Stories and prose from the pages of Chiron Review. Click a title to read.
Jonathan Leamington was the son of a sheep farmer. He was also, strangely enough, the son of his mother. Jon was a fine lad. So fine, in fact, that his Dadda beat him with a dried birch tree every evening around five o’clock. But he only did this if the chores were done on time. Dadda, being such a fine man o’ God such as there ever weren’t one, out o’ the kindness of his heart, beat Jon anyway. Now Mum would throw herself across Jon lad, and beg Dadda Leamington not to beat Jon (’im being a bad boy, or so she said), but that Dadda should beat her instead as she was more a’God fearin’ than Jon laddie. So the family would break into great peals of hyena-like laughter and beat the cat against the wall instead.
One day-o Jon set off to seek his fortune in the famous town of North CMEX, which was just outside of London, Ohio. He was seeking a life which would offer him more than sheep farming, with less money and lots of humility — so he decided to become President of the United States of Outer Mongolia in Southern England. It was the year 1314. Which was a good year for the plague, and a great year for seeing the famed rude objects of Yorkshire fly through the air with barely any speed at all — only enough to land on buxom ducks. Anyway, Jon couldn’t raise enough shekels to run for the desired presidency, so instead he became a welcome mat to a family of well-to-do aristocratic piggies. Jon was overjoyed at the chance to really “come-up” in the world. It joooost made ’is lit’l heart cough at the thought o’ it!
Then one day during some year that I forgot, Jon lost his virginity to a roaming band of Mexican lowriders who stapled his nostrils together and made Jon eat Twinkies and Ding Dongs and Fruit Pies while they laughed at him and made sarcastic jokes about a Latin wench they met killing dead flies named Dollius Partonus whom (so they said) had extremely large nosehairs. They thought themselves extremely funny and said so. Then they cast Jon laddie aside like a worn-out jock-strap and went on their way.
Well, that episode really quite discouraged the hell out of Jon laddie. He decided to go home to his parents, but when he arrived, he found out to his horror, that his father was married to his mother. So Jon went on his sobbing lit’l way and was struck down and killed by a whirring disgusting-looking biscuit that wheezed when it moved. A passing fancy arrived just in time to bury Jon laddie before he began to smell. He was thrown in an empty well and a memorial was put on the spot where Richard III was killed in the battle of Bosworth.
THE END
There was a big fat man talking to his brother, a wiry skinny man; they were eating. At one point in their lives these two men had eaten dinner together daily in a Brooklyn tenement now sentimentalized in their memories, but these days they hardly ever ate together, hardly ever saw each other. Still, they were brothers. Married with children, each one had become a storeowner in the Bronx. Skinny Victor was a moneymaker living in the suburbs, a conservative. Fat Aaron was poorer: his store was a financial mess and he lived in a housing project; often he favored liberal and sometimes even radical speechmaking. They had both married brunettes. One brunette, the wife of fat Aaron, seemed depressed. Her gestures were choppy and uncoordinated. Skinny Victor’s wife took better care of her appearance: her hair was set nightly on rollers, her lipstick was never an out-of-date shade, but at night she occasionally sobbed in a way that was familiar to her sister-in-law.
Dinner had been prepared by Iris, fat Aaron’s wife. She had perspired over the stove all day, praying that the casserole come out perfectly, afraid of burning the crust. She had also defrosted some lamb chops (in case of disaster with the casserole) and cooked broccoli and made a soup and tossed a large salad. She had set out three types of bottled salad dressing: California Onion, Russian, Low-Calorie Russian. During her last pregnancy, the difficult one with Carly, she had developed a love for Russian dressing. For months she had poured Russian dressing onto corn muffins, into yogurt, onto scrambled eggs. Then she would throw up each night around nine o’clock.
“Perhaps,” she whispered as she placed napkins down, “I should have named Carly something more appropriate, like Natasha or Tania.” Smiling was barely a reflex for her anymore.
Iris’ other daughter, Carly’s older sister Jo Ellen, had a long nose. For a seven-year-old she had an exceptionally long nose. Her school peers called her Nosy, Rudolf, and Snotface. Of course Jo Ellen hated her sister Carly. Carly was pugnosed and blue eyed; even strangers on buses told Iris that she should get her into television commercials. “Art Linkletter would love that one,” a woman in a supermarket had said. Once, Iris had run wildly into the girls’ bedroom when she heard Carly shrieking, “Mommy Mommy Mommy!” and there Jo Ellen had been, poised to strike Carly over the head with the metal iron. But the scar on the side of Carly’s nose, the jagged hole with slightly lumpy skin next to it (barely noticeable after awhile) had appeared one day because Iris hadn’t heard Carly’s yells, or had ignored them, or hadn’t understood them. In any case, Iris couldn’t remember what she had been doing at the exact moment that the scissors had flown from Jo Ellen’s hand into Carly’s skin.
Paul, the only son and oldest of the three children of Aaron and Iris, didn’t like Jo Ellen most of the time. She had too mean a streak, shoplifted too often from the candy store, and kissed the television screen whenever a Spin and Marty episode was shown on The Mouseketeers. Paul was eleven-years-old. He liked Carly, even though she was spoiled and demanded too much attention, especially when his friends were around. But she was cute and she was tough, and he had hopes of her becoming a lady wrestler some day. He stood silently hidden sometimes, watching her play in the project grounds with her girlfriends. She never let anyone get away with anything: Carly could hit for real, and he felt proud. After she’d broke her arm (jumping off the monkeybars) she’d gone wild with the power of the cast, hitting everything in her way; even then, even when his own nose got bloodied, he felt proud.
Now while the four parents seated at the kitchen table ate the dinner which Iris had prepared, while they spread their thighs comfortably on the four plastic orange chairs, Carly and Paul and Jo Ellen played in another room with Mimi and Shushie, the daughters of Victor and Lydia. Mimi hated Shushie. She didn’t mind Carly that much because she rarely saw her, but she hated the urine smell which Shushie, a chronic bedwetter, invariably carried around with her. Victor screamed and yelled at Mimi at least twice each week, and was given to beating her at least once each weekend if he’d been drinking, but he called Shushie “Princess Sha-Sha” and “Princess Shut Up” and never touched her.
Shushie had quietly peed on the floor of Paul’s room. Jo Ellen and Mimi whispered together and then announced that although Shushie had obviously done it, Carly was probably resisting the desire to do the same. “Carly,” they said, “is still a baby.” Paul, feeling left out, sang, “Carly likes piss, she makes piss and eats piss ...”
“You eat shit and stuff,” Carly answered.
Shushie clung to Carly’s arm.
Jo Ellen pinched Carly’s other arm. “I’m going to tell Daddy that you made Shushie pee, that you pulled down her panties for her, that you made her do it, and that you tasted it like a dog! Like a pig!”
Mimi said matter-of-factly, “Carly, you know that Uncle Aaron will beat you up.”
“Why me? Why not Shushie? I didn’t pee on the floor!”
Jo Ellen smiled. “So what? You’re still a pig. You keep our room a mess, Mommy says you’re disgusting.” She hopped around the room.
“Jo, you don’t have to keep calling her a pig,” Paul said.
Jo Ellen stopped hopping. “Mommy found you in your crib when you were a baby covered with shit and vomit and even diarrhea, don’t forget it! I heard her telling Aunt Lydia that story. You were covered, in your hair, in your face, even in your mouth!”
Carly began to run. She would leave little clinging Shushie behind, leave Jo Ellen with her nose and fury behind, leave taunting Mimi and confused Paul. She would run, they could all sit in the piss for all she cared, they could drown in it. “Eat it yourself!” she yelled and began to run, enjoying the sensation of flight: out of the bedroom, racing through the living room weaving in and out of the two Woolworth coffee tables and the small table which her father had built — she could run forever, it felt so good — around the fish tank, the plants, the bookcase, over the lamp and television wires, into the kitchen, past the kitchen table ... Her father was lifting a glass of black cherry soda to his lips. Carly raced by, running freely, somehow knocking the red and white dotted glass from his hand, then racing faster as it fell to the floor. The glass broke, causing the black-red liquid to pour onto the kitchen floor which Iris had mopped that morning. Aaron stood up. He was sick and tired of Carly knocking his food, her own food, everyone’s food and drink to the floor. She never sat still, she never even sat in a chair; instead, like a goddamned flamingo with one leg crossed under her and the other one on the floor so that she stood rather than sat, bouncing and eating, picking out lima beans from her soup with her fingers and leaving them on the table in mushy little heaps. She held the fork wrong. She fidgeted so much in restaurants that she knocked over her chair, even the time that Monty Hall was at the next table the night they all went to The Brass Rail. Carly kept running, into the bathroom. She locked the door, double locked it, pushed the clothes hamper against it, piled on top of the hamper bottles of shampoo, soap powder boxes, stomach relaxers, every box or bottle in sight. She sat down in the white bathtub, pulling the lima bean green shower curtain closed around her.
She would live inside the bathroom and never come out. She could do it if she wanted to. There was toothpaste in the bathroom, there was soap and water so she would be clean. There were things to touch and play with so that her fingers wouldn’t become crazy with boredom, but there would be nothing to draw with, yes there would! The four red lipstick tubes in the medicine chest, and the nailpolish, too. They would never be able to get her. Her father would kill her if he ever saw her again. She would lock herself in the bathroom all night, and then when her mother went shopping or to the laundry, she would come out. She would pack some shirts and shorts and her favorite doll, Black-Haired-Bazooka-Lady, and run for her life. Paul and Jo Ellen would be in school, so they wouldn’t have any idea where she had gone. She would leave rather than face him. She remembered the time that she had spilled her dinner on the floor, by accident, and he had forced her to eat a little bit right off the floor, while her mother had stood by the cabinet saying, “Aaron, stop it!” But she had said, “Mommy, I don’t care. I'll do it, I'll do it, he wants me to do it, I’ll do it.” And on her hands and knees she had crept to the food, listlessly touching some with her tongue and then saying, “Okay Daddy?” never expecting him to thrust his foot forward almost into her face and say, “Eat it all, just for that, you snotty wretch!”
The bathtub felt cool and soothing. Why did she have to knock it out of his hand, of all the people eating dinner? Mommy or Aunt Lydia wouldn’t have minded, they might have even laughed. Uncle Victor would have frowned and turned red, but she wasn’t his daughter. Why did the glass have to break into so many tiny pieces? Why did Mimi and Jo Ellen say she ate piss? They were the disgusting ones, they were the pigs. Shushie was just a baby who didn’t understand and she would try not to hate Shushie. But the thought of Shushie with her dripping nose made her sick.
Carly had promised herself long before this day that her tears, if and when she allowed them, would be short. “He won’t ever make me cry again,” she thought. “Fuck him, fuck him, I won’t cry because I didn’t do it on purpose, I’ll never come out, he’ll only miss me for a day or two, and for all I care he can use the Boys’ Bathroom in the playground tonight. I don’t care if he never goes to the bathroom again for the rest of his life. He takes all day in there, and Mommy says I should pee into a rubber bucket when Daddy is in the bathroom, because he gets angry if we ask him to hurry. He’s embarrassed because he has ‘bathroom problems.’ And if it’s a real emergency, we have to say, ‘Daddy, please, I really need it, I’m sorry, it’s a real emergency.’ And he gets mad and says, ‘In a minute, in a minute’ and comes out ten minutes later holding his crossword puzzle, and then he stands outside the door waiting until we’re finished.”
But the times when her father was in a good mood and he would hear Carly go into the bathroom (his bedroom was next door to the bathroom so he knew who went in and out) he sang songs to her outside the bathroom door.
Oh Pretty Carly The face that sank one thousand ships
Oh Pretty Carly The sweetest eyes in all the town ...
Once, as she was emerging from the bathroom, he had solemnly told her to follow him into the bedroom. His bedroom was usually off limits except for beatings. “You’re the pretty one,” he said after he had her sit down on his bed. “Paul is a boy, and Jo Ellen isn’t pretty at all, let’s face it. She’s smart no doubt, but no beauty, you’re the beauty, the one that the neighbors all want to steal. The Bennys wouldn’t mind if one night we forgot to close the front door so they could sneak in and take you away.”
Paul’s voice was suddenly outside the bathroom door. “ ... gonna get it, Daddy’s mad as shit, you better come out, Carly.”
Carly said nothing. If she didn’t talk or move, maybe they’d decide that a cockroach had eaten her, or a wasp had stung her to death. Why couldn’t Paul step in and stop the beating? It wasn’t fair, any of it. Paul got beaten even harder than she and Jo Ellen and he was a boy and the oldest and he couldn’t stop it. And he was supposed to be the generous one of the three of them, and even that didn’t help.
“Leave her inside, let her rot in there if she wants to,” said Jo Ellen. “And when you do finally come out, not only is Daddy going to beat you up, but Paul and I are going to take you into The Dark Room!”
The Dark Room. That means that they shut the lights and pulled her inside and shrieked, “Oh, come into The Dark Room, Carly, come inside The Dark Room, where little girls are eaten by monsters, little snotty girls.”
Whenever her parents went to the movies, which was once a week, every single week, Paul and Jo Ellen pulled her inside the bedroom and shut the lights. They would push her down hard on the bed and say she could never come out, never, and they would pinch and tickle. She would push and yell and fight her way outside, kicking and biting if she had to. She had bitten Paul’s arm so deeply once that he had yelped like Mimi’s dog.
Sometimes only Jo Ellen would be interested. Paul would be doing something alone in the room with the door shut. But Jo Ellen and Carly shared a room, and then Jo Ellen would push Carly down and say, “I’m the Va Va Voom, and I’m going to eat up YOU!” and she would pounce and hit, yelling “Va Va Voom Forever!” If Carly could gather her strength, she could possibly reverse positions. One time she had thrown Jo Ellen down and stuffed a pillow over her face, chanting over and over, “The Ugly Witch is Dead!” Jo Ellen had been very still, allowing Carly to chant until Carly grew scared and pulled the pillow off. Then Jo Ellen jumped up screaming, “Va Va Voom will eat you alive!” Carly had fallen off the bed, crying. But she never cried for long. Nobody even noticed, sometimes if she was quiet enough. She made sure that she never hiccoughed afterwards like her friends did when they cried. Mostly she got a lump in her throat that stayed. There was a dream she kept having that stayed also: the dream about gorillas invading the housing project and eating everyone up except for Carly and her mother, who chose to jump out the kitchen window instead, holding hands, rather than to die at the hands of the gorillas. In another dream the gorillas became octopi.
Her father pounded on the door. “You’ve been in there for almost an hour! Get out!” She jumped up. Her mother’s voice spoke, “Carly, Daddy’s very angry this time. You’d better come out now.”
Carly pulled the hamper from the door, scattering the shampoos and boxes and bottles onto the floor. She ran out. Her father’s arm reached and she was inside his bedroom, the door shut, her panties were forced down and she was hit so hard that she felt her skin wanting to bleed, although he hit her for a very short time, probably, really. And then she knew enough to say that she was sorry, Daddy, sorry, Daddy.
I.
Blue neon fizzled overhead. As Harvey Andressen put out his scrawny hand to grab the motel office’s doorknob, a dark shadow lurched across the screen. Harvey stepped back. Startled moths flurried away as the door swung and a tall boy with flapping red hair ran out and pounded off into the night. “Florrie!” the boy called out, jamming his hands excitedly into his jeans’ pockets as he ducked past parked cars, “Hey, Florrie! I did it! We’re in!” A car door slammed.
Harvey shrugged and stepped forward into the office. The two men already there looked up at him. The wild-eyed man behind the desk had a grin, lights and shadows doing a dance in the seams of his face. “Hello,” he said, hospitably.
“Howdy do,” said Harvey, blinking at the jellyglasses on the cluttered desk. A couple of empties, and one half full. “Go on ahead,” he waved his chickenclaw hand. The stripes in his seersucker suit rolled and wavered. “Whatever you’re up to, don’t mind me.” His skin sagged off his bones in yellow pouches, so that even when he was trying to smile gaily, he looked sad. “Don’t mind me ...” He peered now at the man sitting on the floor, with his back against the wall. Sweaty shirt gonna stain that wall, thought Harvey. But then. None of my beeswax. “You havin’ a party here, hey?”
“Damn love nest,” said the man on the floor. “It’s the times. Still. Kid that young ... ought to be protected. That’s why they got laws ...”
“I liked the boy,” the man behind the desk said. “He’s a good kid. A brave one. Drink your drink and don’t insult my guests.” He shuffled through a pile of what looked like unpaid bills to find the register book, and then shoved it forward to Harvey. “Sign here,” he said. “Pay no attention to my friend.”
The old man wrote a spidery script, like the writing on beer bottle labels. But the motel man managed to read it upside down. “Andressen. Harvey Andressen.”
“That’s me,” said Harvey, writing on. “This here I’m giving is my daughter’s address, but Lord knows I don’t plan on livin’ there no more.”
“Don’t tell me,” the man on the floor groaned. “A run-away.”
“Ohio’s a nice place,” said the man behind the desk.
“Nice place my ass,” Harvey croaked. “Tell you the truth. They got no respect for they elders, in Ohio, not no more. Put you in some in-sti-tuition, that’s all they think to do. Call it a home. Home my ass. Wham bam and you’re in and no gettin’ out, and no damn thank you ma’m, neither.” The wrinkles in his seersucker suit rolled and valleyed like a sea as he jiggled up and down, agitated. “Not this old man, they don’t put in no home, o, no, sirree. I’m goin’ to Mi’mi, where they got respect for older folk. Pretty gals set in your lap ... I seen them post cards.” He nodded energetically. “All them titties bouncin’ up and down that beach. Well. That’s for me, that’s what I say, and to Hell with O-hio.”
“I’ve been to Miami,” said the man on the floor, breathing as though he might be in some sort of pain. “It’s no different. No different from here.”
While the motel man took Harvey’s money and made change out of a battered tin candy box, Harvey tried his best to educate the man on the floor. “Well sir, what you got to have is a positive atti-tude. Set your mind right, and you can grab off all the tittie you want. Think it right, and you'll do it, ever time.” Harvey hopped a couple of excited hops. “Wasn’t it you just called this place a love nest? Here, right under your nose?” He snatched at the key the motel man offered. “Think on that!” He skittered toward the door. “I hate to run,” he said, “But by golly when you got to go, boys, you got to go.” Going out, he flapped his arms and looked more like a frightened stork than anything human. “So I say ... goodnight, all ...”
