Virtual Silence Read online

  Yet Ida was unfailingly enthusiastic about everything they did. “Oh, how lovely,” she would cry, and then she would point out what was unique in each of them. “You’ve learned to mix colors!” she exclaimed once when a little boy who had begun with a green fish had a change of heart and scribbled yellow over it. “Does everybody see this? Green and yellow make blue. Thomas discovered that, all by himself.”

  The children brought the completed projects to a table at the far end of the dingy basement, where the supplies were kept. Between it and the wall behind it there were several huge flattened cardboard boxes, the kind in which appliances come packed. Ida planned to cut them along the folds, and then have the older children paint mountains on the pieces. I had written her a note one day, to ask why she didn’t just buy poster board, which would be easier to paint on and uniform in size. But the key word, of course, was “buy,” and I never bothered to show it to her. Likewise, the paint cans, which were lined up beneath the table, had come from Ida’s and Flo’s basements, the pastel remnants from children’s rooms, trim paints, and several different shades of white.

  I was sitting back there one afternoon, collecting sequined butterflies from the three-and four-year-olds and turning each over to make sure there was a name on it, when the pastor of the church came down, almost scaring me to death with his bulk, his loose black frock, and his noiselessness. He paused at the bottom of the stairs for a moment, with a finger on his lip, smiling behind it, waiting, I suppose, for an invitation. Then, in spite of the fact that Flo, whose jaw had fallen, did not invite him in, he moved forward, slowly, looking over the children’s shoulders as if someone had appointed him to oversee their work.

  Ida had been bent over one of the boys, but when she saw him approaching between the tables, she straightened and greeted him. He returned her cheerful greeting with a nod. When he had passed her, she followed him. “Forgive me my inquisitiveness,” he said without turning. “I hear the children, but I never see them. I couldn’t restrain myself any longer.”

  When he had gone the length of the work tables, his gaze fell on the table in the back where I was standing. From where he stood, the piles of projects must have looked like mounds of litter. He cocked his head, squinted at them, and then came forward for a better look.

  When the parents came to pick up their children, Flo brought them a clipboard and had them sign out. This formality—unnecessary since we knew all of their faces—intimidated them, and they lingered near the doorway while Flo collected their offspring. The pastor was the first man that I knew of to actually cross the basement floor. What right had he? He had no child here. The day-care center, Flo had told me, had nothing to do with the church, no affiliation at all. We simply rented space from them. I tried to make eye contact with Ida, to relate my indignation, but she was prancing at his side now, wringing her hands and smiling moronically while she waited for his response to the projects.

  Finally, he began to rave, which further infuriated me. He simply couldn’t believe that such wonderful things were happening right in the basement of his very own church. He said it was like finding out that Santa’s elves had quit the North Pole and come to work in Rock Ridge without his knowing it—an inappropriate simile, I thought, for a man of the cloth. He picked up a paper-bag bunny. One of its ears had fallen over and its cotton-ball tail was dangling by a single fiber. “I’d love to give this rascal a home upstairs in my office,” he said.

  Ida bit her lip. “Oh, Father, I’m sure the children would love to have you adopt some of their animals, but you’ll have to wait until Christmas.”

  He put the bunny back and turned to look at her. “What happens then?”

  Her eyes flashed with pride. “Well, we’re going to make a display, a kind of replica of nature right here in your basement. It’ll be ready for our Christmas party, which will be the last school day before the vacation.” She took a step closer to him. “The parents enjoy it as much as the kids do,” she confided.

  The pastor turned from her to survey the table again, probably wondering, as I had many times, how Ida would manage to assemble all this junk in such a way as to replicate nature, unless it would be at its very worst—a hurricane, earthquake, or some other natural disaster. “All God’s gifts,” Ida added encouragingly, “for all the parents to come and see.”

