Broken Ground Read online

Helen glances at me. “Oh, sweetheart.” She’s heard me calling out in the night; she’s been startled awake by my bad dreams; she’s held me while I cried. Her expression softens. “Come on.” She pulls a silk handkerchief from her dainty pocketbook and wipes the smeared lipstick from my mouth and chin, then links her arm through mine. “Let’s find us a seat where there’s less scrutiny.”

  We show our student identification cards to the barrel-chested, blue-uniformed campus guard at the gate, whose jolly “Welcome, ladies,” uttered through the bristles of his gray mustache, belies his threatening appearance. Helen navigates us through the crowd gathered at the concession stand and onto the sidelines. From there, she leads me halfway up the wooden bleachers, where we sit down. Soon she’s engrossed in a conversation with a fellow bearing a blue-and-gold Fighting Spartans pennant. To my relief, they allow me to keep to myself. This first football game will be my last; I might as well take in the scene. It does feel good to be outside on this balmy, clear day. The warm breeze carries the minty hint of eucalyptus. Flatlander that I am, I’m struck, as always, by the mountains that ring Pasadena. And there, in the distance, rises the Rose Bowl, a horseshoe-shaped structure that dwarfs this little stadium. The Rose Bowl glints in the sun, winking whitely at me. I’ve heard that in a few months the mountains will be white, too—capped with snow—but for now they’re as brown and dry as the turf of the football field before us. Turns out Pasadena—all of California—is also weathering a drought. The dust isn’t nearly as pervasive as it is back in Texas or Oklahoma; there are no black blizzards here. But the amount of water it would take to make this field green is beyond the university’s means. The surrounding parks and lawns have gone brown, too; they will stay that way or get worse until streams flow in the arroyos again. Only flowers flourish under the care of watchful gardeners—and there are fewer flowers than usual, I’ve heard (though to my eyes, vivid blooms accent every open space on campus). Flores. That’s what the gardeners say, tending the beds.

  Flores. Arroyos. Seven weeks ago, I would have known these things only as flowers and canyons. But now, without even trying, I have Spanish words on the tip of my tongue. The language is everywhere, on street signs, churches, and missions, in shops and cafés. And everywhere, people speak it, not English. I should have expected this, given my experience at the depot on the night of my arrival, but the fact continues to take me by surprise. “What country are we in again?” I sometimes ask Helen and she sometimes asks me. But we’ve learned that California was Mexican Territory about as recently as Oklahoma was Indian Territory. So I guess that explains why.

  Helen clutches my arm. “It’s starting!”

  The game, I realize, blinking at the football field. That’s what she means. That’s why we’re here, after all.

  The bleachers grow crowded as the game goes on and on and on. Though Helen tries to explain the rules, talking of downs and yards, offense and defense, I grow antsy. My books, the exam, the letter I owe Miss Berger—these things seem to exert a magnetic pull. Finally, as the crowd’s shouting crescendos, Helen leans over and tells me that we’re nearly at the end of the second quarter. “Halftime’s coming right up!” From her tone, this is a good thing. “Does it take another half to make a whole?” I ask in all seriousness. Helen gapes at me and then laughs. Her laughter is my answer.

  I try to watch the cheerleaders. Young men wearing blue and gold sweaters and neatly pressed slacks flip young women wearing blue and gold sweaters and shin-length skirts into the air. There’s additional gymnastics and a whole lot of shrieking. U-N-I-O-N S-P-A-R-T-A-N-S! Repeatedly, they spell the words, until I can’t think what they mean. I lean my elbows on my knees, clap my hands over my ears, stare blindly at their antics. Let my posture connote relaxation for Helen. Actually, I’m trying to muffle the din and let my mind wander anywhere but here.

  My mind wanders to wondering, to if. If Charlie had boarded the Antelope with me, if we’d changed trains in Kansas City together, if we’d traveled across the rest of the country to Los Angeles, if we’d made our way through the train station there (marveling that the earth could heave and quake as it did less than a year ago, leaving such disrepair), if we’d settled into one of the college apartments set aside for married students, if we’d plunged into freshman year together, if we’d been older than most everyone else together, if we’d been together . . . would we have spent this Saturday afternoon taking a break from our studies? Would we have gone to a football game? Would we have felt more at home at homecoming together than I feel on my own? Or would we have stayed in our apartment, shared popcorn for an afternoon snack, quizzed each other for tests, napped when we got tired? Would we have said “Our bed is an island”? Would we have drifted together on an ocean of our own making?