The motel man looked serene, counting the money into the box. “All I know is, them sweet titties better watch their ... O, Christ, Otis, you know what I just did?” He picked up his half-full glass and observed the glitter of light in the liquid, solemnly. “You know how dumb I am? I gave that crazy old man the key to the room right next to that nice kid. And the walls ... Christ, at night you can hear the paint flaking off and falling kerplud on the floor next door, that’s how thin those walls are made ...”
“Kmmp, kmmp.” The man on the floor either simpered or choked. “You got any idea how high those hearing aids turn up?”
“I didn’t see any hearing aid.”
“There was one. On this side.”
The motel man leaned back in his chair and laughed before he swallowed his drink. “O Jesus.” Sweat beaded up on his nose, glitter wet. “O, Jesus God. I hope he doesn’t blow a fuse.”
II.
Harvey wondered what the girl in the room next door looked like. Young, she’d be, for sure. The kid who'd run out the office door was still wet behind the ears — ears stuck out like handles on an old milk jug, at that. He wondered why he suddenly remembered those ears.
“Florrie,” the boy had called her. Well. Whatever Miss Florrie looked like, she talked a tarnel stream. The murmur of her sharpy voice came through the wall, but you couldn’t tell from that about her face or shape. He tall and she tall that’s one thing, but if she were a little bit of a thing (and he kind of guessed that’s what she was — the name was like little flowers, pale and ruffley and pink) that’s another. She was probably a bit like that Carrie Jones had been with the dirty neck like a plucked turkey’s, there in the fifth grade cloakroom. All those bags of lunch and sweaters on the hooks, smelling of peanut butter and squashy bananas and wool ... Carrie’d had the dry heaves, he remembered, after it was over. But quietly, so nobody could hear, that was the kind of girl Carrie was, and that was as crazy to remember now as the look of that boy’s ears. Harvey ran his scrawny yellow hand across his cheek and scratched at his own ear. Funny, how the hearing aid made it itch sometimes. Well. Little or big or tall or squatty, what he absolutely knew was, they were taking one damned long time to get to bed.
Here he was in his nightshirt already. And there they sat, one on each side of the room it sounded like, in all their clothes, far as he could tell, sitting and jabbering. All that jibber jabber, sure no else was going on.
He’d pushed the sprung-out wicker chair ready against the wall, poked it comfortable as he could with the pillows from the bed, and a water glass handy. “But,” Harvey muttered, not realizing he was making any noise at all. “That glass won’t be no use, just the receiver on the wall and the controls up, and it’s like the voices are water pouring down a funnel, into my head.”
Beyond the wall, the voices murmured, back and forth, a steady stream. Still gabbing on.
Harvey scowled at the suit jacket he’d hung around the chair back. Deep creases in the seersucker like reflections of his gnarled face. Wrinkles. “Guaranteed! Wouldn’t you know?” He ought to take it back to the G.D. store and throw it through that window with a brick. Guaranteed. ‘Won’t wrinkle for a lifetime’? Pig shit. A butterfly’s lifetime, do they mean? Look at it!”
The voices next door abruptly stopped. Harvey clamped his lips together tight. What were they listening for?
The girl beyond the wall giggled shrilly and Harvey skittered to the wall. Something goin’ on, at last. His hearing aid receiver, dangling a thin loop of wire, snuggled tight against the wall.
“You could turn the light out, Davy,” the girl said, and Harvey grinned. He could even hear the light switch. It rasped, like it had a load of rust. And the bed creaked, too. Harvey scratched at his belly, enchanted now.
“Maybe your mom won’t take on too bad,” the boy said. “Maybe she'll even think it’s kind of ... funny?”
“Funny!” she gasped. “Davy you don’t know my mother one eensy teensy bit if that’s what you think. Maybe Selma Morganstern’s mother would laugh, but mine? Are you out of your head, anyhow?”
“I didn’t mean funny exactly, I guess. But it is, kind of, you know, to come all this way into Georgia and then they wouldn’t ...”
Harvey groped for the chair and sagged back into the pillows, letting the receiver fall into his lap. Still a-jabbering. That all they intend on doing? Mercy on us, Moses. Talk you can do on some streetcar, on a bus, in a library. Anywhere. What the Sam Hill ails them two?
She said something, and he answered. Harvey stood and took up his listening position once again. Might be worth his while.
“Sure I am,” the boy, Davy, said, clear as clear. “Honest, Florrie. Sure I am. You know I am. Just as glad as glad could be.”
“You don’t act it.” Her voice faltered. Harvey could barely pick it up. “But I’m glad you’re glad. If you’re truly glad.”
“I’m glad you’re glad I’m glad.”
She giggled. “I’m glad you’re glad I’m glad you’re glad.”
Harvey writhed against the receiver. Blabbers, he thought. He wanted to scream at them, shut up, shut up! Save your damn blabbin’ for fifty years from now, when you’ll be needin’ it.
The glow around his lamp was warm, and seemed to throb for a moment, as if something brighter had passed through, into his room. Harvey nodded sheepishly, and mouthed a shy apology. Mae was just beyond that glow, he supposed, and he could guess the look in her eye, hadn’t seen it years and years, sweet look that still could let him know he was up to Sin again.
“Could be,” he muttered. “Maybe Mae, you’re right. You sure always used to be. And I got to agree it serves me right, all this talkin’ goin’ on. But it’s not so bad as if I was lookin’ in the window, now, some peepin’ trick like that, is it? And they’re young ... fair game.”
“This sure is nice, though.” Davy’s voice came through the wall, clearly, dreamy. “I mean, just you and me here like this, with the clean sheets and all.”
“Sheets,” Harvey choked on sudden, helpless rage. Sheets! By the Great Harry, now it’s sheets. Anger filled his head, blotting out reason with its red heat. His hands shook as though he were palsied. Sheets! He reached out to turn off his own light, tipping the lamp crazily, before the light switched off with grim finality.
The boy’s voice drifted on, soft, dreamy, and even without the receiver, Harvey heard him, soft, more words ... “You share a room with Belinda, don’t you? I mean, you did. I guess you’re used to havin’ somebody nearby in the dark like this.”
“O, Davy,” she giggled. “It’s not near the same.”
“Still, it’s different for me. In a nice way. When I was a kid, I used to lie awake in the dark and talk and talk and I was only talking to a make-believe boy I made up, in my head ...”
“What’d you talk to him about? What was his name?”
“Didn’t have a name. Just, ‘Boy.’ That’s what Uncle Jace always called me, ‘Boy,’ so that’s what I called him. Talked about what it’d been like, if we'd ... if I’d been sent down to Okeechobee and Uncle Mort’s and the ranch with the cattle and all, ’stead of bein’ sent to Uncle Jace and his dernfool everlastin’ cabbages. That kind of stuff. What I’d do, when I got big ...”
Harvey Andressen spit off into a dark corner, making a hacking noise deep in his throat. He didn’t care if they heard him. He really hoped they did.
But Davy’s voice droned on, unperturbed. “Florrie, you’d never believe. It’s like tons and tons of sand just shifting and flowing down the road, when they go loping off, those Brahamas. I always wanted that, more than anything. To be down in Okeechobee, with Uncle Mort ...”
“Well.” Florrie’s voice turned icy. “Maybe if that’s what you want so much, you could still go down.”
These Goddamn kids were going to inherit his earth. Harvey could have wept.
“I told you it was just kid stuff ... make believe.”
“But you’d like that? To work with cows and all?”
Davy was breathing more heavily, rasping. “No. Not really. And you don’t call them cows ...” He lapsed into a silence, a broken silence punctuated only by the hoarseness of his breath.
Silence. Harvey pressed the receiver to the wall, and sucked in his breath, the better to listen. What’s that boy up to? Kissin’?
III.
Silence. And in the quiet shadows of the next room, Florrie wondered, too — what’s that boy up to?
Davy’s breathing was so deep and steady. Almost like he might be ... But he couldn’t be. Not after all the mess they’d gone through, driving all day up from home, and then being stopped from even getting a license just because they couldn’t prove how old she was, and how they’d tried, two three places, and finally, they’d found this place, even that hadn’t been easy. Davy’s ears always turn red when he’s lying. Nobody’d know that but her, but they seemed to know anyhow, somehow. Davy couldn’t lie for a fool ...
She inched closer to him on the musty coverlet they hadn’t even pulled back properly, nubbly chenille sort of stuff against her face — put her hand on his arm, in the warm crook of his arm, the inside of his elbow, warm and smooth. “Davy?”
She couldn’t believe he would fall asleep like that, right here. Not after everything. “Davy? I love you ...”
Other than his breathing, now soft, relaxed and steady, Davy made no reply.
Mad and mortified, Florrie snorted in his ear. In the dark, he smiled gently and slept on, exhausted.
Florrie bounced away from him, teach him. Let him think she was just trying to get away from lying side of him, had to get comfortable, is all, bounced and bounced.
The old springs creaked and groaned beneath them, but even that didn’t seem to budge into Davy’s sleep. Was he deaf then? Exasperated, Florrie bounced some more, harder. The old bed, complaining bitterly, hopped and skittered on the sloping floor, banged its headstead against the wall. Davy slept on, peaceful as a child.
Incredible. Florrie was working up a sweat just trying to wake him, yet he didn’t stir.
IV.
Incredible, too, how soothing the sound of squealing bedsprings was to the old man on the other side of the wall. A warm flush of desire spread slowly over Harvey Andressen’s aging thighs. “Hoo hoo,” he cackled into the night. “Them Mi’mi titties best watch out, ’cause here I come, ready or not. There’s life in the old bugger yet.”
“Davy,” he heard the girl moan. “O, Davy, love me!”
Grinning, Harvey turned his hearing aid down to Low, scrunched deeper into the pillows of his chair, and slept. Peaceful, restored. As did the boy next door.
“I hate you,” Florrie snapped, with one final resentful bounce. But no one heard her. “I hope your damned old cows get hoof and mouth disease. I do. I do. I do.”
Midwives and drug dealers have something in common. The world owes them an uneasy living. Lena had been up this road once before, probably to some kind of party. But tonight she was in no hurry. First babies always take a long time.
The Jeep took the ruts in the road. Night arched over the pinon scrub, perfectly full of late winter stars. All afternoon it had snowed and melted, then snowed a bit more, until sun thawed steam out of the earth and fog rose through branches that were just about to turn green at their tips.
Lena didn’t foresee any trouble. Sarah’s cervix had been soft, even a centimeter dilated. Sarah seemed a calm sort of woman, big hipped, soft, with long hair that was twenty years out of date. If she wanted something, she didn’t say. But most women lost all ambition by the time they were nine months pregnant. It took the arrival of a helpless baby to crank up the juice again. Lena could tell all about it, but no one asked her.
The house was lit up completely, light pouring out of the unshaded windows. It sat like a lumpy adobe ship, moored in a clearing of trees. The second story bristled virtuously with solar panels. It looked like it would leak in a bad storm.
The door was unlocked. Lena let herself in and left her boots parked in a corner of the blue tile. Her sharp eyes caught spiderwebs, but in her profession one didn’t judge people by their housekeeping. Still, they owed her money, more than half the fee. She noticed a good Navajo hung on the wall, next to the curve of a poorly designed staircase.
Lena smelled woodsmoke, coffee, and that other, unmistakable smell — the smell of the edge of things, metal and blood. And she smelled weed, a high grade sensemilla that burned green and golden, all female buds.
* * *
The baby’s room was strange, a foreign country, as remote as Tanzania or Pakistan. For a while Sarah had simply kept it empty, it was just the second bedroom to the right of the crooked stairs. And she kept the door closed. At first she couldn’t imagine why the baby needed a room at all. The baby didn’t, really, being just the size of a lima bean and then a walnut, floating securely in amniotic fluid.
Then Sarah’s mother arrived from Cleveland, armed with a Sears charge card and the notion that her grandchild should start life in style, even in these Third World surroundings. By then Sarah was clumsy and awkward, but she obligingly drove her mother to the mall. Sarah’s mother hated to drive an unfamiliar car. Perhaps, in a way, Sarah was relieved to be taken in hand. After all, what did she know about babies. But the heaps of stuff the still unborn child required frightened her. They bought a crib, a changing table, a bathinet, twelve tiny undershirts, a set of pastel sheets, and even two packages of those waterproof pads that look so useful.
Obviously the baby needed a room not so much for baby as for baby’s things. Still, vague superstition held Sarah back from unpacking the boxes from Sears. But in life you take your chances, she told herself in an attempt at courage. She'd had the usual tests; it was unlikely that anything was wrong. All pregnant women worry.
When the nesting instinct hit, Sarah set to work assembling the changing table. The instructions might have been written in Rumanian for all the help they were. It took the better part of an evening to line up the alphabet blocks properly — an ABCD in bright plastic. Sarah couldn’t visualize the baby — was it housepet or houseguest? Baby might wear a little pink or blue hat but naked look mysterious and far away, like a green tree standing on the rim of the horizon. Baby herself was a foreign country and spoke no English but kept on talking in her own syllables about milk milk milk.
Maybe they might sleep the winter away like a den of foxes. Baby could sleep in the crook of an arm, on the curve of a stomach. Baby’s room was full of objects so much larger than baby. Baby preferred one ray of sunlight across the dusty floorboards.
* * *
He’d been out in the desert once. Okay, so he hadn’t always known what he was doing. But this one time, it was something special. Somehow he knew just where to look. It wasn’t a cave or anything, just a depression, a sandy place in rock. And he’d dug, not too deep, and he’d found it, perfectly preserved. A water jar, maybe a thousand years old, perfect, fat bellied, thin necked. Some woman had molded it in clay and fire. Some man had buried it here full of water, full of water in that hungry thirsty desert place, and then forgotten to come back. Or not forgotten, but died, or been killed, moved on, met with other people, taken another wife, joined a different hunt. The pot felt warm to his fingers, warm, slightly rough, its color a reddish brown. At that time touching it was one of the few things that gave him a feeling of peace. He looked inside and there was a long abandoned nest of some small animal — grass and hair and pellets of shit. But it smelled dry and clean as a bone. A bone that had been left out a long time.
* * *
Steve’s beard was scruffy, as befitted a man whose wife was in labor. He wanted dinner. But of course he hadn’t expected Sarah to cook. The pain had begun to intensify, to focus, he could see that. She wasn’t as restless anymore, like a cat caught off its own turf. She’d stopped roaming around and taking all those showers. He was glad that midwife, what was her name, was here. He certainly didn’t know what to do. Well, so maybe he should have read the god damn book. But he hadn’t. It was a lot different when it was your own family. Where was the frying pan? He wanted a sausage fried with green peppers and onions. Too bad he and Sarah were macrobiotic vegetarians. Gloomily he opened a can of beans. He bet the midwife, Lena, that was her name, ate meat. She was skinny though. A house full of women. Did he want a boy or a girl? Everyone assumed boy, but boys could be a lot of trouble. In a way a girl would be nice. Not just because she’d be pretty, but because ... well, she’d like him. Sometimes Sarah could just be so ... She’d never even learned to drive a stick shift. That galled him, here they were all the way out in the boonies and she could never drive the second truck. He’d teach his daughter to drive stick. Really, it was important, you never knew where you might be stranded. Maybe you break down somewhere, and ... never roll down the car window to a stranger. He’d teach her that, too.
“Oh Jesus oh Jesus oh Jesus.” Sarah’s voice ran up an unfamiliar scale. He took a peek into the room. Sarah was crouched on all fours on the floor. The midwife, whatshername, had a great looking ass.
* * *
Lena and Sarah climbed the stairs slowly. Sarah would take one, maybe two, steps until the next contraction started and she would moan and clutch Lena around the waist.
The bedroom was better. It always is. Try the toilet if all else fails. Sarah lay curled on her side. Not ideal, maybe, but she had been up a lot. It would do.
Lena opened a dresser drawer, pretending to look for another sheet. Actually, she was checking for jewelry. All the stars in the sky couldn’t make up for a lack of silver coins. Lena had done worse things; and on some days, when it smelled like it was going to rain, she would admit it.
Still, Lena was not the sort of woman to drink too much tequila at the bar at the Pink Adobe and start announcing that she had left two of her own children on a commune in West Virginia in 1974.
The best thing about Lena was her silence. That, and her fabulous collection of silver jewelry. She didn’t trust a woman without earrings. Even tonight she was wearing a filagreed silver hand on a chain around her neck. The hand held a turquoise stone in the middle of its palm.
A woman in labor thinks she is the center of the world. Why trouble yourself when usually all goes well. Lena was still working without insurance, though. But who said that was against the law. Stupid, maybe, but she’d never lost anyone. That time the child wouldn’t turn. Of course you only think about the insurance afterwards.
Lena had done things that were bad. Things the world called bad but also things like stepping on a hill of red ants and stomp stomp stomp killing two or three of them for no reason at all.
* * *
Lena wanted to get stoned, not stoned stoned but just slightly stoned, just a buzz on. Everything was going fine. It would take what, two, three minutes. She went back down to the kitchen.
“Want a smoke? Coffee?” Steve seemed to read her mind. She took the fat joint he handed her. It was nice, his thought was for her, help the helper.
“Thanks,” she said. Then, “Sarah’s doing fine,” when he didn’t ask.
“Ahh ... good.”
“I figure an hour more, two at most, before she starts pushing. She’s well dilated, the baby is in a good position. Everything’s fine.”
“Okay,” he said.
“You really should come up now. Sarah needs you. Maybe bring her some ice chips, and I need some more sterilized cloths, would you like ...”
It seemed effortless. Was she too stoned? They leaned at each other across the kitchen table, a nicely refinished table with a green patina, and by accident Lena was kissing this no good husband with the tip of her tongue sliding between his dry lips. What did he expect, that she slide to her knees, unzip the cold zipper on his jeans, unzip it with her teeth?
Lena got up. She’d only been gone a minute, but Sarah was deep into another contraction, groaning like a black goat.
“Come on,” she said to Steve.
But he needed a breath of fresh air first. God, he was stoned. From the back porch he looked straight into the dark, at a red rock formation fifty feet to the east. He looked at it, even though he couldn’t quite see it, as if it was the most fabulous sight in the world, a woman’s tits and ass.