  He turned back towards her and nodded, as if he was beginning to understand. “Yes,” he mumbled, “because we’re made so that we love first when we see them painted …”

  Ida screwed up her face, confused. Although his back was to me, I imagined that he was smiling at her, condescendingly. As he didn’t bother to inform her that he had been quoting, I extracted a purple crayon from Peter, the little boy who was standing beside me, and scribbled Browning on the back of his butterfly and held it up for Ida to see. But Peter noticed first and exclaimed, “Hey, that’s not my name!” so shrilly that the pastor turned abruptly to see what the commotion was about.

  He looked at me, directly, for the first time. “I have an idea,” he said suddenly, turning back to Ida. “How about setting up your replica of nature up in the church, where not only the parents but my whole congregation can admire it? Would you consider doing that?”

  When Ida didn’t answer right away, he added, “Think of how good it would be for business. You’ve got plenty of room down here, and I’ve got plenty of parishioners who send their children as far away as Centertown for day care. If they saw the kind of work you were doing …”

  “I’ll have to talk to Flo,” Ida said gingerly, “but it might not be a bad idea.”

  Since I had nothing else to spend my money on, it took me only three weeks to accumulate the $160 that I had decided would be sufficient. I prepared two notes, the first of which said only, I need to talk to you alone. I handed it to Tom Heely not in the cafeteria, where he would surely have passed it around for the amusement of his friends, but in English class, where he had none. He opened it up immediately, read it, and nodded expressionlessly. When I looked away from him, I caught Terri dropping her gaze from our transaction.

  He and Frankie were standing near my locker at the end of the day. As soon as they saw me approaching, they rolled their eyes and exchanged identical smirks. “I guess she changed her mind about going out with me,” Tom Heely said for my benefit.

  I put my books down to dig for my pen in my bag, but when I straightened up, Tom was holding a pen out for me, and a pad too on which he had written, Yes or no, and if yes, your place or mine? Frankie, who had leaned over to read it, laughed wildly.

  “Look,” I said, my voice hoarse from disuse, “you’ve got a brain. You know what ‘alone’ means. Get rid of him.”

  Tom looked startled for a second, but he recovered quickly, resuming his smirk. “You heard her,” he said to Frankie, who was still laughing. “She wants to be alone with me.”

  Frankie turned and went down the hall, shaking his head, and I handed the second note to Tom.

  It was written in pencil—printed, actually—and unsigned; no one could prove that I had written it. He took it over by the window, into the shaft of sunlight there. When I saw his smirk vanish, I knew he had finished and I snatched it back. “Why?” he said.

  I only stared at him; it was none of his business.

  “No way,” he said. “I’m not into that.”

  I wrote on the back of the note, I’ve got $160.

  “It’s not the money,” he said.

  Okay, forget it, I wrote.

  I picked up my books and turned to my locker. He waited, quiet for once, while I finished up my business. “Listen,” he said. “All kidding aside, I’d really like to get to know you better. I think we’ve got stuff in common.”

  “What?” I whispered. I was too defeated to muster the energy to write.

  “We both like Wordsworth,” he said, and he offered me a half smile that would have been touching on any other face.

  “I don’t go out with drug dealers,” I replied,
and I started down the hall.

  “You’ve got balls, girl, after what you just asked me for!” I heard him cry out behind me.

  I had no alternative plan unless I could convince Tom Heely in the days to come, which I fully intended to try to do. Otherwise, I had saved up the money for nothing. I stood at the top of the stairs entertaining the idea of giving up my job in the basement below, although for only a moment. The truth was that I liked it. I liked the kids and I liked Ida, and even, most of the time, Flo. And besides, I had nothing else to do in the afternoons. If not for everything that had happened, Sharon, Terri, and I might have joined some of the after-school activities by now, the debate team or the chess club (yes, they had eventually got me to play), or maybe even gone out for girls’ soccer. But Sharon was gone, Terri might as well have been, and I myself had no more desire to be in the building when the greater din was gone than I had to be exposed to the whims of passers-by out on the sports field. In the church wing I felt safe, or nearly so.

  As if he had read my thoughts, the pastor appeared in the hall just then, having come out of his office, his brows furrowed in concentration and his head bent. I turned to hurry down the stairs, but he noticed me and called out, “Miss, wait!”

