Unburying Hope (7 page)

She sat at the table, rifling through her
purse for her cell phone while turning on the small computer that sat at one
end.
 
Her screensaver flashed for a
moment, two champagne glasses on a remote beach, then two silhouettes in the
sunset.
 
She scraped a bit of old
pasta sauce off the screen and determined not to eat dinner again with the
screen facing her.
 
She went first
to her bank’s website and checked her account.
 
The rent check had cleared, the auto-transfer of 30% of her
paycheck into savings had gone through and she still had plenty of money left
over after deducting what she’d spent on her debit card for her new clothes.

She had lived frugally for her whole
life.
  
Her mother never said
why her father had left, but Celeste grew up in a boarding house with her
mother, going to school and coming home by herself while her mother worked jobs
that changed every few years with the closing of factories.
 

As a child, Celeste had eaten dinner with the
elderly lady across the hall who babysat her in her own small studio apartment,
sharing the cooked contents of a can of refried beans with cheese melted on top
in two small bowls.

The old lady’s hands and face were like used
brown paper, crinkled and dried out.
 
She did not like when Celeste moved on her small portion of the
threadbare chenille sofa cushion.
 
She’d yelp in pain and grab her hips and Celeste would freeze, closing
her eyes to the anger.
  
The
only time Celeste had to play and dance was from 3:45 after getting home from
the meandering walk from the bus stop and 5:05 when she went to sit for four
hours with the old lady.
 
She
brought her backpack and could put her books on the coffee table once but the
old lady grimaced and moaned when she leaned forward and back shuffling her
notebooks as she did her homework.

Later each evening, her mother would come
home, tapping gently on the door.
 
She’d take Celeste’s hand, lead her back to wash her face and brush her
teeth before Celeste crawled into the wall side of the small bed they
shared.
  

When she was 17, her mother left one evening
for work and didn’t come home the next day.
 
The day shift at the factory didn’t find her body until nearly
noon.
 
She’d died of a heart attack
and slumped against a rarely used machine in a ball bearings plant.
 

Two women in hairnets were sitting against the
hallway wall in the rooming house, waiting across from her front door when
Celeste wandered in after school.
 
They’d stood quickly and put their hands all over Celeste’s shoulders,
offering condolences, telling fragments of details between their tears.
 
She’d gone quickly, the coroner had
said.
 
They handed her the keys and
wallet that had been in her mother’s uniform jacket and held out a box that
contained everything from her mother’s locker.
 
They said that her mother had worked as though it were a
calling, not a job.
 
That the job
was too small for her spirit.

The funeral was tasteful, the church
empty.
 
A few of her mother’s
coworkers prayed in the back pews, and her aunt came to rifle through her
mother’s sweater drawer, extracting two to take home, the least frayed.
 
She said it was as remembrance, but
Celeste could feel there was an unresolved rivalry that was now being completed
by the theft of her mother’s best things.
 

Her aunt left her to live in the boarding
house after seeing her routine with the now nearly immobile old lady, paying
two years of rent with the bit of money they’d found hidden away in her
mother’s small bank account so that Celeste could graduate and go to community
college without worrying about being homeless.
 

In the winter months after her mother died,
Celeste would climb into bed sometimes with wool socks, thermal underwear,
sweatpants, a sweatshirt and a down vest, and be asleep in minutes like a bear.

Part of her heart had gone into hibernation,
she felt, and she couldn’t for the life of her find a way to awaken it.
 
So she completed high school, went to
college, worked, came home every day with a gauzy blindness that kept her in
her routine, unthinking and unfeeling for months on end, dreaming of a home
that could become a sanctuary for her, a place for new hopes.

Her longing for a home came from her high
school years.
 
It was probably odd
to have been a good tennis player in as frozen a state as Michigan.
 
But she was.
 
When she was a little girl, in the humid summer months, her
mother hit balls with her against a wall behind the apartment building with two
racquets she’d found at a yard sale, and sometimes when she didn’t work
weekends, they’d play on a real court a couple of neighborhoods away.
 
 
Her mother had been a local star, she once admitted, playing
statewide before she’d gotten pregnant with Celeste.

In her public high school in the inner city,
Celeste was the only student who could play tennis.
 
She had teammates sometimes, whenever a kid from a warmer
state transferred into her district.
 
But their families wouldn’t last long into the next winter, when the ice
got so thick on car windows that they’d have to pour hot water from a tea
kettle onto the windshield just to be able to see through enough to drive.

Her life opened up the Spring before her
mother died, as a diesel bus slowly took her to her first off campus tennis
tournament, far into the suburbs of Bloomfield Hills, to a private girls’
school where she was the lone public school entrant.
 
She stared out the window as her transit bus crossed into a
greener world, past huge house after huge house, front lawns, trees bigger than
buildings in her neighborhood, giving her a sense of what she could wish for in
her own life.
 

That’s when she first really wanted a
house.
 
A home.
 
Walls that weren’t shared with
strangers.
 
Quiet that wasn’t
broken by loud TV or other people’s fights.
 

But she also hated that bus ride because being
poor wasn’t something she had ever noticed.
 
She got off that public bus and walked, passed by cars
driven by mothers with their blond dyed hair up in pony tails who handed juice
boxes over the seat to their kids who in turn stared out the window at Celeste,
walking alone on unused sidewalks, wearing her baggy t-shirt and gym shorts.