Okay, okay, he would go upstairs and cover Sarah’s forehead with a cool wash cloth. He knew a lot about some things, light planes and small boats. He’d only been a medic there. Still, that was no excuse.
* * *
The place was red and narrow. So this was what it really felt like. The room was a cramp. When she was little she’d had a collection of dolls and stuffed animals piled on a narrow daybed. Then she hadn’t minded faces. Push, push. Things you’d worried about didn’t matter now, like getting cut there. You just wanted the baby out. Would she remember or would she forget. How could you forget. This place was narrowing. “Thank you,” she said. And then: “Oh Jesus.”
* * *
Sometimes, out in the desert, you came across a small ruin, just a few rooms, unexcavated. The stone walls had fallen in. Green wasps buzzed. Asters grew, and yellow weeds full of butterflies. Sometimes there was the shape of a kiva in the earth, a circle filled in with dirt. Bits of pottery lay scattered about, bold with red waves or black lines. The people had gone away long ago. It was hot and dry and quiet. They weren’t coming back.
* * *
... was pushed forward into light, a girl child calling from the top of her lungs.
I tried to find a solution to the mass deformation of the spheres by consulting the Third Harmonic of Bellatrix, but all he offered was a string of words as long as a comet’s tail and a token gravitar.
“Someday a door will open and expose to us the glittering mechanism that operates this universe,” I said.
Eustachia shook her head in disgust.
* * *
Noticeable deviations in our dreams were sending the ship into a centrifugal spin.
Eustachia said, “Two bodies revolving mutually about their barycenter must always maintain the same relative distances from each other.”
“But that isn’t the point of two bodies mutually revolving,” I countered.
“What is it then?” she asked.
“We must first correct our orbit, Eustachia,” I said, and calmly left the room.
* * *
“Eustachia,” I said, “do you know that even now I have trouble establishing the true orbit of the moon?”
“Because of its many perturbations, the eccentricity of the moon’s orbit changes frequently, but over many years its mean value we have learned is 0.0549.”
“And the anomalistic month?”
“27.555 days,” she said, but I still didn’t believe her.
* * *
We lay under an ocean of sheets.
“Do you think this configuration can last?” she asked.
“Yes,” I lied. “Everything can remain altogether unchanged.”
“And the problem get solved?”
“The many-body problem can be easily solved when one body feels the predominant gravitational force of another body,” I replied.
She pulled the sheets off my head.
“You look like an oblate spheroid,” she said.
* * *
I crushed out a cigarette on the chair’s aluminum leg. Outside the window interstellar dust and nucleoids compressed into a dimly lit space which flowed like lava across the chromosphere.
Eustachia held up her hand. Each finger contained a silver ring with an imbedded eyeball.
“In spirit,” I said, “the generalized theory of gravitation and the value of typical gravitational scalar far away from a rotating celestial body should depend on the conditions already existing in the universe.”
“In spirit, in spirit,” Eustachia said and spat at my feet.
* * *
I made notes on the K dwarf or subdwarf of SS Cygni.
The outbursts, I noted, occur at odd but predictable intervals. The distended envelope about fills the critical volume governed by the mutual gravitation of the K star and its blue companion.
“Are all dwarf novae binary systems?” I wondered.
We stared out the window at the approaching gray light, my arm around Eustachia’s shoulders.
“Maybe it’s a young cluster.”
“No,” Eustachia said, “it’s the heatdeath all over again.”
* * *
It was the ionizing hydrogen that led us to the actual edge in the last H II region and Eustachia, patchy and irregular in the crepuscular light, was the first to realize the nebula was optically thin. But what does it matter now, I wondered, as we plunged through the nebulium lines, away from the brightness of other wretched bodies flaming out one after one.
Elmira Wilkinson became a hooker when she was sixteen. Men had offered her money before: she started taking it all. She claimed it was like crossing the state line: if you didn’t see the sign that said “Welcome To Our State,” you never knew a boundary had been crossed. Of course, money hadn’t been that important then. Sometimes she had spent the entire night with a man and never charged extra.
Now that she was older – 56 next month – things were different. Most of the men who picked her up now workhorse and smelled of alcohol and cigarette smoke. She missed the sweet fragrance and smooth skin of her past customers. That’s why the money had become important.
Elmira leaned closer to the mirror and stretched her mouth to paint on a set of luscious red lips that extended beyond the line of her own thin ones. The radio blared on the dressing table beside her. She hummed along as Tammy Wynette sang “Stand By Your Man.” One more year, she thought, and I’ll have enough saved to move to Australia.”
Elmira knew all about Australia from the dogeared copy of National Geographic that she kept on her bedside table. Australia was filled with young cowboys and had some sheepherders. The article said that men outnumbered women ten to one. They were bound to be lonesome with so few women around. She had heard somewhere that men in such a predicament did things with sheep. Well, she was better than a sheep any day! They’d want her even if she didn’t still have her looks, which she did if you didn’t look too close and the lights weren’t too bright. She had long legs, too. Men like women with long legs.
Elmira adjusted the light over the mirror. When she’d had those teeth pulled to save the expense of root canal, the dentist hadn’t told her that her face would cave in when the gums shrunk. She added more light colored pancake to the little hollow under each cheekbone to compensate for the shadow, then leaned back to survey her face. Satisfied, she wiped the makeup off her fingers, adjusted her wig, and inhaled deeply. The new, red lace brassiere she had on worked just as the sales lady said it would, holding her breasts high so they squeezed out of the low-cut dress and lay against her chest like two quarter moons. Still humming, she switched off the radio, grabbed her purse, and headed for the streets. I’ll make a mint, she thought.
That was the night she met Dennis: the night she first wore the red lace brassiere. It was an unusual evening, the first one of the year with no chill in the air. After a long winter people were glad to be out again. A festive, almost carnival, atmosphere permeated the neighborhood. Laughter and loud music from inside the bars drifted through open doors onto the crowded sidewalk. Liquor flowed freely. Even the neon beer signs in Tavern windows seemed to shine with a gaudy intensity, snapping and buzzing with an electricity not unlike that which filled the streets.
Elmira knew immediately that she had made a mistake coming out so early. Expectations were running too high. Men who would normally have gone with her – their eyes darting about even as she stood before them – held out in anticipation of the night’s vague promises. Elmira had been through other evenings like this. She knew that the only thing to do was bide her time. Walking over to the brick paved mall that surrounded the old Lincoln courthouse, she sat on the stone bench to wait for what she called the Cinderella hour: the point that came about as the evening wore on, and the booze took effect, and people tired. Dreams turned to pumpkins then, and men were willing to take what they could get and call it a night. Around 12:30, Elmira began to score.
Her last encounter was with two men who had circled the block several times before pulling over to the curb; and when they did, Elmira could hardly believe her luck. One was a good looking Italian in his late twenties; the other was shy, blonde boy of about eighteen. The older man made the arrangements. When they got to the hotel room, he insisted that the boy go first while he stood behind and watched. When the boy reached that point of excitement to where he was oblivious of all but the sensation, the man pressed himself against the boy’s back and began caressing him. Elmira had thought it most peculiar.
As she headed home – down the silent, pre-dawn street – she wished she had a girlfriend that she could sit with over a cup of coffee in Jack Robinson’s all night restaurant. She would tell her about the Italian man and the boy; and the friend, elbows on table, would listen eagerly. A nagging loneliness – the vague longing for one person instead of many – threatened to spoil the happy mood Elmira had been in. She tried to rid herself of the feeling by concentrating on the young boy she had just left.
She was almost home when she heard the moan from the alley that ran behind the delicatessen. She bent over awkwardly on her spike heels and peered into the semi-darkness. As her vision adjusted, she inched her way in, tripped over Dennis, and almost fell. He was sitting on the ground, dressed in women’s clothes. He’d been beaten up, she found out later, by someone who thought he was a girl and found out differently. If the wig hadn’t been knocked off his head, Elmira wouldn’t have known he was a man. He looked like a high fashion mannequin all set for a show window display except for the hair being added. When he refused to let Elmira call the police, she helped him to her apartment and tended his wounds herself.
“My mother will kill me,” he moaned. “These are her furs. Only today she said, ‘Damn you, Dennis, if you don’t quit wearing my furs …’ And now just look at them. Blood all over. It’ll never come out.”
Elmira, dodging his wild gestures, dabbed at the bruises and cuts with a damp cloth. “Honey, them furs are the least of your worries. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but there’s some things you can’t fool nobody about none of the time.”
A half sly, half pleased look crossed Dennis’ face. “I have before. Look.” He pulled open his blouse to reveal two huge breasts. He smiled at Elmira’s surprise. “They’re real. Go ahead, feel them.”
Astounded, Elmira reached over and gingerly squeezed a boob. “Well, if that don’t beat all. They’re bigger than mine.”
“Thank you.” Dennis buttoned his blouse. “It’s the hormone shots, you know.”
Elmira was totally confused. “What about the rest of you?”
The smile faded. “That part has to be done yet. I have to have an operation. That’s why I got beat up tonight,” he said angrily. “He was no gentleman, or he would have never found out. Usually I can keep them from going that far, or the ones I can’t don’t care by the time they get there.”
Still shaking her head, Elmira went down the hall to put clean sheets on the bed in the spare room.
* * *
Two weeks passed and, during that time, nothing was said about Dennis leaving. When Elmira came home one day and found him unpacking boxes of his belongings, brought from his parents’ house, she knew he was there to stay. He rearranged the furniture, painted the walls a baby blue, and hung brightly colored gold-frame pictures. He washed windows, scrubbed floors, and sprayed for cockroaches. For dinner, he fixed tasty dishes with fancy French sauces; and at night, after they had both come home, they sat in the living room and sipped wines with names that Elmira couldn’t pronounce.
Elmira had never lived in such luxury. The only problem was that all this cost her more than she meant to spend, even with Dennis helping on the expenses. It especially irritated her that he bought good liquor to serve to the men he brought to his room. Sometimes they drank so much that Elmira was sure what he made from the man wasn’t enough to cover the cost of the alcohol. Dennis wouldn’t admit that he was just as much a hooker as Elmira was. The men were “gentlemen callers,” he said, and the money, “a gift from my beaux.”
“Honey, I don’t mean to yell. It’s just that I’m trying to save as much as I can for Australia,” Elmira tried to explain. She showed him the article in the National Geographic. “Look at that. The plains are full of sagebrush and young men. You can drive for miles and miles and never see a woman. We’ll be the only ones.” Her eyes took on a faraway look as her voice grew low and dreamy. A smile played about the corners of her mouth. “Why, they have things there like you can’t find nowhere else in the world: live teddy bears you can make pets out of, and kangaroos with pockets in their bellies to carry their babies in, and whole tribes of little midget colored people – I forget what they call them – so cute you just want to run up and hug them.”
“Those are aborigines,” Dennis said, thumbing through the magazine, “and they’re not midgets. You’re thinking of the Pygmies in Africa. There’s an article on them in here, too.”
But that made no difference to Elmira. What bothered her was that Dennis refused to share the dream with her.
“Not until I get my operation,” he said.
“But, honey, you’ll never get it, spending money like you do.”
“A lady of quality must maintain standards,” Dennis said primly. “After all, we do have gentlemen callers coming here.”
Elmira groaned. “Aw, honey, those’re just tricks. Don’cha see, going with a guy is no different than having dinner. It can be real quick, just to hush the hunger pains, like grabbing a McDonald’s hamburger when you’re too busy to do anything else. Or nice and slow, leisurely-like, simply because the food’s good. And sometimes maybe even special, with someone you really like, in a nice romantic atmosphere. But you gotta learn which is which. You just don’t bring out the wine and turn on the music and light the candles every time you have a Big Mac.”
But it didn’t do any good. Elmira had to admit, though, Dennis did have class. Why, just let a roach run across the floor! He acted like it was the end of the world. One day she had noticed him scratching and made him lie down on a sheet so she could search his skin with a pair of tweezers.
“Yep!” she cried triumphantly, holding one aloft. “It’s crabs!”
Dennis began to tremble. Elmira had to slap his face to keep him from getting hysterical. She hurried into the bathroom and made him rub on the oily liquid she poured into his hand from a bottle of A-200 pesticide. After he had showered and dressed in clean clothes, Elmira fixed him a Vodka gimlet.
“Are you sure that killed them?” he asked weakly.
“They’re gone.” Elmira reached over and squeezed his hand. “It’s an occupational hazard, honey. Why, sometimes I’ve had them for weeks before I found out.”
The next month, while Dennis did the laundry to keep from getting re-infested, Elmira went to a drugstore to replenish her supply of pesticide. She waited patiently until several customers moved away from the counter, then asked the woman clerk for a bottle of A-200.
“Do we have any A-200?” the woman yelled to the druggist at the other end of the store.
The druggist, a little bald man, came running, his face red. “I’ll take care of this,” he told the woman quietly.
“And then he waited on me,” Elmira told Dennis later, “just as if I were a respectable person.”
It pleased Elmira to take care of things like this for Dennis. It made her feel needed. She’d never been needed by anyone before. She smiled to herself and tears filled her eyes. She knew she could never go to Australia and leave Dennis behind. They had been together too long now, and she loved him too much. There was really only one thing to do: withdraw the money out of her savings account and give it to him for his operation.
“We’ll just watch our budget,” she said. “In a year or two, with both of us working – that is with me working and tips from your gentlemen callers we’ll have enough saved again so we can both go to Australia.”
Dennis was ecstatic. “Just imagine,” he bawled, “I’ll be a twenty-two-year-old virgin.”
* * *
Elmira accompanied Dennis to Chicago, where the operation was performed, and stayed with him until he was well enough to come home. She insisted he stay in bed while she served his meals to him on a tray until, finally, he convinced her that the healing process required a certain amount of exercise. Even then, she followed him about, ready to clutch his arm should he start to fall. It was only after he had managed to sneak his first gentleman caller into the apartment and lose his new virginity that Elmira would believe he was well.
That’s when the trouble began. Before the operation, when Dennis was Dennis and not Denise, Elmira had had the advantage. She was a real woman. But now Dennis – Denise – had the advantage, being a real woman and several years younger, too. When they went out together, Denise seemed to be embarrassed by her. She constantly criticized Elmira for using too much make-up and wearing flashy clothes. Once, when they went to Jack Robinson’s for a late night snack of onion rings, Elmira made a quick dash into an alley to relieve herself. Denise was quite offended.
“It’s not very lady-like squatting there with your knees stuck up in the air like some – some cypress tree,” she complained.
Nor did Denise save money as she’d promised. Elmira began to doubt that they’d ever get to Australia. And then something happened that made her forget all about Australia: she found a boyfriend.
One night a transient hotel down the block caught on fire and eleven people died. The police found the ledger, but the names in it were all aliases and families could not be notified. None of the bodies were claimed. After the fire, the city sent inspectors around to check the other buildings in the neighborhood, mostly old two-storied brick structures with laundries, porno book stores, bars, and pawn shops on the first floors and apartments on the top floors.
Elmira was alone when her inspector arrived: a young blond boy just out of college, smelling of soap and new clothes. He eyed Elmira appreciatively, and when she took him into her apartment to inspect it, it was a long time before he came out again.
His name was Rick, and he came back the next night and the night after that.
“I like older women,” he told her.
Elmira was happier than she had ever been in her life. She stopped working the streets and got a job tending bar during the afternoon at one of the neighborhood taverns. Denise said very little when Elmira talked to her about Rick. Elmira thought it was because Denise didn’t have a special beau of her own or because she was worried that Elmira might want to live with Rick. She assured Denise that there was no reason the three of them couldn’t get along together. She started making a special effort to include her when Rick was around.
She and Rick had been going together for three months when Denise surprised them by fixing an anniversary dinner complete with cake and candles. After eating, the three of them moved to the living room. Wine flowed freely. Elmira grew sleepy. Rick and Denise were discussing politics. All Elmira knew about politics was that she had had to be more careful about plainclothesmen before elections. She leaned back and smiled as she listened to the two of them. She dozed off, thinking how very happy she was.
When she awoke, the lights had been dimmed and she heard whispering behind her, near Denise’s bedroom door. She closed her eyes and listened.
“Do you think we ought to right now?” Rick said. “What if she wakes up?” Oh, she won’t. She’s had a long day. She’s older than you think. When she falls asleep, nothing can wake her. Sometimes she snores so loudly, I swear, the room trembles from the very vibrations.”
Elmira swallowed several times to hold back the expensive wine that seeped sourly into her throat. Acrid tears burned her eyes as she leapt to her feet and turned to face them. She weaved unsteadily, trying to keep her balance. “I don’t sleep so sound that I don’t feel a knife when it’s stuck in my back by my best friend,” she bellowed between her sobs.
Denise clasped her blouse where it had been unbuttoned to reveal her full breasts. Her face was white with fear.
Rick grinned foolishly. “Aw, hey, maybe I better go. Why don’t we talk about this tomorrow when we’re all cooled off a bit?” Elmira ignored him. “If you want him so bad, take him,” she screamed at Denise.
“Take him and get out of my apartment.” “It’s not what you think,” Denise whispered, unable to look her in the eye. “It’s not.” “Have you told him about your little secret?” Elmira asked quietly, her voice deadly. Denise looked up, her eyes wide. “You said you’d never mention that. You promised you’d never tell.” “Then get out.” Their eyes held for a long moment. Finally, taking Rick’s arm, Denise led him out of the apartment. “What secret?” Elmira heard him ask as she slammed the door after them and sank to the floor sobbing.
* * *
For the next few weeks, Elmira stayed inside. She had to force herself to eat and bathe. She didn’t bother doing the dishes or putting on make-up. When she closed her eyes and tried to see Rick’s face, nothing appeared. It was Denise she mourned. Rick didn’t matter.
For a while, she listened to the footfalls in the hall, hoping that Denise would come back. Then she gave up listening. Her pain, like the deep ache of a festered tooth, blocked out all other thought. She moved listlessly about the apartment, pausing only to caress some object that had belonged to Denise: a ceramic bird found in the Goodwill Thrift Store, a sweater draped over the back of a kitchen chair, the hairbrush on the vanity. At night, she lay on Denise’s bed and smelled the scent of her perfume in the pillows.
