. Framed photos covered every flat surface, and inside the frames of those photos were stuck more photos, wallet-size snapshots of Julia or Eavan or James, or all three together. The closets were stuffed with old coats, appliances in need of attention—a blender without a lid, a juicer without a cord, a food processor Greta had never learned how to use. There were also shoeboxes filled with odds and ends, souvenirs from special occasions, matchbooks, candles, ribbons, letters, pamphlets, more photos. There were some boxes that held old lipsticks, buttons, shiny hair combs lined with crystals, bracelets, compacts, scarves, even old stockings wound up and tied into balls. Julia's grammar school papers and projects were crammed on the top shelf of the hall closet, while science projects, book reports, and artistic endeavors by Eavan and James were mixed together and divided between their bedroom closets and the closet in the kitchen. Long before news of any move Julia often wondered if her mother had ever thrown anything away.

Once Greta had the boxes from the liquor stores she'd called—close to thirty in all, uniform in size and strength—she took a week off from work and got down to business. Julia, she said, was off the hook until her finals were over. School was, after all, the most important thing. She gave Eavan and James busywork—line up Mama's shoes in a neat
row, organize the Tupperware so they all fitted into each other—while she dumped drawer after drawer and shoebox after shoebox onto the floor of the living room and separated what should be thrown out from what should be packed and brought to the suburbs. When Julia came home from her last exam at City College, she found that the stack of packed boxes lining the hall had grown tall since morning. Empty, the closets and cabinets revealed themselves as Julia had never seen them — expansive, naked, squares and circles of shelf liner bright and dust-free where the cartons of pasta and cans of soup were once stored.

"Jesus," Julia said as she watched her mother, who was sitting cross-legged on the living-room floor with a bandana tied around her hair. "Why don't we get a shovel and just throw it all out."

"It's not garbage," Greta said as she stood to hug Julia. "College graduate! How does it feel? How was the last exam? Are you hungry? You should be very proud of yourself, all those tests. I made a cake, and Eavan's icing it, so don't go in the kitchen."

"It's really not a big deal, Mom."

"Of course it's a big deal. You think everyone graduates from college?"

"Pretty much. It's not like I went to Harvard."

Michael, listening from his bedroom, propped himself up on his good elbow and called down the hall, "Is she home? Was the test very hard?"

"I thought you were asleep," Julia said, walking down the hall to perch at the edge of her parents' bed. "Feeling better?"

"Forget about me. Tonight, Miss Ward, we're going to eat steak and spuds and then we're going to have cake your sister is icing with pure sugar, I think, from the taste on the spoon she brought in for me to lick. Just one little spoonful she brought me, no more. That was awfully hard of her, wasn't it? After supper we're going to have a toast. How do they do it? To Julia. How do they put it? City College graduate, class of 1986."

"But before that," Greta said, coming up behind Julia, "you'll give me some help, won't you? I don't want to face this pile after the celebration."

Once Julia had changed into sweats and a T-shirt, she sat down on the opposite side of the pile from Greta. She'd quit her job at Jackson's Bistro earlier that week, and now, with the last exam behind her, the immediate future was beginning to look like a place she wouldn't mind checking out. She was twenty-one going on twenty-two. She had a college degree. She had nowhere to be in the morning. She would soon have an entrance all to herself. Recess was only a short drive away. Her parents had gone a lot farther from home when they were a lot younger than she was now.

"How about a rule?" Julia asked. "How about if you haven't looked at something in over ten years, it gets tossed."

"Just because I haven't looked at it doesn't mean I don't know it's there. And ten years isn't so long."

"Mom," Julia said as she opened a plastic bag and peered inside. "This bag is full of coloring books. Old coloring books, but," Julia took one out and flipped through the pages, "never used."

"So they're good. They come with us."

"James is too old for coloring books."

"So what? We just throw out a dozen perfectly good coloring books?"

Julia sighed, reached for another fat plastic bag. "Are these what I think they are?" she said, shoving her arm elbow-deep into the bag as if searching for a winning ticket. She pulled out a long strip of glossy paper, torn on one side. She held the paper to her nose. "I think these are old perfume sniffers. Like from magazines." She dumped the bag into her lap. "The whole thing!"

Greta's features drew together in a scowl, the way they always did when she was thinking seriously about something. "Those can go," she said finally.

Julia rolled her eyes and threw the bag into the trash pile. "What about this?" she asked a moment later, tilting the mouth of the bag toward Greta so she could see the tiny balls of yarn inside. Some balls were smaller than marbles, few were bigger than golf balls. Every color of the rainbow was represented in multiple shades.

"Put that aside for now," Greta said.

"I feel I should point out that you don't knit."

"I do knit. I mean, I know how to knit. I used to knit. Crochet too."

Mom—

"Listen." Greta put down the box she was sorting and put her hands on her hips. "I have my own way, and if you're going to argue about it, maybe you should go and clean out your own closet."

"My closet's clean."

"Then bring your brother and sister to the park."

"Okay, I'll shut up," Julia said, and did shut up, pressing her lips together every time she felt an objection forming in her throat. The garbage pile was growing, but very slowly. The pile marked to come with them had grown into a mountain and had spilled over the couch and onto the floor in front of the armchair. At the top of the pile to make the journey to the suburbs were little bundles of Polaroid photographs held together with rubber bands, bags of half-used jars of cold cream and lotion left over from promotions at Bloomingdale's and Macy's. Julia picked up a bright red cookie tin of a brand she knew could only be bought in the Irish parts of Queens and the Bronx. Once in a while, usually before Christmas, Greta took the train to one of the shops that sold these cookies and bought enough to last through all the special occasions of the year.