Labor Day Read Free Page A

paper. The idea was, mothers would come over with their children, and my mother would put on music, and lay out things like scarves and ribbons, and everyone would dance around. When it was over, they’d all have a snack. And if she got enough customers, she wouldn’t have to worry about going out into the world and getting a more normal type of job, which wasn’t her style.
    She went to a lot of effort setting things up for this. She sewed little mats for everyone, and cleared out all the living room furniture, which wasn’t all that much to start with, and she bought a rug for the floor that was supposed to be someone’s wall-to-wall carpet only they hadn’t paid.
    I was pretty young at the time, but I remember the morning of the first class, she lit candles to put around the room, and she baked cookies—a health food kind, with whole wheat flour and honey instead of sugar. I didn’t want to be in the class, so she told me I could be the one to work the record player and keep an eye on the younger children, if she was busy with one of the older ones, and later, I’d serve the snack. We had a dry run, the morning of her first class, where she showed me what to do and reminded me, if anyone needed to go to the bathroom, to help the little kids with things like fastening their pants after.
    Then it was the time her customers were supposed to start showing up. Then it was past the time, and still nobody.
    Maybe half an hour after the class was supposed to begin, this woman arrived with a boy in a wheelchair. This was Evelyn and her son, Barry. From the size of him, I got the impression he was probably around my age, but he couldn’t talk so much as he just made noises at unusual moments, as if he was watching a movie nobody else could see, and all of a sudden there was a funny part, or one time, it was as if some character in this movie that he really liked a lot had died, because he put his head in his hands—which wasn’t all that easy, since his hands jerked around a lot, and so did his head, not necessarily in the same direction—and he just sat there in his chair, making these sobbing sounds.
    Evelyn must have had the idea that creative movement could be a good thing for Barry, though if you asked me, he moved pretty creatively to begin with. My mother made a big effort, though. She and Evelyn got Barry on one of the special mats, and she put on a record she liked—the sound track of Guys and Dolls— and showed Barry and Evelyn these motions to make to “Luck Be a Lady Tonight.” Evelyn showed some promise, she said. But moving to a beat definitely wasn’t Barry’s type of concept.
    The class folded after that one session, but Evelyn and my mother got to be friends. She’d bring Barry over a lot in his oversized stroller, and my mother would make a pot of coffee, and Evelyn would park Barry on the back porch and my mother would tell me to play with him, while Evelyn talked and smoked cigarettes, and my mother listened. Every now and then I’d hear some phrase like delinquent child support or face his responsibilities or my cross to bear or deadbeat bum— this was Evelyn talking, never my mother—but mostly I learned to tune the whole thing out.
    I tried to think up things Barry could do, games that might interest him, but this was a challenge. One time when I was really bored, I hit on the idea of talking to him in a made-up language—just sounds and noises, along the lines of the ones he made himself now and then. I parked myself in front of his stroller and talked to him that way, using hand gestures, as if I was telling this elaborate story.
    This seemed to get Barry excited. At least, he responded by making more sounds than before. He was hooting and yelling, and waving his arms more wildly than normal, which caused my mother and Evelyn to come out on the porch, checking things out.
    What’s going on here? Evelyn said. From the look on her face, I knew she wasn’t happy. She had rushed over to