  I poked my head back out. Now he was smiling and holding out some papers. “What a coincidence. I was just praying that God would send someone to help me out.…”

  I shook my head to let him know that either he or God had made a huge mistake, but his smile didn’t falter. “You work downstairs, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Listen, we’ve got this food in there.” He thumbed in the direction of the conference room. “All these canned goods that parishioners have donated. They have to be delivered before Thanksgiving to the poor people in the area. I rounded up two boys to help me, but one gets lost every time he goes out and the other has never shown up at all. I’ll pay you, of course.”

  In spite of the fact that I was flattered to think that he realized I was old enough to drive, I pointed at him, so as to ask why he didn’t just make the deliveries himself. He looked so astonished that I expected him to say, “Who? Me?” but instead he whispered, “Don’t you talk, dear?”

  Something in his tone made me quake, and I had to gulp back what felt like a rising sob. Then I remembered Herman Gardener saying, “Are you all right, young lady?”

  I shook it off. There was no resemblance between the two men. The pastor was twice his size, nosy, and condescending too. I took out my trusty pad and scribbled, I’ve taken a vow of silence, temporarily.

  He beamed when he read it. “Why, then, you’re just the one! The people who receive these donations don’t necessarily want the public to know about it.”

  Yes, I thought, I’m perfect for the job. I imagined driving down a long dirt driveway, approaching a shack where one window was opened, the barrel of an extended gun swiveling to follow my path.

  “You could use my car,” he said.

  I shook my head.

  “It’s a Toyota. Midnight blue, I think it’s called. It has a tape machine.”

  When I shook my head again he looked up at the ceiling, as if in response to the voice of some unseen entity. “It’s heated,” he added.

  I rolled my eyes. He laughed. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  I wrote it down.

  “Ginny, listen, I need help. An hour a day, for the next three, after you get done downstairs, of course. You don’t have to go into anyone’s house, just leave the bags on their doorsteps. I promise you, you’ll be rewarded for this, and I’m not just talking about the few dollars I’ll be able to give you.”

  The notion of an intangible reward gave me pause, not that I actually believed in that stuff. But the fact was, Ida needed to attract more clients, so that she wouldn’t have to continue paying me from her own paycheck, and now the pastor had come down and offered, when you got right down to it, free advertising. Had he been aware of her dilemma? Was he psychic? Nah, impossible, I decided. And I was about to put my pen to paper one last time when Ida came charging up the stairs.

  “Ginny!” she exclaimed when she saw me. “Father, hello. Ginny, I was just about to phone your house. You’re late!” She laughed and clapped her hand to her chest. “Not that I mind. That’s not what I mean. I was worried.”

  “It’s my fault,” the pastor said, and he proceeded to explain his appeal.

  Ida shook her head all the while. “Oh, father, I don’t think that’s such a good idea. I mean, not the part about giving food to the poor, obviously. I mean for Ginny to do it, to go to the houses of strangers. I mean, she’s had some … well … disconcerting …”

  She paused, biting her bottom lip. The pastor, meanwhile, looked at me with renewed interest.

  “Oh, Ginny,” she continued, her eyes darting back and forth between us. “I am sorry. Listen to me. I’m not your mother. Of course she can go if she wants to. In fact, I’ll escort her. I drive her home anyway, so there’s no big deal. We’ll just make a few stops on our way. It’ll be fun.”

  It was fun, actually, and more rewarding than the pastor could possibly have imagined.

  Each evening, just before we closed up, the pastor came down for Ida’s keys. Then he carried the bags out himself and placed them in the back of her vechile. He gave us a map on which he had marked each of our destinations with a red pen. The houses of the poor were not all in one area, as is the case in more suburban locales, but spread throughout Rock Ridge, many on back roads that I had never been to before. For our convenience, he tried to keep each night’s deliveries in the same area.

  Before we set out, we stopped at McDonald’s for fries and sodas—something to tide us over until dinner, Ida said. The first night, I grabbed her arm when I saw that she intended to get out and go in. She understood immediately, closed the car door, and drove around to the drive-through window instead. After receiving our sack of food, we pulled over to the far corner of the lot and ate while she studied the map, determining the best way to proceed.