A month had gone by before the knock on the door came. Denise stood there, her head bowed. Elmira felt a brief surge of hope, followed by despair. Denise had probably come for her things, was all. She figured it was safe now.
“I’ll make some coffee,” Elmira said.
Denise stepped inside and closed the door behind her. She sat on the sofa and waited until Elmira carried the two mugs into the living room and placed them on the coffee table.
“The apartment is kinda messy,” Elmira said. “The roaches came back after you left.” Denise sipped the coffee. Her hand trembled as she put the cup on the table. “He kicked me out the night after we left here,” she said. “I was afraid to come back.” She looked at Elmira pleadingly. “I guess you never know how much someone means to you until you betray them.”
Elmira held her arms out and Denise went to her. They cried for a long time.
I promise I’ll never steal another beau from you ever again,” Denise said when they finally separated and began drying their eyes.
Elmira got up and went into the bathroom for a wad of toilet paper. She blew her nose loudly. “We won’t have to worry about stealing each other’s beaux,” she said happily. “We’ll have so many we won’t know what to do with them. You haven’t forgotten about Australia, have you, honey?”
The little building squatted upon the forlorn far West Village triangle like an unhappy afterthought. One of three aged, two-story buildings, it seemed to hug the narrowest end of an imperfectly rectangular city block, holding on for dear life. Of course, by then, it had seen grander days.
In the earlier part of the 20th Century, an elevated subway crossing Manhattan at 14th Street had arrived at a conclusion right here, upon a giant turntable where railway cars were twirled around and then propelled back uptown again on their shuttling by. The raised steel structure that girdled the cobblestone plaza had competed with horse-drawn carts and carriages, with early autos, and pedestrians for which of them could make the most noise, stench, and mess below. Sited only two short blocks from the Hudson River, where Atlantic liners of the prestigious White and Cunard lines docked, and where ferry services from Hackensack and Tarrytown had their terminus, the triangle had once been a large marketplace, a bustling center of life and commerce. Even after the Elevated was torn down and the cruise liners moved to more northerly docks, and the ferries no longer disembarked passengers nearby, the triangle remained a nexus of business: a fresh produce market by day, surrounded on three sides by permanent meat market structures.
By night, the cobblestone triangle was another kind of focal point. During the Twenties, speakeasies and dives, beer- gardens, and ethnic eateries had jostled knock-kneed next to Federal era townhouses with their sober facades, graceful railings and wrought iron-grilled windows. On that edge of the Little West Thirteenth Street, night spots had prospered for years, before attaining a slow decline. But as the ninth decade of the century opened, the last of them – El Alcazar – a Spanish restaurant with adobe outer camouflage and Arabic style signage, was barred shut, the last to go.
At around the same time, the fresh produce market relocated up to Hunts Point in the Bronx. True, a few blocks further west, around the old Gansevoort Street customs house where Melville had scrivened out proseless penultimate decades, warehouses continued to be used, and the four block long meat market repulsed the rare astray pedestrian with its never totally washed sidewalks, where gobbets of fat and flesh reeked in the gutter. By then the rough cobblestone piazza itself had fallen into desuetude. People still lived in the area, mostly on side streets, in rent controlled warrens within the previous century’s tenements, but there weren’t many tenants during the Sixties and Seventies: the area was out of the way, abandoned, too far from the center of anything commercial, cultural or cool.
A few attempts at reviving the triangle and maybe even having it renamed had abortively begun, and a male model of some note along with his girlfriend had taken over a building across the street from the old row of bars and the El Alcazar, two of a handful of pioneers intent on reviving the area. Few followed them to that particular city-edge, and even that thrust at gentrification failed when the model was awakened one night by a burglar, fought him off, and was killed with a twelve inch screwdriver. Even though the burglar also expired of his wounds, that was all people needed to hear: Once more the triangle seemed to sigh, then once again go silent.
So I was surprised when I heard that Michael Fesco had taken over the little corner property there and was planning to open a bar. Once a Broadway musical gipsy dancer turned entrepreneur, Fesco had already done fairly well commercially. The Gay Seventies’ ultimate private club, Flamingo, next to which all other discos Studio 54, Paradise Garage, 12 West were always compared and always found to fall short, had been Fesco’s venue, until it (or he) somehow fell afoul of the NYPD and was closed.
As the Eighties began, he’d already opened another club in Chelsea, around the corner from the roller-skating disco which was hanging on nicely, especially with its Sunday afternoon parties, featuring one cute-ish, wild, hetero bartender who took his break by dancing along the full length of the twenty eight foot long arc of concrete bar top. (He’d soon leave New York for a spot at a TV series called Moonlighting and stardom).
Now Fesco had this new place, which was to be a “casual, neighborhood bar, with an upstairs darkroom, where local guys could come in, have a few beers, talk, and get off,” all a few blocks from home. Or so said Racey Peters, the manager of the bar. Racey came from the South as was apparent just looking at him. He was tall, deliberate moving and circumspect in his speech, with unwashed dank black hair that fell off his head like plastic sheeting. Racey possessed the hard, flat body of someone born to grate himself down on a chain gang, and a face that some might find handsome, but which others called generic Mississippi White Cracker, with an added perpetual bad-attitude scowl. To experience Racey at his most amused was to ascertain a lip curled a quarter inch with half of a single exposed canine tooth.
I’d met him maybe a year before in the Glory Hole, up West Street, where after satisfying myself in the usual manner, I’d peeked in curiously to a double booth on my way out where Racey happened to be carrying on with another rough looking guy, and had paid for my prying by being pulled into the booth, and into a scene of passion with more than the usual percentage of raunch. After about fifteen minutes of being stripped and manhandled by the pair, I managed to get away albeit with most of my orifices invaded by a melange of mouths and limbs – more or less intact.
A month or so later, I’d come across Racey and his band on-stage, at one of those fly-by-night Punk Rock lounges that seemed to mushroom overnight throughout the city in those days, this one hosted by gigunda drag-impresario Dean Johnston. Along with his instrumental trio who more or less played, Racey grabbed at his substantial boner, while screeching and howling out his “current hit song,” “Fuck You – And Your Mother Too!” Following this performance, I’d been astounded to be accosted by him at the bar in a surprisingly familiar manner as he verbally played me up to the guy I was trying to bag, as a quote, “hot little fucker,” which indeed did help me bed the guy later that night.
But I’d never have gotten into Fesco’s new neighborhood bar if only Racey Peters was involved. No, instead it was Bob Lowe who’d been talked into working there two nights a week, and Bob was at that time the person closest to me. I never got a clear understanding of exactly how he ended up there. True, Bob had been head bartender at the Cock Ring, a little place at the foot of Christopher Street at the Hudson River’s edge that had taken the gay community by storm in the late Seventies. On weekends, crowds would be lined up, vying to get into the bar and it’s boudoir sized dance floor. And it was through this contact that Bob – and I too, had entered the after-midnight, after hours bar and club scene which had helped me write my novel, The Lure, so authentically.
But Bob’s only connection with Fesco had been as a “living statue” on a plinth wearing a black leather outfit during one of Flamingo’s notorious Black Parties. Of course, his two years’ earnings at the Cock Ring paid all of Bob’s first year and part of the second at the New York School of Law, when he matriculated there. Now he was in his second year, living nearby, in a small flat on Horatio Street, in a building the local police (who knew its denizens well) called “Love American Style,” after the current tv program. And although he never gave details, I guessed that Fesco, who was no fool, thought Bob would bring the trade into his place too.
Meanwhile, Bob, said, until it hit, he could study his law books whenever the place was empty, and still make a few dollars. That studying ended up being a great deal: the new bar was empty most of the time. Bob had begun working there mid-September, while I was still living out at Fire Island Pines. It would be another month before I actually got a look at the place, even though it was only six or seven small West Village blocks from where I lived. By then, I’d received lengthy phone calls from Bob from the bar, telling me about Racey’s antics, as well as Michael’s own attempts to get the place going, which included stripping all the upstairs walls of plaster, leaving bare brick, not really that necessary in a room that’s supposed to be pitch dark.
In fact the first time I stepped foot in it, I overheard the place referred to as “Fesco’s Folly.” That occasion was a party for someone or other, a kind of Sunday afternoon pre-beer bust. The piece de resistance of that fairly ho-hum affair was a pair of Racey’s denims, draped over one of the bathroom pissoirs in such a way that using it you had to urinate on them. He explained to someone who asked when he would know the denims were “ready” by saying, “I guess, when they dry out and can stand up on their own.” He of course planned to wear them during his band’s next gig.
Although he gave no sign of recognizing me, Racey followed me upstairs to the newly wall-stripped “back room” when I wandered up there to see if there was any “action?” There wasn’t. At least not until Racey arrived, with his squid-sucker like mouth and his octopus-like arms, at which point it was all I could do to keep my pants on and in one piece, before making my escape. The combo of Racey and Fesco somehow suggested to me that this new place would – like most of Fesco’s places – become a hit. But it didn’t and somehow that was all right with Bob, and even with Racey, for the next two months that it lingered on after opening.
For Racey, of course it was a hangout for him to have sex with pretty much whomever he wanted. While for Bob it was a way to get paid while studying law with the unusual distraction of a customer or two. That’s the way it was explained to me and that’s the way I took it. Soon enough Fesco would get wise and staunch the money flow, but until then why rock the boat?
So I guess I was surprised when I began getting phone calls from Bob, from the bar, at around the same time every night, just before midnight. He’d been there since ten pm. I knew, and would remain until one or two in the morning. But all of a sudden, he was phoning me, often for a second or third time that day very much wanting to talk, but saying very little. He needed to talk to someone, I began to feel. He wouldn’t let me go to sleep until we’d spoken. Outside the bar, whenever he and I were together and I mentioned this new habit of his, he explained it by saying, “Well, no one comes in. So I get lonely there.” Or even “The bar gives me the creeps.”
It was one of the oddnesses of our already odd relationship that we sometimes had sexual affairs with others which we might mention to each other in passing, but which were usually unimportant, and which didn’t in any way bother us or alter our commitment to each other. It was partly a function of the era we lived in. It was also how we’d begun our relationship and so how we’d decided to stay “together.”
Sometime in the beginning of his first year of law school, Bob had begun seeing a designer/decorator named Reggie. I meanwhile had begun dating with two guys: one blonde Randy, one dark haired Neal. As a result of these extracurricular activities, Bob and I seldom checked each other’s schedules very closely. Even so, I’d gone so far as to begin to worry about Bob. Partly because whenever we did see each other, he wasn’t looking his usual absolutely beautiful self, but instead a little – haggard? a mite gray? I couldn’t put my finger on it. He knew I didn’t like going to the new bar because Racey would invariably try to get my pants off me, and I wasn’t that interested in Racey – definitely not in front of Bob.
Then one night, at midnight, Bob called, as usual from the bar, and this time he sounded quite different. I was brushing my teeth, preparatory to going to bed and was fatigued from an over-occupied day. But I sensed something going on in his voice and didn’t like it. I asked if he wanted me to come there, that night, right away. And he said, “No. It already happened.” While I mulled those enigmatic words over, he added, “But I’d like it if you came tomorrow night, around this same time. Say, quarter to twelve?”
It turned out the following night I was going uptown to dinner at the upper west side apartment of recent acquaintances, the Ferro-Grumleys. Based on what our mutual friend had told me of these events, I knew I’d get out around eleven p.m. Add a subway ride and I’d arrive at the little West 13th Street triangle around eleven-thirty, eleven-forty. So I told Bob I would see him there the next night and exactly when.
That following day turned out to be yet another busy one. I was about to launch a new Seahorse Press book, always a lot of work and worry for me, then I had dinner, at which Robert and Michael had several new people for me to meet, the reed-thin but achingly handsome Colin Streeter, for some reason or other dressed in a gardener’s uniform; novelist Julia Markus; and their especial pal, writer and recently a successful jazz singer, Suzanne McCorkle. The evening was fairly fabulous, people-wise, even food-wise it was merely pasta with ricotta and a salad since the F-G’s were in yet another financial slump – the women had brought dessert and I’d brought wine so I really had to tear myself to get downtown by midnight.
I recall that I was full of high spirits from the evening’s events, slightly buzzed if not high from the wine, and that I didn’t even mind the longish walk to the bar from the 8th Avenue subway line at 14th Street, through a mostly deserted area. Bridge-and-Tunnel Guidos cruising syphilitic hookers and only slightly more upscale trannies were pretty much the cream of this area’s sparse population in those days, although today Armani and Barney have chic emporia there. The cobblestone triangle upon which Fesco’s bar stood provided the only light for blocks around that night, and it was as moribund as I previously recalled it.
When I got there, Bob was at the very front of the bar, nearest the streetside windows, perched on a stool, with a text- book and a notebook open. The place was otherwise empty, although a disco mix by Roy Thode played loudly. I’d figured Bob sat where he did for the light or because it was closest to the street and any possible street life. I would soon discover the true reason. He offered me an aperitif, but I was interested in sobering up before heading home to sleep so I took a tonic water with lots of ice instead. We chatted, I about my day, and the people at the F-G’s dinner party, he about his day at law school. We’d reach a point where we had nothing further to say, and we were about to lapse into silence, when Bob suddenly turned and faced the rear wall of the place.
It was a long rectangle of a building, with the bar on the south side, the east side half wall, half windows, a corner doorway, and the north side again half wall, half windows for almost one entire length – except for the last five feet or so which enclosed what once had been a hat check room. Another door opened to the street right there, but that was locked most of the time. And near that back door and check room a wooden stairway rose straight up to the second floor and the dark room. I knew all that, as I’d been there a half dozen times.
Even so I was surprised when Bob turned to that back wall and stairway, ignoring me as I spoke about someone or other. I turned too and this is what I saw: at five minutes to midnight a mass of ash-gray smoke descended the stairway as though tumbling toward itself. It stopped at the foot of the stairs and formed itself into a figure. I don’t to this day understand how I could tell, but I could definitely tell who the figure was and even how the figure was dressed. It was an African-American man about 40 years old, with a wide almost cat-like face and somewhat squashed-in broad nose. He was dressed in overlarge jacket with a sort of checker board pattern, which looked vaguely yellow green, and he wore darker, almost chocolate colored trousers of some fine material, well pressed. The shoes were newish and two toned: white and oxblood. He wore a light brown pork pie hat, askew on his close cut head, with a single feather sticking out of the band. He was holding what looked like an empty wine bottle. The clothing was Bee-bop Era, no later than 1941.
A second after he had consolidated at the foot of the stairs, he somehow became both the ash colored smoke and a solid figure again as he flowed forward, directly into the doorway of the hat check room. Then he was gone. I looked at Bob, who looked at me rather queasily but didn’t say a word. Neither did I. I got up and walked to the back of the place, looked up the stairs, inspected the steps and floor, and examined the hat check room. Nothing. Not a thing. “What is it?” I asked.
“What did you see?” Bob asked. I told him what you just read.
“You’re pretty observant. Anything else?”
“Yes, he looked stoned, not on liquor but as though he’d been shooting heroin.”
“That’s what Racey said. He comes every night. At five minutes to midnight.”
“He doesn’t know he’s dead,” I said. “He shot up on bad stuff, ODed, I’m guessing somewhere upstairs, at eleven fifty- five p.m. and every night he comes downstairs, looks around, and goes into the hat check room.”
“Racey thinks he leaves here every night,” Bob said.
“But you don’t?”
“I’m here every night.” Patting his spot, as far away from the apparition as he could get and still stay in the building. “That’s why I stay here. But what if one night he decided to come for a drink?” he fretted.
“He’s already got a bottle,” I said hoping to calm him. It only partly worked.
“What if he does?” Bob repeated.
“He won’t. He doesn’t know he’s dead. He’ll repeat this action every night. But I doubt that he’ll do anything new. They usually don’t,” I added. I remained another hour. No one came in, and at 1:30 a.m. Bob closed up the register. I walked him home which was on my way home.
In his building foyer, Bob said. “I can’t stay there anymore. I’m just too ... you know?”
“Creeped out. I know. Well, don’t stay. Can’t you find a temporary law-clerking job through school?”
“It’ll be real work, instead of studying like this all night,” he argued. “But I can’t stay there.”
“Does Fesco know?” I asked.
“We’re not sure he believes us. You saw? Right?”
“I saw. I’ll tell him if you want.”
“Don’t bother,” Bob said. We kissed good night and he went up to sleep.
To all of our surprise, Fesco abruptly closed the bar the very next week, and paid Bob and Racey for another week after that. After a month or so, Bob began clerking, a job he got via school, for two women lawyers, one of them British who had been married and divorced from the film director Joseph Losey. After he’d graduated with honors, Bob would take her place in the firm and become junior partner, he’d remain working there happily the remainder of his far too short life.
As for Racey, I would see him now and again over the years, usually at some raunchy new bar or club opening, and usually manage to get away before he spotted me. Then I heard he’d returned South where he’d made something of a go out of singing and playing rockabilly.
We never referred to that evening again, Bob and I, the rest of our years together. Except once, only once, when I needed potent ammunition against the specious words of his vile mother. The place was Cabrini Hospital in Manhattan where we’d brought Bob several weeks before with severe pneumocystis pneumonia, and where he’d remained, in and out of intensive care, as first one then another vital part of his body began going completely haywire before shutting down. In the fourth week of this abomination, it became clear to me that he was probably not going to ever get out of this place. I had plenty of time to be with him in the hospital, but usually his mother – we uncordially, mutually, detested each other – was around, refusing to leave his side.
One day as I entered, I heard her bullshitting him that he was getting better and would be back in New England soon, recovering. I’d just that moment spoken to his doctor who’d told me that Bob’s body was going into a piece-by-piece shutdown. He said he’d told Bob the same thing an hour earlier. I was angry at her for lying to him. Instead of filling his mind with nonsense, she should be preparing him to cross over. This was now my unwelcome obligation.
Once Bob and I were alone, I held his hand and told him what his doctor had told me, and what I knew he knew too about his lack of a future. He told me he was afraid, very afraid, and that’s why he let his mother prattle on. I asked him not to run from what was happening, but to attempt to embrace it, difficult as that seemed. But he kept arguing with me.
