There Is No Long Distance Now Page 8

  “How do you know these things?” Mandy had asked her.

  “I read.”

  Amal had also been to the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, which changed everything about how you looked at him. He had incredibly graceful handwriting. No drug addict would be able to write that well.

  “Amal, you look stunned,” said Mrs. Melchor. “Have you been struck by lightning between classes?”

  “Yes,” she said. “The lightning of ignorance.”

  Mrs. Melchor raised her eyebrows.

  Amal carefully eased into her chair and tried to smile. An art of its own, the rueful smile. This had been her favorite class all year. Mrs. Melchor paid astonishingly particular attention to every student—if someone had a raging headache, for example, by the end of class Mrs. Melchor would have noticed it on her own, without being told. She had a talent, a gift. She knew when people broke up, or even when their parents did. She was an Observer.

  Today they were working on their transcendentalism essays in class. Mrs. Melchor made them handwrite their papers, which pleased Amal because she had retained her penmanship skill. It would have pleased Thoreau, too. He might have made them write with pencil. Some of her friends complained bitterly, said they could only use a keyboard now. Their writing looked clumsy and erratic. Back in Lahore, all class papers had been handwritten, though some students had computers at home. Amal liked to make flourishes on the tails of her letters. They looked almost Arabic, graceful as swans at the park.

  Joe, in his geometry class, felt a sharp twinge in his side. Appendicitis?

  Did that girl do voodoo? Did they have voodoo wherever it was she came from?

  He felt a little restless about razzing her. Of course it wasn’t her fault, all the bad stuff that was going on in the news, in the world. What did she say her parents were, that time he accused them of living in caves? Scientists. She said they did medical research. Yeah, sure. Maybe if he were having appendicitis, they wouldn’t even fix him. She had said he should read newspapers from other countries online to see how the United States was depicted, then he might be less inclined to make stereotypical accusations.

  He said, “I don’t even read the school newspaper.”

  She said, “Part of your problem.” He didn’t have a problem. He had a pain in his side. Goddammit, she really upset him.

  Rafael had completely forgotten to do his assignment. Even though it was for Spanish class, the stupidest class ever, since he had spoken Spanish all his life, he had a hard time keeping up with the written part of it, and had failed to translate his Octavio Paz poem into English, or to write a paragraph about the process. And of course, of course, Mrs. Ramirez called on him first. “Rafael, will you read your translation please?” He was fanning through his messy papers as if looking for it. “Uh, I can’t find it,” he said.

  “We’ll wait,” said Mrs. Ramirez.

  He hated her.

  She knew.

  She knew he didn’t have it and she was torturing him in front of the class.

  “It was about—the moon,” he said. Everyone laughed. Half of them had gotten the moon poem and the other half had been assigned a longer Alberto Blanco poem about words in boats.

  “I don’t have it,” he finally said. He stopped rooting around like an animal and looked straight up at Mrs. Ramirez. Surly style. Try and make me.

  “Well, as you know, Rafael, we are counting homework as eighty percent of this class, since you all know I don’t like tests and think homework is a better learning tool. So far you are down around the zero percentile, señor, and your forthcoming grade will represent that.”

  “I already speak Spanish,” he said.

  “That will not get you an A if you don’t participate in the class and do your homework. That will not even get you a C.”

  He hated women. This morning his mom had said to his dad, “Even Brad Pitt does more chores than you do.” How did she know? Women always thought they were so smart.

  Reading Thoreau truly felt helpful to Amal. She didn’t care that he had lived 150 years before, or never married, or had dubious feelings about travel. He felt like a friend. He helped her steady herself. “I hope you will tell me if anyone is giving you trouble,” Mrs. Melchor whispered kindly, leaning down over Amal’s desk and staring at her encouragingly.

  Amal smiled back. “Thank you. I will.” But she knew she might not. The world was full of trouble. It was up to her to deal with it.

  Mailbox

  When Mr. Langston died at age sixty-eight, Mattie Hedges, age sixteen, sent Mrs. Langston a card.

