Deena Goldstone - Tell Me One Thing

“Oh God …” escapes from Jamie.

“He had this elaborate way of doing it depending on which part of my body was going to get the punishment.”

“Don’t!” Jamie says. He can’t hear this, but Ellen continues on anyway.

“And then he’d find the spot he wanted. It was always a soft spot, somewhere that could be covered up with clothes, and he’d cut me.…”

“No …” Jamie is moaning now. “Please …”

“And he’d tell me this would all stop if I’d only be good, what he was asking for was only reasonable. Wasn’t it reasonable that he know where the woman he loved was? Wasn’t it reasonable that he be able to believe what she told him? Wasn’t that reasonable, he’d ask me, and I had to agree or he’d find another soft spot.”

Jamie gets up abruptly. He can’t hear any more of this, but Ellen grabs his forearm. “Sit down. I’m not finished.” And as much as he’s desperate to walk away, to wipe from his consciousness what she’s just told him, he looks into his sister’s urgent face and sits down again.

“But I didn’t just give in. I began to fight back. And that’s when it got really scary. We began to inflict major damage on each other. Not just black eyes and bruises, but I broke his wrist once and he pushed me across the kitchen one night and I fell against the stove and blacked out. And he couldn’t revive me and so I ended up in the emergency room with a serious concussion.”

“And that did it?” Jamie asks, begging her to tell him that this horrendous story is over.

“You would think, wouldn’t you, that that would have been enough.” Ellen sits back and says this without emotion, as if she’s telling the story of someone else, someone completely crazy. Someone who has no relationship to her.

“You didn’t leave him then?!”

“Not the first time I showed up in the hospital, but the second time, yes. But only because he was arrested and when I was well enough to go home, he wasn’t there.… Before he made bail, I did the one smart thing in the middle of all this mess: I called Tracy and she came and got me.”

“Is that the end of this story?” Jamie asks her. “Because I don’t think I can hear any more.”

“The rest of the story is good,” she says. “The rest of the story is how I became this paragon of health and happiness that you see before you. The rest of the story is what I came to California to tell you.”

“You know what, El, I don’t think I’m ready to hear it now.”

“Okay,” she says reasonably, “I’ve given you a lot to take in.”

“Would you call that an understatement?”

And she grins at him. “Yep.”

• • •

WHEN HE LEAVES FOR SCHOOL the next morning, she comes with him. She wants to see where he works and then she wants to explore San Diego. She’ll drive around a bit and then pick him back up at three thirty. They arrange it over breakfast, sitting at his breakfast bar, drinking their coffees, and idly reading the morning paper.

She seems so calm to Jamie, so present, so unaffected by the story she told him last night that part of him doesn’t believe her. How could she have gone through what she described (and he has a feeling she left a great deal out) and still be the Ellen he knows? The two things can’t quite coexist in his mind.

When she looks up from the paper and sees him scrutinizing her, she again knows what he’s thinking. “I survived, Jamie, and something miraculous happened because of all the pain. Don’t judge until you hear the rest of the story.”

“Give me a breather here, El.”

She laughs. “I can wait.”

Jamie’s school is close to the water. It seems to Ellen that practically everything in San Diego is within sight of the Pacific Ocean. The middle-school building is part of a vast old military base. Some of the other buildings have been renovated, too, and Jamie points out the elementary school and the high school as he parks in the teachers’ lot.

“We’re all part of a charter school run by a private corporation. They leased the land from the Defense Department, refurbished the buildings, and set all this up.”

“So it’s a private school?” Ellen asks as they open the large glass double doors and walk into the main hallway. Inside, the building has been opened up with skylights and bright paint colors horizontally striped along the walls.

“No,” Jamie explains, “we’re part of the San Diego Unified School District. The kids have to meet their standards, but because we’re a charter, they pretty much leave us alone.”

“Well, that should suit you just fine,” Ellen says, and she looks at him sideways as they enter the main office so he can check his mailbox.

“Very funny.” But he doesn’t seem at all offended as he grabs a fistful of mail from a cubbyhole, one in a row of several dozen along the left-hand wall of the office. “You want some more coffee before class starts?”

“Do you even have to ask?”

He points her across the hall to the teachers’ lounge. It’s a long, narrow room with windows overlooking the front of the school. Someone’s taken the trouble to put together a cozy room — easy chairs in the same primary colors as the hallways. Everything in this school seems to pop out at you , Ellen thinks. Do they need to wake people up? Some of the chairs have ottomans next to them, useful for putting up aching feet or as a place for the paper overload that always seems to accompany any teacher. There are two small, round tables for catching up on work in one corner of the room and an efficient coffee area with a tiny sink and under-counter refrigerator and the ever-going coffeemaker opposite it.

Jamie pours them each a mug of coffee and introduces Ellen to the handful of teachers who are getting ready for their day. “My sister Ellen, everyone. She’s visiting from Spain.”

The teachers are friendly. They greet her. She sips her coffee and looks around the room. More teachers have come in to grab a cup of coffee or simply as a respite before the day officially begins. They stand in twos and threes, chatting. But, she sees, not Jamie. He’s over by the windows, by himself, reading what looks like a memo. No one approaches him and he doesn’t look up. It bothers her that he is the singular person in a room of groups and conversation, and she’s watching him, waiting for him to turn and talk to someone or have someone talk to him, and so she doesn’t see a very pretty woman in her thirties come over to her.

“I didn’t know Jamie had a sister,” she says.

“Jamie has four sisters.”

“Really?” The woman seems puzzled.

She’s fine boned, wrenlike, with honey-colored hair that today she’s pulled back into a sleek ponytail, not a tendril escaping. Immediately Ellen can tell that this woman has been pretty all her life and takes it for granted. No makeup. Clothes that seem too casual for teaching — cargo pants, a T-shirt advertising San Diego State, and running shoes. Next to her Ellen feels like an unruly Amazon, her wiry reddish hair unattended, her five-foot-seven height oversized.

“I’m Nicole. I’ve known your brother forever.”

“And you didn’t know he has four sisters and three brothers?”

“I wouldn’t call your brother much of a talker.” And this last is said with just enough of an undertone of bitterness that Ellen pays more attention.

“Well, you know,” Ellen says, defending Jamie without even thinking about it, “when you grow up in a family of eight, there’s not much of a chance to talk. We shout. We’re really good at shouting.”

“There were times I would have been thrilled to hear him shout, but I never did,” Nicole says as she moves off, glancing at Jamie as she does. “Enjoy your visit.”