Finally, I asked him to remember the little bar where he worked on the Little West 13th Street triangle, so many years before, and what we’d seen there, what he’d shown me. Was that what he wanted, I asked Bob, to be so utterly unconscious in life that he didn’t even know he was dead? To be so fearful and blank that he would keep doing the same stupid action over and over again for eternity? I begged him to reconsider. Bob stopped arguing. He went silent and a few minutes later he began coughing, then needed ice in his mouth, then the pillows plumped and there were another dozen distractions, before the she-wolf stalked in again and our private moment was over. But I knew from the way he looked at me in those next few moments that I’d gotten through to him with that memory, and that he’d remembered and been horrified all over again by that nightly visitor and worse, by the possibility of turning into one himself.
So I was relieved, if appalled, when two days later, I discovered that Bob’s consciousness had already left his body. He’d had what they called a “massive cardiac event” and the witch woman had forced the hospital staff attempt to resuscitate him, even though the letters DNR, “Do Not Resuscitate,” were all over him and the room, from outside the doorway to the chart hanging at the foot of the bed, to the tag around his neck. Of course, once she realized too late the ghastliness she had precipitated – if only to go against his and my wishes, since I was his health executor – she fled, sidled back to whatever aperture she’d crawled out of.
But while I was deeply disheartened, having to daily care for a machine-breathing body without any mind inside it – shaving it, washing it, etc. – day after day until I had nightmares about it, still and all, I judged this was a better situation than if it had been the opposite: body ravaged, mind still active. Wasn’t it? Naturally enough, once his body too was gone, I’d wished I’d kept my mouth shut, wished that I still had contact of some sort, any sort with Bob. I even, yes even wished that he could have become my own personal nightly visitor.
“Do you, Jesse, take Anna to be your beloved wife?”
“I do.”
“Do you, Anna, take Jesse to be your beloved wife?”
“I do.”
Crowd breaks into wild applause, interspersed with shouts of Mazel Tov!
Cut. Cut!
Wait. I never said that.
I know I never said it, because I’d never been allowed to say it. And when I finally could, I’d lost the desire.
Never wife.
Our wedding, like every wedding, carried freight, some of it typical and some unique, because we were two women marrying. “Joining in Civil Union” was the term permitted, we couldn’t legally marry. The M word was reserved exclusively for “one man and one woman.” (One? What about divorce? I hear you saying.)
Certainly the coverage of our wedding was unique. While most couples choose to announce their marriage in the society pages of their local newspaper, the story about Our ceremony appeared on the front page of the Washington Post, complete with color photographs of the smiling brides.
How did such a private celebration become a media event?
At first it seemed simple. The decision to allow a reporter to write a human-interest article about our wedding practically made itself. Helen worked at the Post. Anna knew her from visits to her parents just down the dirt road where she came to unwind from the demands of city life. Anna and Helen talked politics outside the barn, later Anna introduced her to the finer points of the dairy goat business. So you can imagine how pleased we were when she dropped us a note to let us know she’d landed the assignment to “put a human face” on civil unions. Such an ally. When she heard a couple of months later that we were getting married, she grabbed the opportunity – could she base her article on our civil union?
This question presented itself during final wedding preparations, something else to consider, forcing us to take a break from deciding whether the catering staff should wear traditional black and white or casual attire, whether the band should play ’60s rock ’n’ roll or something less raucous? – important questions like that – to talk it over. How would it feel to invite a public we’d never meet to share our wedding with us? Well, why not? Who could humanize the story better than Helen who knew us and appreciated our lives? Ultimately, it was the phrase “putting a human face on it” that swayed us. A cliché maybe, but it motivated our decision.
Well, we made the paper all right. Bottom of page one: a beautiful color photograph of us with our arms around each other, smiling directly into the eye of the camera. Look how great we look, they chose a good photo, didn’t they? then I froze at the headline: SAME-SEX UNION DIVIDES SMALL VERMONT COMMUNITY. I stared at those words. “DIVIDES”? What are they talking about?
It wasn’t like that. That’s not what happened. Noah, world-weary at sixteen, waited for my protests to subside before informing me, “Mom, everyone and her cousin has a happy wedding. That’s not news. There’s got to be some ‘angle’.” Angle. Wasn’t two women getting married enough of an angle? Wasn’t the fact that William Sloane Coffin – weakened by a stroke but still fighting the good fight at eighty – performed the ceremony, wasn’t that enough of an angle? Weren’t the one hundred guests, a crowd that stretched from three months old to ninety-three, all of our brothers and sisters; my father and step-mother; other friends and family who traveled from as far away as California to stand with us on this Vermont hillside, weren’t they an angle?
The article was somber and dark, the women besieged. A cloud of controversy hung ominously over them as they struggled to express their love in a ceremony that aped a real wedding.
How did someone who knew us, who claimed to be supportive, get it completely wrong? The newspaper account of our wedding was so different from my experience that, for a moment, I wondered if Helen was actually writing about some other event. I know reality can be subjective, but this was an out-and-out distortion.
Furious, I sought relief in tearing the article apart, line by line, word by inaccurate word, starting with the implication that Anna is a bigot who decides whether to tell the truth based on appearances:
‘I’m not telling that guy I’m marrying another woman,’ says Anna Rosewood ... she’s judging by what she sees through the window: big arms, shaved head and a scar ... The drama – won’t tell him, will tell him – repeats that morning ... Now that Rose-wood has decided to put up a white tent the whole world can see, nearly every encounter is making her nervous.
Anna was nervous all right, but I can tell you that what was making her anxious wasn’t the tent man. We’d divided responsibilities for our wedding based on who was good at what: I’d arranged the catering, so I was focused on whether the food would be as delicious as it sounded on paper. Anna, the expert gardener, was responsible for the lawns and grounds of her hillside farm. She was worried about whether the grass she’d mowed, edges clipped with special shears, and the flower gardens she’d lovingly tended, looked sufficiently welcoming for the guests about to drive up the hill.
The fight over gay civil unions used to be waged among strangers ... but now as Rosewood and hundreds of others begin to exercise the new rights, it’s getting more intimate, played out on front lawns, neighbor to neighbor.
Part of that, at least, was true. Anna did invite neighbors. And they came: Dusty, the dairyman from the next farm over, arrived wearing his usual outfit, tight brown T-shirt stretched over his enormous belly. He was escorting his wife Matilda and mother, Polly, who came up to his chest. He embraced Anna, saying, “Now I guess I’ll have to take your name out of my little black book,” winking at me. Marybelle, at ninety-three our oldest guest, grew up on this farm in the early part of the century. She lived in California now and had traveled the farthest emotionally and geographically – to celebrate with us.
Carla, Maggie, Julia, Lizanne – the Women’s Group – arrived together, walking up the long driveway accompanied by spouses, boyfriends and children. These women had heard in exquisite detail every struggle and joy on the way to this wedding day.
Family arrived: our brothers and sisters with wives and husbands, cousins, nephews, nieces, babies. My eighty-year-old father remembered Bill Coffin from when they met at a SANE/FREEZE rally thirty years before. Aunt Judith, whose life as a closeted lesbian had almost destroyed her, clutched me so tightly she squeezed the breath out of me. “I never thought I’d live long enough to see this.” I could only glimpse what she’d barely survived.
As you know, Anna and I had each lived an entire history before we became a couple. Honoring our pasts, embracing our future, we had gathered people we loved from every part of our lives. A grab bag of past and present, sharing one common denominator: they had come to celebrate.
We’d designed a ceremony to embrace our different backgrounds. I wanted Jewish tradition and group singing. Anna needed classical music. She’d asked Lizanne’s son, an accomplished musician, to play the piano, another friend played the cello. The spirit of Anna’s parents, long gone, inhabited those moments before the ceremony as we sat together listening to Bach and Tchaikovsky. My arm around Anna, I glanced over at her sisters and brother, who were all weeping. They knew who we were honoring.
After the concert, we walked behind the chuppa to the circle of maple trees. Kids ran in front, old women with walkers maneuvered cautiously down the stony driveway. We formed a long line. A hundred people spread out makes a slow procession. Anna’s dairy goats gamboled and pranced along escorting us, thrilled to be included in the festivities.
The chuppa is traditionally made of the Jewish groom’s prayer shawl, but since there wasn’t a groom, I’d asked Noah if we could use his. The sixteen-year-old’s version of yes was not effusive, but I could tell he knew he was making a special contribution. Certainly everyone who was a chuppa holder understood the honor. Noah, Sophie, Anna’s sister Gerri and niece, Barbara took their responsibilities seriously. We had stretched the tallit between four hand-cut sticks from Anna’s woods, another melding of two traditions.
We arrived under the trees. Our guests sat in a semicircle on folding wooden chairs, facing us, looking out over rolling hills. Anna and I stood holding hands under the tallit that the holders had to raise high, arms extended straight up. When they relaxed their grip, the chuppa sagged down, draping Bill Coffin’s white head.
But that’s not what subscribers to the Post read over their morning coffee. They didn’t hear the concert, didn’t meet our family or any of our friends. They met the Johnsons.
In this standoff, Cabot turns out to be a perfect stage not upscale like the nearby skiing resorts at Stowe but headed that way. Drive the one-mile stretch of Joseph’s Pond Road ... and you’ll pass, on your left, the Johnsons, who politely declined an invitation to the ceremony because, ‘We believe in the word of God.’
That’s true, they did say that. And since that’s what they believe, thank God they didn’t come. But drive a half-mile the other direction and you’ll pass, on your right, a biracial lesbian couple who raise sheep, and two houses down, a gay man who’s a professional bird carver.
Before Silverman arrives, Rosewood is remembering her first image of lesbians: two women who lived in the ‘haunted house’ deep in the woods near her child-hood home. One day someone knocked on their door and found them dead, one of alcohol poisoning, the other of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Somehow Anna deduced that this would be your natural end if you were a farm lesbian and preferred to be around girls.
Farm lesbian?
She kept quiet, or closeted as they say now. For forty years. Fumbling through silly relationships with men and destructive fixations on women. Throwing her energy into her career as a professional runner and drinking, lots of drinking.
Yes, there had been a lot of drinking. But how was this relevant to our wedding? If we’d known that the article would air a troubled past, focusing on Anna’s personal struggles, we would never have even considered it. Maybe we were naive, but we never entertained the possibility. Why would we? This wasn’t the National Enquirer, after all.
We thought our-friend-the-reporter was writing about one subject, but she was searching for an angle, something to capture an audience. Something sensational: Famous athlete, after years of struggling with her lesbianism and alcoholism, finally emerges: Victorious! The human face we’d thought we were showing wasn’t dramatic enough for the newspaper.
And there’s something else: I was embarrassed to admit that it bothered me, because I most definitely did not want to be over-exposed the way Anna was. But I was invisible. Like a photograph where the foreground is in sharp focus but the background fades, in shadow, insignificant. Was Anna the only one getting married? Or just the only famous one? Good thing they printed a photograph so you could see the two of us together, because you sure couldn’t tell from the text.
Here’s how I showed up. Regina Johnson got her say. I’m the “partner.”
Anna’s partner has a little girl, named Sophie I think. ‘It’s her I worry about,’ says Regina Johnson. ‘I’m afraid she’s going to be swayed, you know, taught to live that way. And I’d hate to see her hurt.’
“Taught to live that way.” We appreciate your concern for Sophie’s well-being, Regina. Now if you’ll just deal with your own prejudices, Sophie won’t be hurt by you.
‘My feeling is it’s her business, but if we went to the wedding, or whatever they call it, we would be approving it,’ says Donald Johnson. ‘I believe in God’s word, and that’s what I wrote her in the reply note. But we’re still going to be friends.’ ‘Yes, she’s a very nice girl,’ adds Regina. ‘They are good people. Very good people.’
Yes, Donald, they call it a wedding.
If truth be told, he’s not really very religious, Donald Johnson says:
If that means you go to church every Sunday and quote the Bible by heart. But what bothers him is the change coming so quickly, stealing a state and a way of being he has known all his life.’
Now that I think about it, “stealing the state” is a dramatic, terrifying image: I can understand why Donald was upset. But how my wedding steals the state that’s more power than I ever knew I had.
But let’s address what’s really upsetting Donald, “a way of being he has known all his life.” The way of being I’ve known all my life is hiding, fear, denying who I love, hearing that I’m sick or a sinner. I’m sorry Mr. Johnson has to face changes, faster than he wanted, so I can have the same rights he has. The right to celebrate my love in the daylight.
It’s not as if he didn’t know who was gay in town, but they used to keep ‘very quiet.’ Now, you’re supposed to celebrate. ‘Now it’s right there near the Wedding Section, a picture of Jen and Susie or whatever, and that ain’t right. It’s too open.’
Oh, my God, right near the Wedding Section. But at least Mr. Johnson got something right. Now you’re supposed to celebrate.
This next part is wrong geographically, since these guys, the Rogers brothers, live too far off the road to see any traffic going by. But they, too, have their say:
By 2:30 p.m., the traffic gets heavy as cars make their way up to Roseland’s house. The Rogers brothers watch it all from the trailer they use as a hunting lodge, wondering what’s going on. They helped their neighbor put up his ‘Take Back Vermont’ sign just across from their trailer ... but they want to emphasize that they too are good neighbors ‘If a gay guy wants to come hunting with us, that’s all right,’ offers Darryl Rogers, ‘But he has to be tough, not a pansy ass.’
That’s pansy. Or candy-ass. But never, never pansy ass (you dumb redneck).
Polly Chamberlain, 71, has lived and milked cows here most of her life. When she was a school girl, she never knew the word, ‘gay’ except, of course, to mean she explains ... cutting poppy seeds from her garden, her boots still muddy from morning chores at the barn ... Later she thought about it and figured ‘you can accept it or fight it. But I’ve got no fight left in me.” – So she wrote this reply to Roseland and Silverman: ‘I will come to the wedding. Anna is a good friend and a good neighbor. Everyone is the same no matter who they marry. The best to you both.’
Divides a small community? Sounds like our wedding is giving people in town the chance to rethink old prejudices. The headline should be, CIVIL UNION OFFERS SMALL TOWN OPPORTUNITY TO REPAIR ITSELF. That would have been closer to the truth.
Joan Solomon leads the guests in a group chant in Hebrew. Then William Sloane Coffin talks about true love, forgiveness, homophobia and his friends’ bravery in ‘helping millions of others create a world in which cruelty is more of the exception than the rule.’
Finally the touching conclusion, the human face.
‘Anna, will you have this woman to be your beloved wife?’ Coffin asks.
‘Yes, I will.’
Then the echo: ‘Yes, I will.’
And they hug like old friends.
The final ritual of a Jewish wedding is the moment the groom stomps on a glass, shattering it. But, of course, we each insisted on our own glass. So two glasses smashed, then clapping and cheers. Mazel Tov! from the crowd. We had agreed that we would wave and, holding hands, run up to the house for some private time before joining the party. But, plans being what they are, Anna dropped my hand and turned back to embrace Bill, who had blessed us with his presence, and to kiss Sophie and the other chuppa holders, who were just now lowering their trembling arms.
She caught up with me part way up the hill. We had an ecstatic escort all the way along the fence line to the house, Anna’s goats frolicking and calling. Two shattered glasses, goat escorts: the birth of a new tradition.
The food was delicious. Guests, old and young, loved the rock ’n’ roll music and danced like dervishes. The dancing chair, another tradition, was modified as Anna and I were both hoisted into the air by the strongest men and danced around to a raucous rendition of “Hava Na Gila.” Anna, ever the athlete, loved it, bouncing up and down and shrieking in time to the music. I was terrified and couldn’t wait to be delivered back to the ground. Anna could’ve bounced on her chair all night.
That’s what really happened.
But back to the article. “They hug like old friends.” Can you imagine describing any heterosexual wedding anywhere, anytime – like that? So much for romance. Good-bye, passion. Evidently old friends is reserved for middle-aged lesbians who aren’t supposed to care about being lovers.
And finally that freighted word, wife. That’s not really such a terrible word, you say. And you’re right. Unless it’s been denied you an entire lifetime, long enough to absorb weighty connotations like belonging to, like man and wife, like wifely duties. I don’t object to anyone else using it. I’m a tolerant person – but it could never describe me. If not wife, what then?
1. lover (too sexual) 2. significant other (too ’70s) 3. partner (too business-like) 4. sweetie (too cute) 5. spouse (too distant) 6. beloved (too schmaltzy)
We’ll work on finding a fitting term. For now, it’s Anna, just Anna.
Meanwhile, how could she do this to us, our friendly neighbor-the-reporter? We had welcomed her, opened our private world, and she’d used us. Never in a million years would we have offered our wedding as a vehicle for ignorance and hate.
Since Anna was closer to Helen she had more reason to try to maintain some equanimity. She read the article through once. I read it over and over, raging – VIOLATED, EXPOSED, BETRAYED – trying my damnedest to engage Anna. She listened, but refused to reread the article.
Married now, I remembered the famous quote from Kahlil Gibran:
Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you and stand together yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
The winds of heaven were dancing now. And no one was standing in anyone’s shadow.
But for all my fuming, it was Anna who finally summed it up best by telling me the story of Helen’s wedding, which had been celebrated two years earlier at the house down the road. Family had flown in from Washington and New York, then driven into Vermont hill country, where they arrived looking shell-shocked, convinced they were in the hinterlands, worried they might never find their way home to civilization. Helen and Daniel had a traditional Jewish wedding, complete with chuppa, an imported rabbi and elaborate Kosher spread. Uninvited neighbors drove by, staring at the fancy cars, the men in yarmulkes, the ritual canopy. These were neighbors who didn’t know they knew a Jew. How would Helen have felt if some reporter had interviewed those very neighbors, soliciting their opinion about the skull caps and Hebrew chanting? Inviting them to give voice to ignorance, prejudice ? When we called Helen to complain about the story, she just sputtered, flummoxed, because she’d been waiting to hear from us, she just knew we’d love it. Anna was patiently explaining to Helen what the problem was when I wrestled the phone from her. Because I was on the verge of exploding.
“Helen, how could you do that to us? What were you thinking?”
“What do you mean?”
“Look, we invited you to our wedding, which is just about as personal as you can get. How could you say those things?”
“What are you talking about? Everything I wrote was absolutely true.”
“From your perspective, maybe. But you got the tone all wrong.”
“I wrote what I saw, and quoted exactly what people said to me. There wasn’t anything inaccurate in that article.”