  It had bluebonnets on it—“With Sympathy for Your Loss.” Mattie wrote, “Your husband was so nice to me. He was a great man to everybody. I am very sorry,” and signed the card. It seemed like the right thing to do.

  Mr. Langston directed the church choir. He told Mattie she was the best alto. Though he had retired some years ago from working at a bank, he still dressed every day with a suit and tie as if he were going to work. He combed his thick gray hair straight back, like Alec Baldwin. Even for Thursday choir practice, when everyone else dressed in their pajamas, practically—he liked to be neat.

  Young people loved him because he always looked for their good points. If they were eating pistachios from their pockets during practice, because they had skipped dinner, he defended them. When they felt estranged or disgusted, he’d ask kindly, “You need to talk about anything?” He didn’t give advice, either. That was the best part. He just listened and nodded. Almost miraculously, problems lifted. Mattie thought, When I get older, I want to do that too. Be around for other people. No directions or bossy suggestions—just an open ear. Then she thought, I could do that right now. But it didn’t seem to work well with people your own age. They wanted advice.

  On the day Mr. Langston died, Mattie was stringing YOUTH CELEBRATION! banners from the trees in front of the church. She was wearing a cheery, springy pink dress, feeling pretty for a change. Even a FedEx delivery man said, “Nice dress!”

  Why did it matter so much—to get a little compliment now and then?

  After she heard Mr. Langston died, she felt guilty about being self-absorbed with her outfit while someone very dear was leaving the earth. It seemed terrible.

  He had disappeared from choir practice without a word. No one said, He’s sick, he’s in the hospital. Why the secrecy? No one knew he’d had leukemia for years, “the quiet kind.” The choir tried to sing without a director at his funeral. They made a mess of it. The altos came in too soon.

  Mattie and some of her choir friends took chocolate chip cookies to Mrs. Langston at her home a few days after the big meal at the church. In the super-neat living room, Mattie stared at a few pictures of Mr. Langston when he was young. In the army. At their wedding. He looked gangly and awkward. He had looked more handsome old.

  Mrs. Langston received many consoling remembrances those first blurred weeks—also corn chowder, apple muffins, half a ham, bunches of yellow mums, and a white geranium. She tried to write a thank you to every person who was kind to her, hoping she hadn’t missed anybody, and lined the cards in a shoebox she found in Mr. Langston’s closet. It smelled like him, in a fresh man-shoe kind of way. The flood of attention reminded her of when she had retired from teaching school and received fourteen apple paperweights.

  A few weeks later, at the Family Dollar store, Mattie saw a thick purple box of cards on sale (from $2.99 to, yes, a dollar) and had an odd thought. Things would be calming down now over at the Langston home. The funeral was over, coffin in the ground. Would Mrs. Langston feel forgotten and lonesome? Would her mailbox be empty now?

  Thinking of You.

  Cheery Thoughts!

  You’re on My Mind.

  Just a Little Hello!

  It was a perfect cut-rate general Hope assortment.

  She bought it.

  She sent her second card to Mrs. Langston on the following Monday. He had died on a Monday. Monday would be the day.

&nb
sp; Later, at Dollar World and Dollar Tree, Mattie found more cut-rate cards. And at the Salvation Army, a complete vintage box from the 1950s with covered wagons. We’re on the trail to cheer you up!

  At one point Mattie had a drawer with about a hundred cards in it.

  Mattie enjoyed picking out stamps too—No flags, she’d tell the clerk. Any more Love stamps? Something cute or cozy? Kittens?

  She was seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. She went to college. She got married too young, to a baritone. Sending the cards every Monday became a sturdy thread through her days. She sent them first from her family home in Waco, then from Waxahachie (married), and Tyler (divorced).

  Mattie always added a note. Hope you’re doing well. We actually had snow and ice here in Tyler! Stay warm!

  Mrs. Langston didn’t save all the cards. They seemed to be part of a family. She replied about twice a year, as the years went on, at Christmas and Easter, when you had an excuse to talk to people. While writing Mattie’s address, she would get a slightly vague look—now, who was this person? Mr. Langston died a very long time ago, Mrs. Langston thought. Why was Mattie doing this? Once she even wondered, Had Mattie’s relationship with Mr. Langston been anything out of the ordinary? But that was impossible. He was a devout Baptist who saw his choir members as the children he never had.