She had walked up the main path to the brick school
building that looked like all the mansions in the neighborhood outside the
school gate.
 
She made her way to
the tennis courts, knowing that her mother had taught her the skills to deserve
to be there, and that she’d even taught her how to fit in, in the way that she
was always a little more comfortable with the people she served in her jobs
than she was with those with whom she worked.
 

The ride home was worse, even though she had
the 1
^st
Place Varsity trophy tucked into her backpack.
 
Celeste walked back to the bus stop,
torn between her new dream homes and the terrible sorrow of being driven to her
own blocks where she had to watch for glass shards from broken liquor bottles
or dog excrement on the sidewalk.
 
She went to bed quickly that night.
 
Tightened her eyes to close out the memories, hardening her
heart to the trees and the lawns and the huge windows that did not look out onto
four neighboring apartment buildings.
 
Someday, I want a home, she had whispered so silently that her mother
hadn’t heard, until she fell asleep and woke up the next day with the
comforting inability to fully remember the sorrow of the bus ride.

She leafed through the interior décor
magazines on the dinette table and a smile crept across her face, ah, the
still-fulfilling joy of seeing lovely comfortable places to call home.
 
Somewhere warm all year round, she
thought, as she sipped the mellow sweetness of the grenadine in the rum of her
Mai Tai.

She considered calling Eddie and scrolled
through the contacts list on her cell phone until she saw his name come
up.
 
She’d never phoned him, but
she did log his number in when he first asked her to.
 
He was so sincere and yet vulnerable.
 

She looked at the bank screen again, at her
savings account.
 
She was proud of
herself.
 
She’d paid off her
college debt and saved from every paycheck for the eventual day when she’d set
up a house.
 
Her eyes wandered
around her dusky apartment.
 
She
was doing the right thing by being frugal, she thought, living in this
already-furnished place.
 
Because
some day, soon hopefully, she’d be sitting at a large wooden kitchen table she
picked out and paid for herself, her husband grinding sardines and squeezing
lemon juice, grating cheese for the freshly made Caesar salad she found herself
craving these days.
 
She wouldn’t
be drinking fruity drinks to remind her of her tropical dreams then, she
thought.
 
She’d uncork some
meaningfully expensive white wine and sip from a real wine glass, when she had
a house.

Frank, on the flipside, had a perfect condo,
tall ceilings, and windows overlooking a small park near the Detroit
River.
 
His bed had perfect navy
sheets and a big white damask comforter, the accent pillows had navy ribbon
trim.
 
His cooking was amazing and
he, too, she thought, would be best suited with a husband.

Frank, however, disagreed with her.
 
He said he was happy with his own place
and liked when a boyfriend left for the last time as much as he liked when they
came over for the first time.
 
If
escrow closed, he’d be moving soon, she knew.
 
Forcing her to rethink her own future.

Another swallow of the rum mixture and she
scrolled through her cell phone screen again, until ‘Eddie’ came up.
 

She looked around her clean but sparse kitchen,
her dark and empty sitting room and she pushed the button, phoning him for the
first time.
 
Why not, she thought,
the apartment could use the scent of an interested man.

Chapter Nine

His voice was smooth on the other end, probing
for who she was, how he knew her and she choked, realizing that she had blocked
her name and phone number on outgoing calls, so he didn’t know who was
calling.
 

He might not even know her full name, she
didn’t remember ever formally introducing herself to him through the plexiglas.
 
She stuttered but he cajoled until
finally she blurted out the phone company connection.

“You’re calling about my bill?
 
The phone’s back on, right?
 
I mean, you’re calling it, right?”

She laughed quietly and said ‘Yeah, sure, it’s
on.
 
You told me to call you
sometime.”

“Of course I did, darlin’.
 
I’ve got something going right now,
doing some business, but I can swing by maybe around 9 tonight?
 
Where do you live?”

And that is how easily Celeste found herself
about to be ‘not alone’ again, in a hot shower, then dressing again in her new
clothes for a date.

Swing by?
 

Celeste felt a lump in her throat.
 
She didn’t need a one-night stand.

Why hadn’t she put him off, asked to meet for
coffee over the next few days, maybe brunch.
 
No, not brunch, because she didn’t want to infect her
weekend with the togetherness and loneliness of different agendas, her longing
for a boyfriend and a man’s potential attempt at easy sex and his inevitable withdrawal
if his needs weren’t met.

Eddie walked into the office so intermittently
anyway, it wouldn’t be too painful to see him again in a few months, or maybe,
like some men, he’d just disappear leaving his cell phone or landline, and her,
behind.

Her mind raced, but the intimate high fives he
gave her against the glass made him different from most men she met at the
bar.
 
His camouflage pants did not
hide him in the whitewashed office as he waited in line to see her.
 
With his growing-out buzz cut, his
military solidity, he reeked of connection, integrity and that’s what attracted
her.
 
He walked towards, looked at
and interacted with her as if she mattered to him.
 
As if, when he walked out the double doors, she had left a
shadow image on the inner movie in his head.
 

So she wasn’t crazy, she thought, she’d had
maybe five or six conversations with him.
 
He always waited for her, always half smiled.
 
Frank sometimes said that Eddie looked beaten on by life,
but Celeste didn’t see it that deeply.
 
He seemed to energize himself when he came towards the window and any
exhaustion that Frank picked up on came across to her more as a softness, a
care, a presence.