me, “Look what I found!”
From the look on her face I could tell she had been through them already.
All my bones were frozen tight & I could not even speak to tell her I did not want to see them.
She sat down next to me and opened the first one contentedly.
“Is that you?” she asked me, pointing to a baby, & I nodded.
“Is that your mother & father?” she asked me. & again I nodded.
“Wowwwww,” she said, as she turned the pages. “Look at you!”
When I couldn’t bear it anymore I stood up as abruptly as I could and excused myself, & then I went into the bathroom & held myself up by the sink. In the other room I could picture her, little Yolanda, seeing my memories one after another. Laid out on the page.
When I came out again she had returned upstairs, and with her went the albums. She’s very kind you see. She can read me.
I have begun to teach her things & to encourage her as if she were my child. She is a receptive learner, but she also teaches me things: she does every time she is here, whether or not she realizes it. She tells me what she is watching and reading. She loves to watch reruns of the late-night comedy program Mad TV & she often describes or reenacts sketches from that show with great vigor, laughing at her own recollection of it, ending each retelling with, It was so funny. I don’t know what her ambitions in life are, though I have asked her. She dodges these questions with a shrug and a smile. I don’t know if she finished high school but I have to assume she did not. This is a shame because she is very smart, with a knowledge of trivia that is well beyond her years. When we watch Cash Cab she shouts out many answers very loudly.
Over the past few weeks I have grown to look forward to her visits. Mainly she does not seem embarrassed by me, which allows me to relax. There is an easiness about her that I hold dear. She is not overly concerned with whether or not she is being polite. She asks and says what she wants & she does what she wants. & thrillingly she judges people who need judging—on television, in the stories she recounts from her life outside my home.
All of this is to say that I have grown quite fond of her & so it was with great sadness that I watched the events of today unfold.
First of all Yolanda called me this morning. This alone was strange, for today is Sunday which is a day she does not work. On the telephone she asked if she could come today instead of tomorrow—for tomorrow she had some things to attend to. “All right with me,” I said, because it did not matter in the least, & in fact mostly I cannot tell the days apart except by her visits.
But when she came in she was upset. She would not look at me, which was also strange because normally she smiles a lot and says Hey Mr Arthur. (She came in calling me Mr Opp, & tho I encouraged her to use my given name, she seems to have reached a compromise in her own mind by combining the two.)
So this morning she said nothing to me, just opened the door—I gave her a key last week—and walked past where I was sitting in the living room and headed directly into the kitchen. Then she returned to the living room and walked past me again on her way up the stairs, her bucket in hand.
When she was halfway up the stairs I said her name once very softly but I do not think she heard, or else she chose to ignore me.
I was confused because I thought we had been getting along so well this whole time, & I had been looking forward to showing her a couple of things I had found in the newspaper that I thought she might like (one was an article about a comedian she has told me about, & one was an article about fun things to do in the city for people who are not yet 21). I sat on the couch with both neatly clipped articles on the table before me & I wondered what to do.
Yolanda was banging around loudly upstairs. Normally when she’s up there I cannot hear