  After seven years, at the International House of Pancakes where she went every Sunday after church, Mrs. Langston asked her waitress a strange question. “Have you ever sent more than one sympathy card to someone, after their spouse died?” The cards were resting oddly on her mind that day. The waitress said, “Ma’am, I don’t send cards,” and Mrs. Langston saw her consulting with other waitresses at the refill station, looking in her direction.

  Even after years had gone by, and Mattie had honestly forgotten how the tradition started, each Monday she closed her eyes for a little prayer, selected the next card, pulled a stamp off its adhesive backing, and started a new week.

  My Gospel

  In those days things were still beginning more than ending. A light fog in the morning wrapped the pecan trees and park benches with a softness the rest of the day would not repeat. At seven a.m. the old-fashioned bell from St. Mary’s Church echoed through the city. At exactly that moment, Leo picked the newspaper up in his front yard (he needed it with his breakfast), and paused to listen to the bell. There was hope in its clear note. Even if you didn’t go to church, you felt it.

  Leo’s life seemed simple to him. He liked to hear the bell, but he didn’t bow to it. So it was hard for him to understand Rainey’s complex subtleties, her desire to hide. What was she hiding from? She acted as if things were ending more than beginning. But she was only seventeen, too, so that didn’t make much sense.

  “Would you like to go to the White Rabbit?” he’d asked her, on the day they met over a dead bird. (It would always be a strange thing to tell people, even twenty years later, when they were married for years already and their little girl stood on her head on a yoga mat in their backyard.)

  Rainey stared at him. “What is it?”

  “What is it? A music club! You never went there? Exene Cervenka and Dex Romweber Duo are there this Friday, with a mystery guest. It’s a crazy place! Wear a coat, though, because sometimes it gets very cold in there.”

  He might as well have been inviting her to the mineral baths in Budapest, the way she stared at him.

  “I don’t know if I can.”

  “What about Grapes of Wrath—have you seen it yet?”

  Their school play was receiving rave reviews. Even university theater students and people from the community were packing the house. Leo ran the curtain and felt proud—also amazed.

  “I’ll have to think about it,” she said.

  Leo subscribed to Paste and Rolling Stone and No Depression. He loved reading about musicians and bands he had never heard of before. Sometimes he would track them down on YouTube or at Hogwild Music store later. The iPod was probably the best invention since the car. He played the saxophone and at Grapes of Wrath, offered a single haunting solo between acts. Two girls sang some old Dust Bowl songs after him. Rainey said later, it was that moment, when he came out onstage wearing raggedy gray pants with black suspenders and lifted his shiny sax, when her whole world changed. For him, the moment would remain the dead bird.

  His mom thought he had a destiny as a music critic, maybe a producer. She could never have guessed he would someday run the food bank.

  Ever since he was small, Leo had wanted to know more about the men and women sleeping under the I-37 bridge, stirring coals and twigs in the lid of an old metal trash can, lining up for new used shoes in the Avenue E parking lot. He wanted them to have everything they needed—food, shelter, security—but also, he wanted them to have more music.

  The struggling people of Haiti, after the earthquakes, had been singing in the streets—old gospel songs, hymns. News reporters seemed broken up about this as they described it. But of course, Leo thought. We need music when we’re happy but even more when we’re sad or confused. Good music lifting us out of our skins. Unexpected symphonies. Put some blues there, under the bridge, and things will feel better.

  Leo had heard that street lamp poles in Tokyo played soft music at twilight—he was anxious to travel there to confirm this for himself. (They would go to Japan for their honeymoon. And, it was true. Rainey’s eyes blinking madly with tears as a light pole, for god’s sake, played an old tune her father had loved.)