  “For heaven’s sake!” Helen whispers urgently into my ear. “You’re shivering. Are you okay, Ruth?”

  I hug myself tight.

  “You’re cold like you get.” A statement not a question. Helen knows. She puts her arm around my shoulders. “Look, it’s halftime. You stay put, and I’ll go get us some hot cider and donuts. They make the donuts fresh here. They’re always nice and warm.”

  With the pennant-waving fellow at her side, Helen descends the bleachers at a brisk clip. Much of the crowd has proceeded her, leaving me and a few other stray souls to mind belongings and seats.

  The university marching band is milling about the field, playing a jazzed-up version of a popular ballad I’ve heard on the radio but can’t name, when from beneath me comes a rustling. A whimper follows, and the rustling intensifies to scrabbling. I start—thoughts of rodents, nothing like the library’s mice, more like rats, maybe raccoons or skunks, given the volume of the scrabbling—and the heel of my left shoe, Helen’s shoe, a fancy blue-and-white spectator pump about one size too big for me, catches on the riser beneath my feet. The shoe drops down into darkness below. There’s a thud as the shoe makes contact, another whimper, and then more scrabbling.

  “No,” I say, as if the shoe will hear and obey, magically reverse its fall and slip itself back onto my foot. These spectator pumps cost more, I’m sure, than all the shoes that I’ve ever owned put together. They’re supple, finely stitched leather fit for a debutante, which is exactly what Helen was. If only I’d resisted borrowing them. Vanity, vanity. Now I’m going to have to climb down into the dark and deal with whatever is there. Let this be a lesson to me.

  I hoist the hem of Helen’s dress and kneel where my feet should be, take a deep breath, ready myself for the drop. Then, as my eyes adjust to the dim, the sun shifts, emerging from behind a cloud to filter in thin planks between the risers.

  Children. Children, not rats. A boy in particular, holding Helen’s blue and white shoe. He tips his head up to meet my eyes, and the sunlight glances off his black hair, illuminates his round, brown face. He wears small wire-rimmed spectacles, and behind these, his eyes are black and almond-shaped, with lashes so long they’re noticeable even from this distance, in this dusty light. He wears a short-sleeved shirt, buttoned to the throat, and belted trousers; the sunlight glints on his shined shoes and on the lenses of the spectacles, momentarily obliterating his eyes. He looks to be about nine or ten years old.

  The other children gather closer around the boy. I do a quick head count. All together, there are six kids of various ages. There’s even a toddler, cradled in the arms of an older girl. They look to be Mexican. They watch me warily. Even the toddler appears guarded and anxious.

  “I accidentally dropped my shoe.” I keep my voice light, trying to put them at ease.

  “We weren’t going to take it.” The boy goes up on the balls of his feet and lifts the shoe as high as he can. “Are you able to reach it?” There’s not a trace of an accent in his voice. He sounds more Californian than I do, with my Oklahoma drawl.

  “I’ll try.” I’d lie down on the riser, but there’s the problem of Helen’s beautiful dress. So I bend over and reach down as far as I’m able. The boy
stretches his arm, too, but there’s still a good twelve inches between us.

  “I’ll throw it to you,” he says.

  “Gently.”

  He nods. “Underhand.”

  We smile at each other like conspirators.

  Then the rustling starts again. The children murmur and mill around the boy; the older girl clasps the toddler in one arm, points at something off to the side. They are not smiling now, not one of them, not the boy holding Helen’s shoe, either. “Run,” I hear one of them say. They tug at one another and at the boy, and now they cry out, yanking at his shirt so that it comes untucked, pulling and pulling until he drops Helen’s shoe. In a scramble of limbs, they are gone. There is Helen’s shoe, lying below me among the litter. The stands quiver with the weight of the returning crowd.

  “What are you doing?”

