THAT YEAR I STARTED working for the school newspaper, The Maroon Wave. I wanted to join some club or group or organization where I could feel I belonged, where people wouldn't move away if I sat down next to them. I was a good runner, and I thought of going out for the track team, but you had to pay for your uniform, and Mom said we couldn't afford it. You didn't have to buy a uniform or a musical instrument or pay any dues to work on the Wave.
Miss Jeanette Bivens, one of the high school English teachers, was the Wave's faculty adviser. She was a quiet, precise woman who had been at Welch High School so long that she had also been Dad's English teacher. She was the first person in his life, he once told me, who'd showed any faith in him. She thought he was a talented writer and had encouraged him to submit a twenty-four-line poem called. "Summer Storm" to a statewide poetry competition. When it won first prize, one of Dad's other teachers wondered aloud if the son of two lowlife alcoholics like Ted and Erma Walls could have written it himself. Dad was so insulted that he walked out of school. It was Miss Bivens who convinced him to return and earn his diploma, telling him he had what it took to be somebody. Dad had named me after her; Mom suggested adding the second N to make it more elegant and French.
Miss Bivens told me that as far as she could remember, I was the only seventh-grader who'd ever worked for the Wave. I started out as a proofreader. On winter evenings, instead of huddling around the stove at 93 Little Hobart Street, I'd go down to the warm, dry offices of The Welch Daily News, where The Maroon Wave was typeset, laid out, and printed. I loved the newsroom's purposeful atmosphere. Teletype machines clattered against the wall as spools of paper carrying news from around the world piled up on the floor. Banks of fluorescent lights hung down eighteen inches above the slanted, glass-topped desks where men wearing green eyeshades conferred over stacks of copy and photographs.
I'd take the Wave galleys and sit at one of the desks, my back firm, a pencil behind my ear, studying the pages for typos. The years I'd spent helping Mom check spelling on her students' homework had given me lots of practice for this line of work. I'd make corrections with a light blue felt marker that couldn't be picked up by the camera that photographed the pages for printing. The typesetters would retype the lines I'd corrected and print them out. I'd run the corrected lines through the hot-wax machine that made the back side sticky, then cut out the lines with an X-Acto knife and fit them over the original lines.
I tried to remain inconspicuous in the newsroom, but one of the typesetters, a crabbed, chain-smoking woman who always wore a hairnet, took a dislike to me. She thought I was dirty. When I walked by, she'd turn to the other typesetters and say loudly, "Y'all smell something funny?" Just like Lucy Jo Rose had done to Mom, she took to spraying disinfectant and air freshener in my general direction. Then she complained to the editor, Mr. Muckenfuss, that I might have head lice and could infect the entire staff. Mr. Muckenfuss conferred with Miss Bivens, and she told me that as long as I kept clean, she'd fight for me. That was when I started going back to Grandpa and Uncle Stanley's apartment for a weekly bath, though when I was there, I made sure to give Uncle Stanley a wide berth.
Whenever I was at the Daily News, I watched the editors and reporters at work in the newsroom. They kept a police scanner on all the time, and when an accident or fire or crime was called in, an editor would send a reporter to find out what had happened. He'd come back a couple of hours later and type up a story, and it would appear in the next day's paper. This appealed to me mightily. Until then, when I thought of writers, what first came to mind was Mom, hunched over her typewriter, clattering away on her novels and plays and philosophies of life and occasionally receiving a personalized rejection letter. But a newspaper reporter, instead of holing up in isolation, was in touch with the rest of the world. What the reporter wrote influenced what people thought about and talked about the next day; he knew what was really going on. I decided I wanted to be one of the people who knew what was really going on.
When my work was done, I read the stories on the wire services. Because we never subscribed to newspapers or magazines, I'd never known what was going on in the world, except for the skewed version of events we got from Mom and Dadone in which every politician was a crook, every cop was a thug, and every criminal had been framed. I began to feel like I was getting the whole story for the first time, that I was being handed the missing pieces to the puzzle, and the world was making a little more sense.
AT TIMES I FELT LIKE I was failing Maureen, like I wasn't keeping my promise that I'd protect herthe promise I'd made to her when I held her on the way home from the hospital after she'd been born. I couldn't get her what she needed mosthot baths, a warm bed, steaming bowls of Cream of Wheat before school in the morningbut I tried to do little things. When she turned seven that year, I told Brian and Lori that she needed a special birthday celebration. We knew Mom and Dad wouldn't get her presents, so we saved for months, went to the Dollar General Store, and bought her a toy set of kitchen appliances that were pretty realistic: The agitator in the washing machine twisted around, and the refrigerator had metal shelves inside. We figured when she was playing, she could at least pretend to have clean clothes and regular meals.
"Tell me again about California," Maureen said after she opened the presents. Although she had been born there, she couldn't remember it. She always loved hearing our stories about life in the California desert, so we told them to her again, about how the sun shone all the time and it was so warm that we ran around barefoot even in the dead of winter, about how we ate lettuce in the farm fields and picked carloads of green grapes and slept on blankets under the stars. We told her that she was blond because she'd been born in a state where so much gold had been mined, and she had blue eyes the color of the ocean that washed onto California's beaches. "That's where I'm going to live when I grow up," Maureen said.