  Once while Leo was waiting in a hospital as his dad had surgery, he played the same round of songs by Bright Eyes over and over. After that he couldn’t play him for a while. But he felt as if Conor Oberst were his personal friend who had gotten him through a lot of worry one day. When Rainey told him she had been heartbroken to learn from nurses at the hospital where her father died that he had played classical music on the remote-control radio in his hands all night before he departed, Leo asked, “Why heartbroken? That’s beautiful! Your father knew how to find beauty when he needed it. He was smart.”

  Shortly after they met, Leo and Rainey went to see an amazing movie, Me and Orson Welles. Although Rainey objected softly to the title’s grammar, they both adored the film and decided the music of 1937 had a profoundly grounding effect. They came out of the theater and wanted to walk home instead of driving. But what would they do about the car? It was his dad’s old Outback. He couldn’t just leave it parked at the mall.

  She stared at him with amazement. Had she ever met anyone more enthusiastic? His brown hair tumbled over his collar. When he was speaking, his hair bounced. At the same time he was very low-key. Rainey decided she could trust him that evening.

  They wished they had long black overcoats and could walk to an old-fashioned diner right then, in the dark, humming.

  On Valentine’s Day they went to a grocery store together and while she was looking for apples and cheese for their picnic by the river, he was standing near the onions with his eyes closed, tapping his foot, saying, James Taylor mellow oldies in the produce aisle, this is the best, really, makes you feel like no time is wasted, it even makes me hungrier, let’s get bananas and walnuts, too.

  New Man

  Mom, Dad, I think I got baptized.

  I don’t know what happened really but suddenly someone was throwing me into a pool of water and praying over me and it was really surprising, I mean, I know you will be surprised, too, because I didn’t know it was coming.

  I shouldn’t have been listening to my iPod in the bus. I think they made an announcement that I missed.

  When our guys rode over there, I thought we were just going to practice on the other team’s field, you know, we had all our gear and we were really tired after school and Coach said he wanted us to hear someone give a talk, I thought like a motivational speaker, after practice, and I put the music on after that and didn’t hear anything else he said if he said more, but I think that was all of it. I know, I know. The bus was making a lot of noise with that c
onstruction on the highway and we had to detour on the access road a couple of times, it was really bumpy, I closed my eyes and when I opened them, Randy was holding his stomach but he didn’t really get sick, it wasn’t that bad, I’m sorry, are you mad at me for what I’m telling you?

  Of course I saw it was a church when we got there, how could I not see it was a church? Churches are pretty recognizable. It wasn’t a big church. It was like one of those back roads churches. Well, I thought the speaker was going to be there. We sat in the pews awhile. No, I didn’t listen to the iPod then, of course not. That would definitely be a ticket to demerits, are you kidding?

  Coach was up in the front row, I could see the back of his head.

  I don’t remember anyone asking my opinion about anything, no way, not asking, like, did I want to do it, did I not want to do it, nothing.

  It was mostly Bible lessons and the speaker was pretty dramatic, not dead and whiny like some of the preachers I’ve seen, no offense to either of you, I know you love your preacher and your priest, but face it, they’re yours, not mine. I inherited them from you. No way I would have started going to either of your churches if you had given me the choice, I mean that sincerely, I would not just have been walking down the street and stepped into either of your churches and thought, Wow, this is great, I’ll come back here.

  Why are you crying, Mom?

  I mean that very kindly.

  You have to respect my own opinion, right? I mean, if I have to respect yours?

  Well maybe not, okay. But I had no idea I was going to get thrown into a vat any moment there, seriously, it is not my style, when we got up to walk down the aisle I thought they wanted us to sign something, like a guest book, or to shake hands, like we do with the other team after a game, it was no big deal, no one said, This is going to be a life-changing moment, no, that’s not what I mean, I don’t feel my life is changed, yes, he talked about rebirth issues, that we were getting born again in Christ, but doesn’t everyone always talk about that? It’s pretty routine, like a pep talk, isn’t it? I mean, do you really get born every time you say “born”—no way. That would be confusing. I mean, you thought you were already happening and you had your legs and body and everything and then you’re just a little baby all over again, it would be really tedious. It’s just a simile. Or a metaphor. Of course I didn’t want to get born again, it’s only Monday. We just started school last week. I just found all my seats in class and everything.