  We chatted while we drove, or rather she did. As I wasn’t expected to comment, I had the luxury of either paying attention or not. Ida was all atwitter at that time of day. “Did you hear how Philip squealed when I commented on how well he’s staying in the lines lately?” she said, and, “Oh, that Pearl! What a sweetheart she is, bringing me in a sea shell to listen to after she heard me tell Flo how much I love the ocean.”

  When she was quiet, she smiled, so that I knew she must still be thinking about the kids. And when she changed the subject, it was usually to talk about her daughters, Lilly and Diane. She couldn’t wait until Thanksgiving to see them. And I would see them too, she reminded me in a voice that suggested it would a blessing beyond measure, since Mom and I would be dining with the Newet family that day.

  The first two evenings, Ida got out of the car, and because she didn’t like the idea of leaving the goods on the stoop, where they might freeze or fall into the wrong hands, she rang the bell once before she departed. At one of the houses—a small cottage really—an old man with a rake appeared from behind a tree just as we were pulling into the driveway. He looked angry at first, but when he saw Ida getting out with a bag, his face lit up. He dropped his rake, rushed to take the bag, and then spent a full five minutes thanking her profusely. When she got back in the car, her eyes were moist. “You know what?” she said. “I’m going to make an extra pumpkin pie Thanksgiving morning and have one of the girls drive it over to him.”

  The goodwill thing was contagious, and I began to catch some of it myself. Sure, Bev’s parents and brothers would be eating without her, and Herman Gardener alone with his daughter, and the waitress’s husband with his two young children. Sure, it was probably all my fault (I didn’t really believe in my anger theory, though I couldn’t lose it either), but here I was, making up for it in some small way, paying my dues.

  A few of the houses that we stopped at were small capes like my own, with well-raked yards and
evidence that there had been summer gardens. More often we pulled up in front of shacks, cottages that had once been vacation cabins but had since been sold and were now in various stages of disrepair. Though we saw no shotguns, there were often barking dogs, and not all of the faces that appeared at the windows were friendly.

  Our third night out was bitterly cold, and Ida, who was wearing her gray poncho with the two buttons missing at her throat, was working on a virus. She had had her inhaler in and out of her nose so many times during the course of the afternoon that her nostrils had actually widened, or so it seemed to me. So, when we arrived in front of a house that was completely dark, I stopped her before she could get out and pointed to myself. “Are you sure?” she asked.

  I was quick about my business. Ida popped the hatch and I ran around the back and got out the bag for a Mrs. Davies. I deposited it on the stoop, rang the bell, and jumped back into the Four-Runner. Ida was just about to hit the gas when a light went on, and we saw the face of a little girl appear in the window. She looked at the bag on the stoop and then, bouncing up and down, probably on a sofa, waved deliriously. “You know,” Ida said sadly, “I bet her mother isn’t home. I bet she’s been sitting in the dark waiting for her since she got off the school bus. She can’t be more than what? Five? Six?” She shrugged. “Well, what do you do when you can’t afford a sitter or day care?”

  I knew what it was like to sit in the house with the lights off lest anyone should guess you are in. Mom and I had, at my insistence, done just that on Halloween. She was good about it at first. She put away all the candy she had bought, except the Milky Ways, which we planned to snack on, and we sat side be side on the sofa listening to the cars slow down in front of our house and then pull into the driveway of the house next door. But when the traffic let up, Mom began to complain. She was bored, she said. Couldn’t she just put on one little light so that she could at least read a magazine? “No,” I was forced to say since she wouldn’t have seen my head shaking in the dark. She sighed. She had herself another Milky Way. Then she got up and made her way to her bedroom, her fingertips raking the walls, cursing when she bumped into things. When she returned, she was wearing the headband flashlight that Dad used to wear when he had to go under the sink to fix the pipes. “Will this do?” she asked. I couldn’t see her face—she had the light tilted toward the ceiling—but I could hear in her voice that she was crying.