“But I’m telling you the tone distorted the entire day. You made it sound like we were under siege and that the neighbors were up in arms, and you know that’s not what it was like.”
“Why are you harping on tone? I got the facts right, like I just said.”
“You’re a journalist, Helen. You know facts can be manipulated to create whatever impression you want. Look at how you framed the story, starting with that headline. The angle you took distorted the reality of our wedding day.”
“I can hear you’re upset, Jesse. Let me tell you what happened on my end.”
“Do I want to hear this? Our wedding divided the community? “The word of God … taught to live that way.” Come on, Helen, you invited the neighbors to give voice to prejudice and hate for the sake of your story. It certainly wasn’t our story.”
“Will you stop talking long enough for me to tell my side? I showed the first version to my editors. They said it was too long and told me to cut some descriptive stuff and add more context. That’s when I went out and got those quotes from neighbors. But their main complaint was that you two looked too good. That you were heroes of your own story.”
“So what? Maybe we did look good. Isn’t that what every bride wants on her wedding day? After all the fear, all the hiding, what’s wrong with taking center stage? You said you’d put a human face on civil unions, which is why we agreed to let you write the story in the first place. You put a face on us all right. It’s just not a face I’d recognize as mine.”
I’d exhausted myself and it was obvious Helen had stopped listening. I imagined her holding the phone away from her ear, letting me go on and on. But I had to, just had to, say one last thing. “Helen, you know we never said wife.”
It was not possible. We could be heroes, maybe. But never wives.
Dian, the checker at Pronto Convenience Store, asked, “Are you all right, Albert?”
“No, I’m not all right,” I said. “I think I’m having a stroke. I need to cash a check before I call EMS.”
“Well, you look terrible,” Dian said. “Do you want me to drive you home?”
“No, I can make it,” I said. “I just need to get some money in case they keep me at the hospital.”
I was leaning on one of the stick crutches I’d kept from fifteen years ago when I had back surgery. I kept listing toward the left and when I started to fall, I’d catch myself with the crutch. I’d walked all the way here like that, over a block, crossing Duval St. heavy with traffic, leaned on my crutch waiting for a break in the flow, mind coming and going, thinking to myself, “Keep thinking what you’re doing. Don’t cross till it’s clear.”
Somewhere time had expanded. It was like on grass. I felt I’d lived half my life walking from my apartment to Pronto, crossing Duval, the river Styx maybe, and I’d live the other half walking back. But it had to be done. You don’t just check into a hospital without any money.
I managed to write a check for $35, the maximum amount, and handed it to Dian who counted it out. Then I got my billfold out, put the money in it, put my checkbook in my hip pocket and turned to the door.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m O.K.,” I said, drifting toward the door, slanting left. “I’m going right home and call EMS.”
I went out the door, stopped once more at Duval St., stood leaning on my crutch, drifting left, till the traffic thinned, then scuttled across crab-like, still drifting left, ever left, the direction in which I’d been floating ever since I’d felt the first dull pain in the left side of my head and, knowing already what it was, gotten up from my chair in the bedroom and started into the kitchen, just walking to see how it felt, what had happened.
If you drift left, lean right.
Did I say it was lonely on that street? Did I say that I was the only person visible, that there was a grey sheen over the neighborhood, a fog that had devoured all the occupants but me, that when I walked out the door of my apartment, I had entered another world, a world as devoid of inhabitants and comfort, of warmth as a world can be? A grey world, a world of ghosts, a world of burdens where each step was the labor of a lifetime and there were no rewards.
But of course all we’re really talking about is waking with a dull headache and trying to walk and finding that you lurched wildly to the left and you knew you were having some kind of stroke and decided that you had to get some money before calling EMS to take you to the hospital and digging your old stick crutches out of the closet and propping yourself up with the left one to keep you from drifting and walking out the front door to go cash a check. That’s all that was happening.
Somewhere deep inside me, a cold hand had wrapped itself around my heart and started squeezing. “This is it,” a voice was saying, “you got out of the others but you’re not getting out of this one. You’re going to die or be helpless. Take your choice.” And then feeling the color seep out of my world, feeling everything settle into grey even tones. So that when I opened the front door of my apartment, having decided to lodge my protest against this condition by walking to the Pronto and cashing a check, I opened it to a grey world, a cold world, a world without hope or love. That was the world I had to walk through. There was nothing to do but set out. And Time expanded.
Besieged by interruptions. I won’t say that my whole life passed before my eyes walking back from the Pronto. Certain parts of it rolled sedately past my vision – rolled then staggered in rhythm with my rolling, staggering gait. Mostly the parts I wanted to forget. I lurched on.
Passing the Fresh Plus grocery, I noted my son, Joe, my oldest son, 45, mentally ill, lost since the 60s, leaned against the building staring off into that infinity that he called home. I thought he was in California, I knew he was in California. But there he leaned. I thought he didn’t see me but as I scuttered past, he asked, “What’s up?”
“I’m having a stroke,” I told him.
“Well, that’s a stroke of luck,” he said.
“How so?” I asked.
“Well, it’s a nice solid response to what’s going on around you. You could be where I am – stuck out beyond hope or famine.”
“I could be paralyzed too,” I said.
“What do you think I am?” he countered.
“I don’t have time for this,” I said.
He was standing by the pay phone. He dropped in a quarter, dialed a number and stood listening attentively for a long time.
“I don’t have time for this,” I repeated.
Joe spoke into the phone urgently. “Operator, I’ve been cut off –” He listened again then said, “How do I know when? When I was five or six years old. Do you have to have the whole story? Yes, I know it’s my quarter –”
“I’m bankrupt too,” I said.
“Don’t you hang up on me, bitch!” Joe screamed. I could see that I was forgotten and scuttled on. It felt dark around me. I was afraid it would be night before I got to shelter.
A chorus of large, middle-aged women were dancing naked on the parking lot while a small combo played 40s tunes, “Dipsy Doodle,” “In the Mood.” The women’s breasts sagged, their thatches were dark and thick between heavy, veined thighs. They touched themselves suggestively. “In the mood,” one of them sang, skipping up to me. There was a ring of dark hairs around each nipple. “I’m in the mood,” she crooned. “I’m having a stroke,” I told her. “Well, different strokes for different folks,” she said. “Maybe you’re just a little bit queer.” She reached down to grab me between the legs but I lurched forward and, drifting left again, resumed my journey. “What you need is a good fuck!” she yelled after me. I stopped and looked back at her and she turned her back, displaying hefty hips, then bent and pulled them apart, exposing the dark little pit of her anus as though this were the final temptation. “Last chance!” she yelled and the combo broke into “Hold that Tiger,” and I turned once more and stumbled on.
Stars were flashing before my eyes. A part of me felt infinitely distant. I was out at that point where the universe was recreating itself moment by moment. But of course I wasn’t. I was hobbling across the parking lot on the way back to my apartment. I had 35 dollars in my pocket and when I got home I was going to call EMS and they would take me away. I gritted my teeth and stumbled on. Something was in the balance. I had to get back on my own two feet or surrender my mobility forever. My sight blurred a moment. I stopped, leaned on my crutch to halt my drifting, blinked rapidly three times then peered ahead. Hazel my first wife was standing under the pecan tree across the street from my apartment. Her eyes were sad.
“You never came back,” she said.
“I know,” I told her. “I had so many things to do. I couldn’t stop.”
“We all loved you,” she said.
My eyes blurred again – with tears this time. I felt my heart expand till it forced its way through my rib cage and exploded. The fragments rained down around my head. I dropped my eyes, unable to look at her.
“We all loved you,” she said again.
I couldn’t think of an answer. Sorrow locked in my throat. I gasped for breath and stumbled past her.
A beautiful lady with a beard grasped my arm firmly. She had dark, lovely eyes. “Just take it easy,” she said, holding me firmly as I started to drift.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Someone who knows you,” she answered.
That felt both comforting and disturbing at the same time. I felt my eyes tear up.
“I have to get back,” I said. “I have to call EMS.”
Her breast was warm against my arm. I wanted to crawl inside it and lie down. I kept forgetting she had a beard.
“It’s not your pain you feel,” she said. “It’s the pain you caused.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“I’m someone who knows you?” she said again. “Confess. You were glad when you got sick. All those times when you thought you would die – you were glad, weren’t you? Because you thought you were paying off a debt in pain.”
I struggled to get away from her, drifted left again and she held me fast.
“True?” she asked.
“True,” I admitted. “Now can I go?”
She brushed her beard against my cheek. It felt velvety and feminine. “And if you die today?” she asked.
“Oh, but I can’t,” I said. “I’m not finished. If I die today, it will all be for nothing.”
On that, she dropped my arm abruptly. “Sometimes I wonder if you’ll ever learn.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “All I know is there’s something I have to do. And I can’t do but one thing.”
“Then you’d better get on with it,” she said and walked away.
I stood there looking after her a moment, feeling rejected and sorrowful. Then, with a shrug and a dip left I turned back. Ahead of me through a mist, I saw my apartment. It was right across the street. I was standing under the pecan tree where I had seen Hazel standing. I started to cross the street.
But now a parade was passing. First a military band went by playing “Stars and Stripes Forever,” a remembered song from my childhood when I’d watched my father, the soldier, parade on Saturday mornings. The band was followed by an honor guard bearing a coffin. The coffin was draped in a flag as was typical at military funerals. I had attended a hundred of them as honor guard in Puerto Rico. It was a detail you pulled – like K.P. Across the street, I saw my mother. My brother was standing on one side of her and my sister on the other. They were holding her by the arms as she bent over sobbing into her clenched fists.
I started toward her but a hand grasped my arm, holding me back. I turned. My father was standing beside me in full dress uniform.
“Let her be,” he said.
“But she needs me,” I told him.
“She doesn’t need anyone,” he said. “She needs to be in her grief.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling very small suddenly. I wanted to take his hand. He looked so splendid in his uniform and his eyes – the same pale blue eyes I remembered as a boy, glistened like stars.
“But who is the funeral for?” I asked.
“Don’t you know?” he asked.
I thought I did but was afraid to say, afraid I’d get it wrong – the way I always did with him.
“I need to get back to my apartment,” I said. “I’m having a stroke. I need to call EMS.”
He was silent.
“I have $35 in my billfold,” I added.
But he wasn’t listening. The band had come to a halt and was playing the national anthem. My father had come to attention and was saluting, his eyes straight ahead, staring past the band, past the apartment house, all the way out to infinity. I could feel his soul still beside me. “It’s about commitment,” a voice said in my ear.
The honor guard lowered the coffin to the ground and lifted the lid. I stepped forward and looked down into it.
I had known, of course, that the face I saw would be my own. What I wasn’t prepared for was how peaceful the face looked. It looked as though he had finished everything he had set out to do in this lifetime and was perfectly content to leave. I stood staring down into my own face for a long time, looking deep into the closed eyes. For an eternity, we hung balanced like that. Then the eyes opened, saw me, blinked once and closed again.
The honor guard replaced the lid on the coffin, raised it to their shoulders, the band struck up a new tune, and the parade moved on, leaving me standing in the empty street. I stood looking after it a moment and then moved forward, drifting left, crossed the street and I was back at my apartment standing leaned on my crutch on the front porch.
I stood there looking off, past the pecan tree, the empty parking lot, the Fresh Plus Grocery. My mind swirled with images then grew still. I thought back over my journey, the long trek to the Pronto Convenience Store, the first part of my journey, a long lurching trek through grey cold air, forcing my way along, driven left by a wind that howled with fury, a cold wind, cold as my loneliness. I thought of all the years I’d spent walking this neighborhood to the Sundae Palace, my writing place, and it seemed that the trek from my apartment to the Sundae Palace all those years was the same journey I had just taken, forcing myself against the wind of my fate, trying to put myself together, trying to make something that would last. I had thought the journey would never end just as this morning I had thought that long cold trek to the Pronto Convenience Store would never end.
I stood there letting this all drift through me thinking randomly of things from the past as one pores over discarded treasures, thought of how I had come to love the broad Texas evenings in San Marcos when I’d first come back to Texas and gone back to school, how I had decided that I’d never seen skies so wide, decided that I could never live anywhere with narrower skies.
And I thought of the faces of the women I had loved and watched them move past me one at a time and blessed them and was glad they had been there.
And I thought of the darkness and the torment of my days and thought of how the mind creates traps for the soul and springs them when it’s least aware. And of how the soul has to continue anyway, from one trap to the next, from one day to the next, from one broad evening …
And I thought finally of the faces of my neighbors in this neighborhood where I’ve spent the last twenty years of my life – the first neighborhood I ever had, transient that I am, army brat. And I thought how I would like to live here till I die among these faces. And as I thought of all these things, a peace came over me and it seemed to me then that my journey had ended.
And standing there on my front porch, leaning left, I lifted my arm and looked at my watch. 9:30. It had been 9:15 when I started out. Not bad. I’d crossed the universe in fifteen minutes. I turned, walked into my apartment, dialed 911 and sat down to wait.
It’s a good thing I’m not fussy because I had a messy disease of the bowel. I didn’t like the mess but it didn’t make me crazy the way it would have made a fussier person crazy. It was the pain that would have driven me mad. It hurt like hell. It could have killed me. The doctors said that I should have the whole thing cut out, so I did. My large intestine is gone. Less mess. Less pain. Now I’ve got a different problem. I’m afraid of public restrooms.
I hate to have to say this but the rest of the story makes no sense if I don’t. Here’s the thing: I cramp up easy. I uncramp hard and loud. Not having a large intestine is better than having a dirty bowel disease, less mess, less pain, but it’s not perfect. I make a lot of noise in the ladies’ room.
My girlfriend takes me to a movie at the mall. The popcorn we ate grabs me by the gut as we’re leaving. I walk into the restroom. There are two teenage girls sitting on stools in front of a long mirror, making their hair big, giggling at the two teenage girls who are shining opposite them from across the faucets. Pretty girls with perfumed hair, ready to laugh at me. I try not to take it personally. They’ve been waiting to laugh at anything besides themselves.
My girlfriend walks in behind me. She’s a fussy person. She hates it when I dump the popcorn out of the box and eat it right off my lap, even though I usually spread out my napkin first. She washes her hands before she uses the toilet. When she’s done, she looks up at the girls in the mirror. She uses a paper towel to turn off the faucet. She turns to me and sees me frozen in front of one of the bathroom stalls. She says, “Look at your jeans. It’s really hard to get that oily stuff out.” Then she leans into me and whispers, “Don’t worry about a thing.”
There are five empty stalls. She swings open the doors of four, walks into one leaving the stall door open. She bends at the waist and flushes. The girls in the mirror trade glances and giggle. My girlfriend walks into another stall, bends at the waist and flushes. The girls giggle more. I walk through the fifth door, safe in the sound she’s creating.
It was a good movie. Outside, people read reviews that are taped to the wall. They wait in the long line patiently to see the show, not knowing that art is being created in the ladies’ room. She bends at the waist and flushes.
Dad used to spend springs in the California desert leading groups of college students on their first archeological digs. He didn’t like the jobs any – he didn’t look forward to them as breaks in the grind of police work, and he always complained that Mom didn’t come with him. But she didn’t like the desert. When I was sixteen, I overheard him saying that since she didn’t go, I should. He wanted me doing more masculine things anyway. He’d formed the idea that I was a coward ever since I’d come home with a bloody and bruised face, and he’d been trying to toughen me up ever since. It was at that moment that I realized he was impotent.
It occurred to me at first because I was angry for being called weak. Being called weak by my own father was awful because I was embarrassed of the defeats I’d had in my fistfights. So me thinking he was impotent was a childishly angry reaction. But then I realized that he actually was frustrated and angry all the time, and I hadn’t seen my parents’ bedroom door closed, not for a couple of years anyway. It had to be true. Dad had to be lacking and walking around with an almost constant sixteen-year-old’s erection made me feel powerful. I confirmed it later that night when I got up to go to the bathroom and I heard no moans nor squeaking springs that I imagined would be the music of sex.
Mom ended up volunteering me to go on that year’s trip with Dad. It was to be two weeks long and we’d be camping in pup tents near a place called Darwin Springs, which was within ten miles of Death Valley. Dad liked that spot because arrowheads and bones were fairly easy to find and water was nearby.
Twenty students, mostly eighteen year-olds from the University of Arizona in Phoenix, came with us. This was seen as a sort of fun trip to them. In their freshman year they looked for bones and things, but not seriously. Dad was not leading the real trip. The real trip came in their sophomore and junior years when they went to the site of an old Indian city in Colorado. Freshmen weren’t allowed to go because there simply wasn’t enough room, so they were sent out with Dad to get their feet wet and learn how to not destroy a site through clumsiness. Occasionally they would find the bones of some long dead person, and they would dig them out carefully, marking the site scientifically, as though it were as precious a find as ancient Troy. If they couldn’t find a human skeleton by the fifth day, Dad would have them carefully remove a cow skeleton from the ground. He knew he’d find the cow skeleton because every year he buried it. Most years, they unearthed the cow skeleton.
* * *
But that year Danielle Johnston and I found a human skull. This made her a celebrity in camp. She wasn’t a very good student. None of them were. She’d found it quite by accident, and I’d been with her when she’d done it. Dad had sent the two of us down the ravine to get water and bring it back for the entire camp. This was a twice-daily event for Danielle and me. We’d walk downhill to the spring and then climb back up resting twice in shady spots. We also liked to rest next to the springs because an old oak tree had been planted there years ago, and it was the only spot of life in the deserty mountains. We’d sit in the shade of the oak tree, and she’d tell me what college life was like and then complain about how demanding my father was and I’d say, “Tell me about it. I have to live with the guy.”
She was telling me what a slave driver Dad was and that she didn’t like to have to be the one who had to go down to get the water. She said, “Why is it me who has to do this? I’m as good a student as any of them, aren’t I?”
I said, “Tell me about it. I have to live with the guy.” I didn’t want to tell her that Dad had sent her down with me because she was the most beautiful girl in camp, and he wanted to see how masculine I was. If I weren’t a good fighter, he wanted to prove that at least I was a good lover. Or this was my theory. As I was saying she should tell me about it and that I had to live with my father, I leaned back and put my hand on what I thought was a stone. It felt strange to my hand, smooth and almost glossy, so I looked at it and could see a face emerging from the Earth. I pointed it out to Danielle and she began to brush away the dirt from its face with her thumbs.