  It’s Helen, standing over me, a steaming paper cup in each hand. Cider. I can smell it from here. The fellow behind her carries a grease-stained bag that must hold donuts.

  I force a smile. “I’m having a bit of an adventure.”

  Feet slap hard against the ground beneath me, and there is the boy again. In a single swift gesture, he grabs Helen’s shoe and tosses it up, underhand.

  I catch it. “Bravo!” I shout, delighted.

  “Hey, you! Kid!”

  This is a man’s voice, loud and angry down below. A yelp escapes the boy, and he whirls around to bolt. But he makes it only a few steps before the man, hunched low, scuttling crablike beneath the bleachers, grabs him by the tail of his untucked shirt. It’s the barrel-chested, mustachioed campus guard who checked our identification cards at the gate. He grabs the boy by the collar, too, and the boy claws at his thin, brown throat.

  “You’re choking him!” I cry, but the guard doesn’t release his hold. As he drags the boy out of sight, I realize that choking is not the boy’s worry. “Papa’s cross!” he gasps. “You broke Papa’s cross!” And there it is, small and silver, gleaming on the littered ground. A cross and, threaded through it, a torn cord. The boy must have worn it around his neck.

  Helen is saying something, but for once I’m ignoring her. I slip off the other blue-and-white spectator pump, tuck both shoes under my arm, swing my legs around, hang perilously from the waist for a moment, the riser cutting into the blue belt of Helen’s dress, and then I push myself off and drop. My knees buckle when I hit the ground, and I sit down hard, wincing. “Ruth! You okay?” Helen cries. I think I say something reassuring as I shove my feet into her shoes, snatch up the silver cross, and then, following the guard’s lead, head toward the back wall of the bleachers. There’s a gap that opens out into the parking lot. They must have gone through it. I do, too.

  In the open air, I look around for the boy and the other children. But there are only adults walking to their cars, and not one of them is the guard. I look down at the little silver cross and then at my wedding band. Certain things should not be lost or removed. Certain things should never, ever be abandoned.

  It seems imperative now that I find the boy and return his cross. I begin to search the grounds around the stadium, the streets to either side. In the distance, boat horns blow and shrill whistles sound as points are gained and lost. Minutes turn into an hour; the game surely is drawing to an end. But still, no sign of the boy or any of the children. Like Charlie, they seem to have vanished from this earth.

  A timer buzzes faintly, reminding me of a bee trapped under a glass. The cheer that follows suggests the Fighting Spartans have won.

  Helen has better luck finding people than I do. She locates me on the front lawn of the campus, where I’m having one last look in case the boy is hiding there among the trees—palm trees with their great leaves drooping from the drought, orange trees with their ripening fruit. Navel oranges, I’ve been told these are. In the late-afternoon light they gleam like lanterns among the branches. Come November, when they’re at their tastiest, students will be allowed to pick and eat them. This year, given the drought, the oranges may need to be picked and eaten earlier than usual; the drought will shorten their season. Helen, mingling with our peers, learns things like this and relays them to me.

  Now she runs to where I stand, beneath what would be an abundance of fruit back home. She catches hold of my arm. “Your hair’s a mess! And thanks to you, Ruth, we’re late for our own party!”

  She leads me from the trees to Garland Hall.

  WE ENTER OUR dorm room to find college students and older alumni decked out in blue and yellow, talking and laughing, lounging about. Barely do I recognize a few faces, let alone names. The few I do recognize are girls from the floor, the closest among Helen’s many friends, who are busy dishing up generous slices of blue-frosted yellow cake, popping caps from soda bottles, and distributing such victuals to the many ready takers. Four young men have commandeered one corner of the room; in perfect harmony, they perform a comically languid rendition of the school song. As always, the only words that stay with me are also the title: “All Hail Valient Spartans.” The way this quartet articulates hail, the word sounds suspiciously like hell; they’re singing in what I now know is “an Okie drawl,” as disdainfully mimicked by those who aren’t Okie at all. That’s exactly what the young men are doing, I realize as the song goes on: They’re making fun of people who talk more like Helen and me than not. Helen stiffens; she’s heard it, too. In a flash, she’s left my side and cut through the crowd. Next moment, the singing stops. With a flick of her hand, Helen disperses the foursome.

