Road to Paradise. Paullina Simons

like, and I find it surprising, to put it euphemistically, that any man would leave home for a woman like Emma, who, with her thick ankles, square low-heeled shoes, gray stiff helmet of hair, and matronly dresses, couldn’t engender passion in a rutting stud dog, much less a male human being. She simply seems too Puritan for love of any kind.

      What’s interesting, in a purely academic way, of course, is that my father also left. I assume it was soon after my mother, because I don’t remember him. What’s odd is I do remember her, like a pale ghost with warm arms. He left and then died somewhere on the road. That’s all Emma told me, wanted to tell me; that’s all I asked, wanted to ask.

      Agnes told Gina who told me he did not leave a letter. Jed Sloane left, died, and left me with “the whore.”

      And she raised me.

      Who was my father?

      Who was my mother?

      And if Emma is no good, and my father left her, why am I still with her?

      More important, why is she still with me?

      Does she feel guilt over me? Do I ask this of her when we’re cleaning the bathrooms of the French U.N. diplomats?

      Emma, my father left; why did you stay?

      My mother left; why did you stay?

      Can you answer me as we wax the floors and cut up onions?

      If they all went away, walked away, why didn’t you walk away?

      I could not fathom what her answers might be.

      Eventually I began to feel that the time for questions had sort of passed; nonetheless, I felt that every day I had to tread carefully, to make sure I walked around the gullet where the fragments of answers had fallen.

      Question: irretrievably fallen?

      But I have this to add in conclusion. My friend from across the road, Debbie, had been spending a lot of time with us this year. She had two parents, a mother, a father, three brothers, a Beagle; her mother was home with the kids, her dad worked as a manager at the Larchmont hardware store. And yet Debbie, who had a whole family plus pet, was over with petless me and Emma; why? She helped us in the evening, watched TV, and though she lived across the street, would often ask if she could stay over. Emma always said yes. Just yes. No less, no more. Yes.

      A few months ago, Debbie finally told me that her father was sick. Our neighbor, Ralphie, was driving him every week to the hospital. Turned out his liver was shot. He needed a transplant in a hurry but couldn’t get one despite having a wife, four kids and no job: he was a drunk, and no one gave fresh liver to alcoholics. So he would drink, scream at his wife and kids, and be sick. When he was sober, Ralphie drove him to the hospital for kidney dialysis and tests. Debbie’s dad was a drunk for twenty years. Ralphie drove him to the hospital for his last two months. One day Debbie’s dad didn’t come home from the hospital, and Debbie’s mom took Debbie and the one brother who was still home and left, possibly for Florida. I missed them when they went. They had seemed like such a nice family.

      Emma and I get up at six, prepare the house for morning, work silently. I make the coffee, she empties the dishwasher, we wipe down counters, I take out the trash. My bus comes at seven-thirty. Emma speaks then. “Do you have what you need?”

      And I speak, too. “Yes.”

      I took typing, so I could have one actual skill when I graduated. I got a D-minus. I do my homework during my free period because at home there’s too much to do. After track I take the late bus and help Emma with dinner, with clean-up, with laundry. Our work is done by eight. The Lambiels like us because we’re quiet, and they’re quiet. The husband is a diplomat and the wife a flight attendant; she’s never home, and he drinks the whole time she’s away. Their only child, Jeanne, a blonde all-that, went to our school for about five minutes, but then, feeling rather ignored by the people she held in such contempt, transferred to a private school for children of foreign diplomats. Certainly when I’m in her house, she doesn’t speak to me. Sometimes she says, “Shell-BEEEE, get us some pop cooorn, s’il vous plaît.”

      Okay, so the French chick who can barely speak English drawls out my name like the boys at the ice-cream parlor when she wants me to fetch and carry. Nice.

      Six days a week, three hours a day, I run. Our meets are Saturday afternoons. On Sundays, our day of rest, Emma and I cook for the week for us and the Lambiels so all we have to do Monday to Friday is heat stuff up.

      If people ask, I say I’m a Christian because Christianity is the one religion where you don’t have to do anything to still be a member. I like that, and since I don’t want to say I’m nothing, I call myself a Christian.

      I have never been inside a place of worship of any kind.

      I have never had outside work. Emma’s been giving me a little money for helping her. I’ve saved five dollars a week for as long as I can remember, and last I looked, my bank account had $2400 in it. My one continued expense has been my running shoes—new ones every three months. Emma pays half. My few leftover bucks go frivolously on hair gel, mascara and lipgloss, Milky Ways and Love’s Baby Soft.

      Two weeks ago, Jeanne Lambiel was caught by her father stealing twenty dollars from his wallet when she wanted to go out with her passé French friends. He screamed at her for half the night; the whole neighborhood heard him. Why would you steal from me, he kept yelling. Why? You have thirteen million in your trust fund! And Jeanne said calmly, “Yes, but, Papa, I needed not thirteen million but twenty bucks.”

      I got away from Emma and the Lambiels by running. I’ve been cross country and track and field from the time I was ten. I run the mile and the two-mile. Once I ran the mile so fast I had to go to the hospital. They thought I was dying. So much for go all out, try your best, do your best, stop at nothing. Give 110 percent. Well, I gave 110 percent and it almost killed me. So you can just imagine the kind of life lesson I took away from that: a little less than your best, Shelby Sloane—that will have to be good enough.

3

       The Gift

      On my eighteenth birthday in May of 1981, which happened this year to fall on a Saturday, Emma said, unduly excited (Emma never got even duly excited about things), “Come outside with me. I want to show you something.”

      I followed her down the stairs and out. In the sap-covered driveway on this Saturday May day, parked behind the Lambiels’ government-issue Mercedes, stood a little yellow Mustang. I say little, but to me, it seemed gargantuan like a house, like an airplane hangar. A bright yellow hangar. It had two black stripes running over the roof and hood. It looked both classic and stunning, as if I knew anything about Mustangs. Except we once saw a documentary on them a few years back, and I might have mentioned that it looked like a cool-cat car, but what did I know, I was thirteen at the time, and Emma had been half asleep.

      I stood silently, staring.

      “It’s for you.” She coughed. “You like it?” She looked alternately exquisitely excited and morbidly uncomfortable. I think she might have been uncomfortable about being so excited. “I wanted to get you something special. You know—for your eighteenth.”

      “You bought me a car?”

      “Not just a car, Shel. A 1966 Shelby Mustang!”

      I was dumbstruck.

      “Go ask your friends tonight about a Shelby Mustang. They’ll tell you.”

      What it cost her I have no idea; when I asked, she wouldn’t say. She was very proud of it. “Engine’s clean,” she kept repeating. “V-8 350 horsepower. Transmission’s good. No rust.” And then laughed