She was excited and kissed me on the cheek and said, “My God, what have you found?”
“What should we do?” I asked. I wanted to defer to her since she was the archeologist. Also it was one of the first times I’d been kissed by a girl and absolutely the first time I’d been kissed by an eighteen-year-old college woman.
She stood up and said, “I’ll go tell your dad what you found. Stay here and guard it.”
“No,” I said. “You’re the archeologist. You stay here and I’ll get Dad.” I sprang up and ran as fast as I could back to camp. Even though we usually stopped twice I didn’t break my stride. Twenty minutes later I got to camp winded and sweating. Dad saw me and rushed out of the main tent.
“What is it?” he said.
“Danielle’s found a skull.” The alarm went up, there was shouting and yelling, and pretty soon everyone in camp was following me down the ravine to the oak tree and the spring. On the way down, I made a story up about Danielle finding the thing by herself. I said we were walking to the water, and she’d noticed the eyebrow ridge sticking up from out of the Earth. From that she’d known it was a human skull and when she’d brushed away the dirt, I could see it too. I don’t know why I made up that story, except that even after running up the canyon for twenty minutes, I could still feel the kiss on my cheek.
When we got down to the oak tree, Dad patted her on the back and looked at the skull. He said, “Yeah. It’s human all right. It looks old too. You can tell by the color.” I was able to tell Danielle about the lie I’d made up and she wanted me to come clean and tell Dad I’d found it so I’d get the credit. I explained to her that I never wanted to be an archeologist and so didn’t care about any sort of credit. She kissed my cheek again and thanked me. I kissed her on the cheek and said, “You’re welcome.”
The next couple of days were spent unearthing the skeleton slowly. Dad let Danielle be the lead archeologist, and he told me that I was to be her assistant, carrying her things and fetching whatever she asked for. This didn’t bother me even a little. They mapped out the area with strings and stakes and dug around the skeleton not with shovels but with brushes. Next to the skull they found some ribs and next to that the top of another skull. Dad said, “My God, Danielle what have you found here.” He said that since there were two there may have been more and so they should really start moving. And since they only had two weeks, Danielle suggested that they bring in lights and work around the clock. Dad said that was a good idea, and she even volunteered to be the one who worked nights since she’d made the suggestion. Dad smiled proudly at her. He said, “You’re really doing a first rate job here. You’re going to be a hell of an archeologist.” She beamed at him and then at me. Then Dad told her that I’d stay up with her and help her to dig. He didn’t think that any woman should be out in the desert night alone. She beamed at me again, and I blushed.
By the time night came around, I had mounted some high-powered lights around the bones. I’d brought down a gas powered generator too and some extra food. The night didn’t faze the students at all and most of them stayed until about twelve when Dad said they should go back to camp to get some sleep so they didn’t botch the job the next day. But Dad gave strict orders that Danielle and I should stay and that I should not dig, but only make sure Danielle had everything she needed.
Danielle didn’t ask me for anything but kept digging with her brushes. As she dug, I watched her. I sat so I could see her face and when she bent over, I could see down her tee shirt to her breasts, which swung freely without a bra. She’d look up at me every once in a while and smile. I could barely force a smile and even though it was about sixty degrees, I sweated.
About an hour before dawn she stood and stretched and walked and smiled at me again. She went to the spring and cleaned the dirt off of her face and arms. Then she took off her shoes and socks, then her tee shirt, jeans, and panties. She was standing twenty feet in front of me, naked. I couldn’t say anything but just watched her. She walked over to me and kissed me on the cheek once again. She said, “Thank you” and began to undress me. She followed the same order with me as she had with her own clothes: shoes, socks, tee shirt, jeans, underwear. After I was naked, she pushed me onto my back and climbed on top of me. She took my penis into her hand and put me inside of her. She must have known I was a virgin, and I wouldn’t have been able to do that myself. But I’d seen enough movies to know that I should start thrusting then. As soon as I did, she began to moan sweetly and sitting on top of me, she arched her back and closed her eyes. When we were done, she lay down next to me and kissed me on the cheek again. She said, “Thank you.”
I said, “Are you kidding? Thank you.”
She kissed me on the cheek and I turned over and kissed her long on the mouth. It was the first kiss that I’d used my tongue. She got up, walked over to the spring, and climbed into the water. As she bathed, I suddenly became worried that someone might wake up early and want to come down to help her dig, and that person might catch us and tell my dad. Then I thought I heard the noise of a foot on the gravel and I looked in the direction of the sound. At first I didn’t see anything distinctly because the glare from the high powered lights had ruined my night vision. But I shaded my eyes and looked into the dark and I thought I could see something move behind a rock. Slowly my eyes began to adjust to the light and I thought I could make out part of a face. I stared at it long, wondering if it actually were a face and telling myself not to be paranoid. Finally I decided that it couldn’t be. I stood up facing it. It spun quickly toward me, and I could see it was Dad. He’d been watching Danielle but when he turned to me, I was able to see him more clearly. He looked hungry. Then he was gone and I could hear his foot as he turned around in the dirt even though I wasn’t able to hear his footsteps as he walked or ran away.
Danielle heard him too and jumped out of the spring, still naked looking in the direction of the noise. She said, “Did you hear something?”
“No,” I said. I grabbed at her ankle and missed, and she looked down at me and laughed. She came over and kissed me long on the mouth, and we made love again. This time, I was on top of her. Later, she dressed and went back to digging at the dead person with her brush.
* * *
An hour after daybreak, Dad came down to the dig. He didn’t look into Danielle’s eyes directly but kept focused on the bones. She had revealed parts of both the skeletons, and he told her she’d done a good job. He looked at me though, and he kept smirking and slapping me on the shoulder the way my high school friends had when I’d lied to them and said I’d slept with one girl or another. After that, for the rest of the trip, he’d send Danielle and I off on small jobs where we’d be alone and he’d always leave us alone at the dig at night. They didn’t find anything else in the area but those two bodies, but Dad said it was the best find he’d seen in any of the field trips.
* * *
For months after we came home, I listened at Mom and Dad’s door in the dead of night for moans and spring squeaks, but I didn’t hear any. When summer came around, Dad enrolled me in a karate class even though I didn’t want to go. He said I’d be all right. He told me that I’d need it if I got into any more fights and anyway he knew I was man enough to take it.
Midwives and drug dealers have something in common. The world owes them an uneasy living. Lena had been up this road once before, probably to some kind of party. But tonight she was in no hurry. First babies always take a long time.
The Jeep took the ruts in the road. Night arched over the pinon scrub, perfectly full of late winter stars. All afternoon it had snowed and melted, then snowed a bit more, until sun thawed steam out of the earth and fog rose through branches that were just about to turn green at their tips.
Lena didn’t foresee any trouble. Sarah’s cervix had been soft, even a centimeter dilated. Sarah seemed a calm sort of woman, big hipped, soft, with long hair that was twenty years out of date. If she wanted something, she didn’t say. But most women lost all ambition by the time they were nine months pregnant. It took the arrival of a helpless baby to crank up the juice again. Lena could tell all about it, but no one asked her.
The house was lit up completely, light pouring out of the unshaded windows. It sat like a lumpy adobe ship, moored in a clearing of trees. The second story bristled virtuously with solar panels. It looked like it would leak in a bad storm.
The door was unlocked. Lena let herself in and left her boots parked in a corner of the blue tile. Her sharp eyes caught spiderwebs, but in her profession one didn’t judge people by their housekeeping. Still, they owed her money, more than half the fee. She noticed a good Navajo hung on the wall, next to the curve of a poorly designed staircase.
Lena smelled woodsmoke, coffee, and that other, unmistakable smell — the smell of the edge of things, metal and blood. And she smelled weed, a high grade sensemilla that burned green and golden, all female buds.
* * *
The baby’s room was strange, a foreign country, as remote as Tanzania or Pakistan. For a while Sarah had simply kept it empty, it was just the second bedroom to the right of the crooked stairs. And she kept the door closed. At first she couldn’t imagine why the baby needed a room at all. The baby didn’t, really, being just the size of a lima bean and then a walnut, floating securely in amniotic fluid.
Then Sarah’s mother arrived from Cleveland, armed with a Sears charge card and the notion that her grandchild should start life in style, even in these Third World surroundings. By then Sarah was clumsy and awkward, but she obligingly drove her mother to the mall. Sarah’s mother hated to drive an unfamiliar car. Perhaps, in a way, Sarah was relieved to be taken in hand. After all, what did she know about babies? But the heaps of stuff the still unborn child required frightened her. They bought a crib, a changing table, a bathinet, twelve tiny undershirts, a set of pastel sheets, and even two packages of those waterproof pads that look so useful.
Obviously the baby needed a room not so much for baby as for baby’s things. Still, vague superstition held Sarah back from unpacking the boxes from Sears. But in life you take your chances, she told herself in an attempt at courage. She’d had the usual tests; it was unlikely that anything was wrong. All pregnant women worry.
When the nesting instinct hit, Sarah set to work assembling the changing table. The instructions might have been written in Rumanian for all the help they were. It took the better part of an evening to line up the alphabet blocks properly — an ABCD in bright plastic. Sarah couldn’t visualize the baby — was it housepet or houseguest? Baby might wear a little pink or blue hat but naked look mysterious and far away, like a green tree standing on the rim of the horizon. Baby herself was a foreign country and spoke no English but kept on talking in her own syllables about milk milk milk.
Maybe they might sleep the winter away like a den of foxes. Baby could sleep in the crook of an arm, on the curve of a stomach. Baby’s room was full of objects so much larger than baby. Baby preferred one ray of sunlight across the dusty floorboards.
* * *
He’d been out in the desert once. Okay, so he hadn’t always known what he was doing. But this one time, it was something special. Somehow he knew just where to look. It wasn’t a cave or anything, just a depression, a sandy place in rock. And he’d dug, not too deep, and he’d found it, perfectly preserved. A water jar, maybe a thousand years old, perfect, fat bellied, thin necked. Some woman had molded it in clay and fire. Some man had buried it here full of water, full of water in that hungry thirsty desert place, and then forgotten to come back. Or not forgotten, but died, or been killed, moved on, met with other people, taken another wife, joined a different hunt. The pot felt warm to his fingers, warm, slightly rough, its color a reddish brown. At that time touching it was one of the few things that gave him a feeling of peace. He looked inside and there was a long abandoned nest of some small animal — grass and hair and pellets of shit. But it smelled dry and clean as a bone. A bone that had been left out a long time.
* * *
Steve’s beard was scruffy, as befitted a man whose wife was in labor. He wanted dinner. But of course he hadn’t expected Sarah to cook. The pain had begun to intensify, to focus, he could see that. She wasn’t as restless anymore, like a cat caught off its own turf. She’d stopped roaming around and taking all those showers. He was glad that midwife, what was her name, was here. He certainly didn’t know what to do. Well, so maybe he should have read the god damn book. But he hadn’t. It was a lot different when it was your own family. Where was the frying pan? He wanted a sausage fried with green peppers and onions. Too bad he and Sarah were macrobiotic vegetarians. Gloomily he opened a can of beans. He bet the midwife, Lena, that was her name, ate meat. She was skinny though. A house full of women. Did he want a boy or a girl? Everyone assumed boy, but boys could be a lot of trouble. In a way a girl would be nice. Not just because she’d be pretty, but because … well, she’d like him. Sometimes Sarah could just be so … She’d never even learned to drive a stick shift. That galled him, here they were all the way out in the boonies and she could never drive the second truck. He’d teach his daughter to drive stick. Really, it was important, you never knew where you might be stranded. Maybe you break down somewhere, and … never roll down the car window to a stranger. He’d teach her that, too.
“Oh Jesus oh Jesus oh Jesus.” Sarah’s voice ran up an unfamiliar scale. He took a peek into the room. Sarah was crouched on all fours on the floor. The midwife, whatshername, had a great looking ass.
* * *
Lena and Sarah climbed the stairs slowly. Sarah would take one, maybe two, steps until the next contraction started and she would moan and clutch Lena around the waist.
The bedroom was better. It always is. Try the toilet if all else fails. Sarah lay curled on her side. Not ideal, maybe, but she had been up a lot. It would do.
Lena opened a dresser drawer, pretending to look for another sheet. Actually, she was checking for jewelry. All the stars in the sky couldn’t make up for a lack of silver coins. Lena had done worse things; and on some days, when it smelled like it was going to rain, she would admit it.
Still, Lena was not the sort of woman to drink too much tequila at the bar at the Pink Adobe and start announcing that she had left two of her own children on a commune in West Virginia in 1974.
The best thing about Lena was her silence. That, and her fabulous collection of silver jewelry. She didn’t trust a woman without earrings. Even tonight she was wearing a filagreed silver hand on a chain around her neck. The hand held a turquoise stone in the middle of its palm.
A woman in labor thinks she is the center of the world. Why trouble yourself when usually all goes well. Lena was still working without insurance, though. But who said that was against the law. Stupid, maybe, but she’d never lost anyone. That time the child wouldn’t turn. Of course you only think about the insurance afterwards.
Lena had done things that were bad. Things the world called bad but also things like stepping on a hill of red ants and stomp stomp stomp killing two or three of them for no reason at all.
* * *
Lena wanted to get stoned, not stoned stoned but just slightly stoned, just a buzz on. Everything was going fine. It would take what, two, three minutes. She went back down to the kitchen.
“Want a smoke? Coffee?” Steve seemed to read her mind. She took the fat joint he handed her. It was nice, his thought was for her, help the helper.
“Thanks,” she said. Then, “Sarah’s doing fine,” when he didn’t ask.
“Ahh … good.”
“I figure an hour more, two at most, before she starts pushing. She’s well dilated, the baby is in a good position. Everything’s fine.”
“Okay,” he said.
“You really should come up now. Sarah needs you. Maybe bring her some ice chips, and I need some more sterilized cloths, would you like …”
It seemed effortless. Was she too stoned? They leaned at each other across the kitchen table, a nicely refinished table with a green patina, and by accident Lena was kissing this no good husband with the tip of her tongue sliding between his dry lips. What did he expect, that she slide to her knees, unzip the cold zipper on his jeans, unzip it with her teeth?
Lena got up. She’d only been gone a minute, but Sarah was deep into another contraction, groaning like a black goat.
“Come on,” she said to Steve.
But he needed a breath of fresh air first. God, he was stoned. From the back porch he looked straight into the dark, at a red rock formation fifty feet to the east. He looked at it, even though he couldn’t quite see it, as if it was the most fabulous sight in the world, a woman’s tits and ass.
Okay, okay, he would go upstairs and cover Sarah’s forehead with a cool wash cloth. He knew a lot about some things, light planes and small boats. He’d only been a medic there. Still, that was no excuse.
* * *
The place was red and narrow. So this was what it really felt like. The room was a cramp. When she was little she’d had a collection of dolls and stuffed animals piled on a narrow daybed. Then she hadn’t minded faces. Push, push. Things you’d worried about didn’t matter now, like getting cut there. You just wanted the baby out. Would she remember or would she forget. How could you forget. This place was narrowing. “Thank you,” she said. And then: “Oh Jesus.”
* * *
Sometimes, out in the desert, you came across a small ruin, just a few rooms, unexcavated. The stone walls had fallen in. Green wasps buzzed. Asters grew, and yellow weeds full of butterflies. Sometimes there was the shape of a kiva in the earth, a circle filled in with dirt. Bits of pottery lay scattered about, bold with red waves or black lines. The people had gone away long ago. It was hot and dry and quiet. They weren’t coming back.
* * *
…was pushed forward into light, a girl child calling from the top of her lungs.
There was a big fat man talking to his brother, a wiry skinny man; they were eating. At one point in their lives these two men had eaten dinner together daily in a Brooklyn tenement now sentimentalized in their memories, but these days they hardly ever ate together, hardly ever saw each other. Still, they were brothers. Married with children, each one had become a storeowner in the Bronx. Skinny Victor was a moneymaker living in the suburbs, a conservative. Fat Aaron was poorer: his store was a financial mess and he lived in a housing project; often he favored liberal and sometimes even radical speechmaking. They had both married brunettes. One brunette, the wife of fat Aaron, seemed depressed. Her gestures were choppy and uncoordinated. Skinny Victor’s wife took better care of her appearance: her hair was set nightly on rollers, her lipstick was never an out-of-date shade, but at night she occasionally sobbed in a way that was familiar to her sister-in-law.
Dinner had been prepared by Iris, fat Aaron’s wife. She had perspired over the stove all day, praying that the casserole come out perfectly, afraid of burning the crust. She had also defrosted some lamb chops (in case of disaster with the casserole) and cooked broccoli and made a soup and tossed a large salad. She had set out three types of bottled salad dressing: California Onion, Russian, Low-Calorie Russian. During her last pregnancy the difficult one with Carly, she had developed a love for Russian dressing. For months she had poured Russian dressing onto corn muffins, into yogurt, onto scrambled eggs. Then she would throw up each night around nine o’clock.
“Perhaps,” she whispered as she placed napkins down, “I should have named Carly something more appropriate, like Natasha or Tania.” Smiling was barely a reflex for her anymore.
Iris’ other daughter, Carly’s older sister Jo Ellen, had a long nose. For a seven-year-old she had an exceptionally long nose. Her school peers called her Nosy, Rudolf, and Snotface. Of course Jo Ellen hated her sister Carly. Carly was pugnosed and blue eyed; even strangers on buses told Iris that she should get her into television commercials. “Art Linkletter would love that one,” a woman in a supermarket had said. Once, Iris had run wildly into the girls’ bedroom when she heard Carly shrieking, “Mommy Mommy Mommy!” and there Jo Ellen had been, poised to strike Carly over the head with the metal iron. But the scar on the side of Carly’s nose, the jagged hole with slightly lumpy skin next to it (barely noticeable after awhile) had appeared one day because Iris hadn’t heard Carly’s yells, or had ignored them, or hadn’t understood them. In any case, Iris couldn’t remember what she had been doing at the exact moment that the scissors had flown from Jo Ellen’s hand into Carly’s skin.