  Our dorm room has always seemed good-sized to me, especially compared to the bedroom I shared with Charlie or the one I had at Mother and Daddy’s house. Tonight it’s tight quarters, packed to the gills, and so noisy I can barely hear myself think. A number of young women sprawl across my bed—across the quilt Charlie and I shared; young men sprawl across Helen’s. People sit two to each of our desk chairs. Other girls from our floor have lugged in chairs to share, and these are occupied by multiple people as well. Our turret’s three wide windows have been flung open; far too many folks perch shoulder to shoulder on the sills. Here’s hoping no one takes flight and falls to the ground.

  The thought of our little bathroom crosses my mind: Me inside with the door closed, collecting myself in the relative quiet, maybe tucking the boy’s silver cross into the medicine cabinet for safekeeping. I manage to maneuver my way there only to find the bathroom crowded as well. Three fellows sit in the tub, pretending to row, row, row their boat, while several girls sit on the tub’s rim, simultaneously calling out conflicting commands: “Hold water!” “Check it down!” “Power ten!” Another fellow sits cross-legged in the sink, and three girls have plunked themselves down on the closed lid of the toilet.

  I turn away from the bathroom, my fists clenched. Everyone, everywhere, seems at ease with the chaos and closeness; even the resident director and the resident assistant have made themselves comfortable, sitting, respectively, on Helen’s desk and mine. Their presence means this party is being monitored for contraband—the liquor and cigarettes of which Helen has told me some people partake, both off campus and on. The resident director, name of Miss Myrtle Voyle, sports a steely helmet of hair and the sharp eyes of a commanding officer. Her assistant, willowy Jane Something-or-other, leaps up now to scrutinize the contents of every cup, the room’s every nook and cranny. I want nothing more than to escape, grab my books, and go to the library, a nearby café, anyplace quiet where I can get some work done. But when she claimed my desk for a seat, Jane removed my books and notes and put them who knows where. I’ll have to find my things before I slip away. I tuck the silver cross into the pocket of Helen’s blue dress and start weaving through the crowd. I’ll check the closets first.

  But Helen blocks my way, shoves a burlap sack of peanuts into my hands. Her eyes blaze with excitement: Hel Fire is in her element. “Mind putting these into bowls and setting them artfully about?” She foists blue-rimmed bowls upon me—crockery from the dining hall, no doubt snitched fo
r this event. I’d chide her, but she’s already back in the fray. Probably best to placate her a bit—do my duty, then disappear when the party really gets going, which, given the early hour, it probably has yet to do. By then Helen will be too preoccupied to notice my absence.

  I move from peanut duty to pretzel duty. Within twenty minutes, I have learned more names than I can remember, and have been invited to more upcoming parties than I can ever attend. I’ve been asked out for coffee, walks, car rides around the city, and drives up into the mountains, where the view, apparently, can’t be beat. Young men do the asking; boys, they seem to me. Mere children. To each and every one of them, I politely say, “Thank you, but no.” Then I make sure each and every one of them sees my wedding band. To a man, they flash awkward smiles and edge away from me, until—alakazam!—they’re absorbed in asking some other girl for her company. Someone whose left ring finger is bare.

  Pretzel duty finished, I find myself standing in a raucous corner, picking away at a plate of cake. And that’s when I spot my books and papers piled unceremoniously on a nearby radiator. I scoop them up, set the plate of cake in their place. Out the door I go.

  It’s only eight o’clock. The library stays open until ten. I take myself there. It is blissfully quiet, empty but for a few glum-looking students overseeing the place. I go to my favorite desk, hidden away in the farthest corner of the top floor, behind a shelf of old books about military history, rarely sought out by students or professors. With a relieved sigh, I open my textbook. I bow over it, try to pick up where I left off this morning. But words seem to jump and rearrange themselves before me. Why can’t I concentrate? I’m always able to concentrate, even when there’s no pressing need. Monday there’s an exam, so tonight there’s a need, especially since tomorrow is Sunday, and I try not to study on Sundays or do anything that might be construed as work. If I read, it’s the Bible. Or—true confessions—one of Helen’s fashion magazines.