Paul, the only son and oldest of the three children of Aaron and Iris, didn’t like Jo Ellen most of the time. She had too mean a streak, shoplifted too often from the candy store, and kissed the television screen whenever a Spin and Marty episode was shown on The Mouseketeers. Paul was eleven-years-old. He liked Carly, even though she was spoiled and demanded too much attention, especially when his friends were around. But she was cute and she was tough, and he had hopes of her becoming a lady wrestler some day. He stood silently hidden sometimes, watching her play in the project grounds with her girlfriends. She never let anyone get away with anything: Carly could hit for real, and he felt proud. After she’d broke her arm (jumping off the monkeybars) she’d gone wild with the power of the cast, hitting everything in her way; even then, even when his own nose got bloodied, he felt proud.
Now while the four parents seated at the kitchen table ate the dinner which Iris had prepared, while they spread their thighs comfortably on the four plastic orange chairs, Carly and Paul and Jo Ellen played in another room with Mimi and Shushie, the daughters of Victor and Lydia. Mimi hated Shushie. She didn’t mind Carly that much because she rarely saw her, but she hated the urine smell which Shushie, a chronic bedwetter, invariably carried around with her. Victor screamed and yelled at Mimi at least twice each week, and was given to beating her at least once each weekend if he’d been drinking, but he called Shushie “Princess Sha-Sha” and “Princess Shut Up” and never touched her.
Shushie had quietly peed on the floor of Paul’s room. Jo Ellen and Mimi whispered together and then announced that although Shushie had obviously done it, Carly was probably resisting the desire to do the same. “Carly,” they said, “is still a baby.” Paul, feeling left out, sang, “Carly likes piss, she makes piss and eats piss. . .”
“You eat shit and stuff,” Carly answered.
Shushie clung to Carly’s arm.
Jo Ellen pinched Carly’s other arm. “I’m going to tell Daddy that you made Shushie pee, that you pulled down her panties for her, that you made her do it, and that you tasted it like a dog! Like a pig!”
Mimi said matter-of-factly, “Carly, you know that Uncle Aaron will beat you up.”
“Why me? Why not Shushie? I didn’t pee on the floor!”
Jo Ellen smiled. “So what? You’re still a pig. You keep our room a mess, Mommy says you’re disgusting.” She hopped around the room.
“Jo, you don’t have to keep calling her a pig,” Paul said.
Jo Ellen stopped hopping. “Mommy found you in your crib when you were a baby covered with shit and vomit and even diarrhea, don’t forget it! I heard her telling Aunt Lydia that story. You were covered, in your hair, in your face, even in your mouth!”
Carly began to run. She would leave little clinging Shushie behind, leave Jo Ellen with her nose and fury behind, leave taunting Mimi and confused Paul. She would run, they could all sit in the piss for all she cared, they could drown in it. “Eat it yourself!” she yelled and began to run, enjoying the sensation of flight: out of the bedroom, racing through the living room weaving in and out of the two Woolworth coffee tables and the small table which her father had built — she could run forever, it felt so good — around the fish tank, the plants, the bookcase, over the lamp and television wires, into the kitchen, past the kitchen table . . . Her father was lifting a glass of black cherry soda to his lips. Carly raced by, running freely, somehow knocking the red and white dotted glass from his hand, then racing faster as it fell to the floor. The glass broke, causing the black-red liquid to pour onto the kitchen floor which Iris had mopped that morning. Aaron stood up. He was sick and tired of Carly knocking his food, her own food, everyone’s food and drink to the floor. She never sat still, she never even sat in a chair; instead, like a goddamned flamingo with one leg crossed under her and the other one of the floor so that she stood rather than sat, bouncing and eating, picking out lima beans from her soup with her fingers and leaving them on the table in mushy little heaps. She held the fork wrong. She fidgeted so much in restaurants that she knocked over her chair, even the time that Monty Hall was at the next table the night they all went to The Brass Rail. Carly kept running, into the bathroom. She locked the door, double locked it, pushed the clothes hamper against it, piled on top of the hamper bottles of shampoo, soap powder boxes, stomach relaxers, every box or bottle in sight. She sat down in the white bathtub, pulling the lima bean green shower curtain closed around her.
She would live inside the bathroom and never come out. She could do it if she wanted to. There was toothpaste in the bathroom, there was soap and water so she would be clean. There were things to touch and play with so that her fingers wouldn’t become crazy with boredom, but there would be nothing to draw with, yes there would! The four red lipstick tubes in the medicine chest, and the nailpolish, too. They would never be able to get her. Her father would kill her if he ever saw her again. She would lock herself in the bathroom all night, and then when her mother went shopping or to the laundry, she would come out. She would pack some shirts and shorts and her favorite doll, Black-Haired-Bazooka-Lady, and run for her life. Paul and Jo Ellen would be in school, so they wouldn’t have any idea where she had gone. She would leave rather than face him. She remembered the time that she had spilled her dinner on the floor, by accident, and he had forced her to eat a little bit right off the floor, while her mother had stood by the cabinet saying, “Aaron, stop it!” But she had said, “Mommy, I don’t care. I’ll do it, I’ll do it, he wants me to do it, I’ll do it.” And on her hands and knees she had crept to the food, listlessly touching some with her tongue and then saying, “Okay Daddy?” never expecting him to thrust his foot forward almost into her face and say, “Eat it all, just for that, you snotty wretch!”
The bathtub felt cool and soothing. Why did she have to knock it out of his hand, of all the people eating dinner? Mommy or Aunt Lydia wouldn’t have minded, they might have even laughed. Uncle Victor would have frowned and turned red, but she wasn’t his daughter. Why did the glass have to break into so many tiny pieces? Why did Mimi and Jo Ellen say she ate piss? They were the disgusting ones, they were the pigs. Shushie was just a baby who didn’t understand and she would try not to hate Shushie. But the thought of Shushie with her dripping nose made her sick.
Carly had promised herself long before this day that her tears, if and when she allowed them, would be short. “He won’t ever make me cry again,” she thought. “Fuck him, fuck him, I won’t cry because I didn’t do it on purpose, I’ll never come out, he’ll only miss me for a day or two, and for all I care he can use the Boys’ Bathroom in the playground tonight. I don’t care if he never goes to the bathroom again for the rest of his life. He takes all day in there, and Mommy says I should pee into a rubber bucket when Daddy is in the bathroom, because he gets angry if we ask him to hurry. He’s embarrassed because he has ‘bathroom problems.’ And if it’s a real emergency, we have to say, ‘Daddy, please, I really need it, I’m sorry, it’s a real emergency.’ And he gets mad and says, ‘In a minute, in a minute’ and comes out ten minutes later holding his crossword puzzle, and then he stands outside the door waiting until we’re finished.”
But the times when her father was in a good mood and he would hear Carly go into the bathroom (his bedroom was next door to the bathroom so he knew who went in and out) he sang songs to her outside the bathroom door.
Oh Pretty Carly The face that sank one thousand ships Oh Pretty Carly The sweetest eyes in all the town . . .
Once, as she was emerging from the bathroom, he had solemnly told her to follow him into the bedroom. His bedroom was usually off limits except for beatings. “You’re the pretty one,” he said after he had her sit down on his bed. “Paul is a boy, and Jo Ellen isn’t pretty at all, let’s face it. She’s smart no doubt, but no beauty, you’re the beauty, the one that the neighbors all want to steal. The Bennys wouldn’t mind if one night we forgot to close the front door so they could sneak in and take you away.”
Paul’s voice was suddenly outside the bathroom door. “. . . gonna get it, Daddy’s mad as shit, you better come out, Carly.”
Carly said nothing. If she didn’t talk or move, maybe they’d decide that a cockroach had eaten her, or a wasp had stung her to death. Why couldn’t Paul step in and stop the beating? It wasn’t fair, any of it. Paul got beaten even harder than she and Jo Ellen and he was a boy and the oldest and he couldn’t stop it. And he was supposed to be the generous one of the three of them, and even that didn’t help.
“Leave her inside, let her rot in there if she wants to,” said Jo Ellen. “And when you do finally come out, not only is Daddy going to beat you up, but Paul and I are going to take you into The Dark Room!”
The Dark Room. That means that they shut the lights and pulled her inside and shrieked, “Oh, come into The Dark Room, Carly, come inside The Dark Room, where little girls are eaten by monsters, little snotty girls.”
Whenever her parents went to the movies, which was once a week, every single week, Paul and Jo Ellen pulled her inside the bedroom and shut the lights. They would push her down hard on the bed and say she could never come out, never, and they would pinch and tickle. She would push and yell and fight her way outside, kicking and biting if she had to. She had bitten Paul’s arm so deeply once that he had yelped like Mimi’s dog.
Sometimes only Jo Ellen would be interested. Paul would be doing something alone in the room with the door shut. But Jo Ellen and Carly shared a room, and then Jo Ellen would push Carly down and say, “I’m the Va Va Voom, and I’m going to eat up YOU!” and she would pounce and hit, yelling “Va Va Voom Forever!” If Carly could gather her strength, she could possibly reverse positions. One time she had thrown Jo Ellen down and stuffed a pillow over her face, chanting over and over, “The Ugly Witch is Dead!” Jo Ellen had been very still, allowing Carly to chant until Carly grew scared and pulled the pillow off. Then Jo Ellen jumped up screaming, “Va Va Voom will eat you alive!” Carly had fallen off the bed, crying. But she never cried for long. Nobody even noticed, sometimes if she was quiet enough. She made sure that she never hiccoughed afterwards like her friends did when they cried. Mostly she got a lump in her throat that stayed. There was a dream she kept having that stayed also: the dream about gorillas invading the housing project and eating everyone up except for Carly and her mother, who chose to jump out the kitchen window instead, holding hands, rather than to die at the hands of the gorillas. In another dream the gorillas became octopi.
Her father pounded on the door. “You’ve been in there for almost an hour! Get out!” She jumped up. Her mother’s voice spoke, “Carly, Daddy’s very angry this time. You’d better come out now.”
Carly pulled the hamper from the door, scattering the shampoos and boxes and bottles onto the floor. She ran out. Her father’s arm reached and she was inside his bedroom, the door shut, her panties were forced down and she was hit so hard that she felt her skin wanting to bleed, although he hit her for a very short time, probably, really. And then she knew enough to say that she was sorry, Daddy, sorry, Daddy.
The boat glided past a little island with a Tobacco Road house on it. I had recently been reading Erskine Caldwell. A barefoot woman stood in the doorless doorway watching us lifelessly, tin coffeepot in hand. A barefoot man in what had once been overalls was sawing a board in the yard, which was the island. Their hair was gray and thin like the grass on the island. A gray woman in a gray slip stood on a ladder painting the wooden house gray.
We glided on, entered the broad blazing bay, and veered. “That’s Guy Lombardo’s boat,” Kitty said as a long white yacht steered by a laughing boy in a green and white silk shirt blew past. She was perched in the prow of our boat eating fried chicken and drinking whiskey, wearing wrinkled pink linen slacks, her blond hair caught up in a gold net from which it kept flimsily escaping. I wondered what there was that was unusual about her. According to my Uncle Pearce, his friend Basil, who was fishing at the stern, had been fired from his government job for keeping Kitty as his mistress. Kitty was rather old now, but Uncle Pearce also said she had once been a circus performer.
Our boat had anchored and Kitty was no longer spilling whiskey down the front of her white polo shirt with the pink-and-blue alligator over her heart. She wiped her greasy pink fingers on the sides of her wrinkled pink linen slacks and said to me:
“Did I ever show you a picture of my favorite elephant, Bimbo?”
“No.” I wanted to learn anything I could.
Kitty reached for a saffron straw bag with a chiffon scarf, a copy of Mademoiselle, a bottle of rose water, a briar pipe and a pair of sunglasses with checkered frames protruding from it. She took from her wallet a tiny snapshot of a mammoth gray elephant with its trunk lifted in the air. I appreciated it, thanked her, and handed it back.
“Bimbo was a jewel, a true love. Now, go somewhere and play for awhile, so I can get drunk in peace. Come back later, when you are sure I have had a chance to forget my sorrows, and I’ll tell you about how I trained Bimbo and my other elephants.”
This was an insult, since I was a college freshman and already dating a man who was required reading at Yale, my philosophy professor, but I did as I was told. I started to walk to the stern of the boat, careful not to touch too lingeringly the heat of the hardwood deck with my bare feet, and on the way encountered my Uncle Pearce, just emerging from his nap in the dark cabin below.
“Hello there,” said Uncle Pearce. He then informed me that all my professors were Red Communists and ought to be deported to Russia, where they belonged.
“Well …” said I, shifting from foot to burning foot. This was his boat, after all, and I was only a timid girl guest.
“Remember that I’ve told you this,” said Uncle Pearce. “You will be grateful to me some day.” He took a swig of whiskey from his flashy silver hip flask, faced around and descended to the dark cabin, where there were bunks, to resume his nap.
I decided to join solitary Basil for some fishing. I grabbed a rod and sat down beside him, but he ignored me. The radio was on — an effeminate voice talking about Emerson’s works — with no one listening.
“The way he combines Yankee shrewdness with an almost Oriental mysticism …” were the words I caught.
I fished in the incandescent heat with both hands tightly on the rod and often lifting it to feel that plunk that means you are holding bottom. The sun was like a corona, a golden chandelier gone mad — “the glorious lamp of Heav’n,” as Dryden called it. Shivery spears of ghostly light green grass grew from the sandy bottom of the bay forming island mirages. Silence, the silence of the sea.
“Have you known Kitty long?” I asked Basil conversationally.
He did not turn. He was middle-aged — a tall, barrel-chested, blunt-bodied, sun-tanned man in white, like Uncle Pearce. I was wearing only a sleek black Catalina bathing suit and my long red-gold hair was being burnished by the sun — at least, if you can describe a bad case of sunburn complete with blisters that way. I felt hot, giddy, lonely. My throat was dry and I longed for a sarsaparilla.
“Don’t mention that woman’s name to me,” Basil snarled after a time.
He switched off the beginning of a discussion of Emerson’s Oriental mysticism. We went on fishing in the silence but neither of us caught anything, not even a guppy, one of those eensie creatures I had in my goldfish bowl at home. My two favorite guppies were named Will Rogers and Will Hays. I got tired of lifting my rod to feel the plunk that meant I was holding bottom. I imagined Kitty would be sufficiently inebriated by now to talk to me. I put down my rod and skittered back to the prow of the white boat, careful as always of the heat of the hardwood deck on my bare feet. Uncle Pearce was still sleeping. He was a very tired man, like everyone in my family.
“Hello there,” Kitty greeted me. She did not seem especially drunk but I knew she was. “Has that bastard Pearce been saying I was once a circus performer?”
“Well, yes, I believe he did speak of something of the sort,” answered I.
“I was never a circus performer. I mean, I never walked the tightrope or got sawed in half or anything like that. I was a trainer of circus elephants, that’s what I was.”
“Will you tell me about it?”
“Yes, if I can get those two bastards out of my mind.” Kitty was still using her greasy pink fingers to eat fried chicken, but now she began to talk:
“Training elephants is very much like teaching children, which I’ve also done. The first thing a five-year-old kindergartner learns is the alphabet, because it is the basis of all his future communication with the human race. In the same way, the first thing a trainer must teach his animals is their ABC, the elementary movements which are the foundation of the more complex tricks they will eventually perform in the ring. Elephants are my big, lumbering, docile girls whom I teach to walk, to stop, to come to me, to lift a leg, to lie down — at a word of command. During these lessons I stand in the center of the practice ring while grooms bring the elephants around me. If, for instance, I want Bimbo or some other particular elephant to stop, I call her name, say the word “stop” and at the same time cue her with a whip — flicking it in front of her face, but never actually striking her. At first her groom may be obliged to act as a brake, pulling back on her long ear. Soon, however, she will understand what she is being expected to do, and will come to a halt on her own. Then I reward her with sugar, in the case of my dear Bimbo, with a lot of sugar.
“Do you know, I’ve had many careers besides this one. I’ve been not only a schoolteacher but a university librarian and a salesclerk in a gift shop. I’ve been a nightclub dancer in Detroit, an artist’s model in New Orleans, a call girl in Chicago. I’ve been a babysitter, a cleaning woman, a short-order cook. But the thing I’ve enjoyed most of all is teaching my elephants their ABC.
“Once the ABC has been learned, the elephants are ready to be introduced to the outside world. In the beginning I take them for petites promenades, only a short distance from the stables. Elephants are sensitive, and can feel lost and grow fearful. But every day we go a bit farther. Presently I steer them closer to the road which winds past the winter quarters. I can sense how terrified they are at the roar of the traffic, poor things … They become accustomed to it, and soon are grazing peacefully in the field bordering the road, and I know that in a few more days I will be able to take them on the road itself. I am skilled at taking my elephants out on the roads. If Bimbo or someone shows any sign of fright — say at the deafening noise of a large truck — I go immediately to her side and whisper sweet-nothings into her ear …
“When it is clear to me that my elephants know their ABC of basic tricks and their road drill, I start to instruct them in some of the harder routines which are part of a polished act. The most important thing for me to remember here is that I must never lose my temper, no matter how long it takes one of my little friends to learn a trick. One outburst of anger on my part can spoil all the friendship and trust created over months of patience and love. Also, I know that I must never ask an elephant to do what she cannot do. I must teach her only the tricks that nature has made her capable of performing.
“Teaching an elephant to dance is not difficult. After all, everyone can dance, as dancing is only a matter of moving one’s feet to music. When I was a nightclub dancer in Detroit I had had no prior training, yet I found it the simplest thing in the world. Bimbo found that dancing was not much more than an extension of her ABC. All she had to do was lift one leg and then another in time to the music. Of course, if the rhythm was a waltz, she would rotate as she did this. All my elephants have tended to look upon dancing as child’s play.
“Once, do you know, I even taught Bimbo to rumba. I had this idea of Bimbo wearing a grass skirt and shaking her body so that the skirt would sway. This was easier than I’d anticipated. I took a piece of sackcloth and threw it over her shoulders, shouting the word “rumba.” The sackcloth made her uncomfortable, so after awhile she shrugged her shoulders to take it off. So I succeeded — and when the sackcloth fell to the earth, I handed her a few lumps of sugar. We did this for a week, and she soon learned that when I shouted “rumba!” I required her to shake her body. Then I was able to get rid of the sackcloth and pretty her up with the grass skirt she would wear in the ring.
“Bimbo was my favorite, as cute as an ivory idol and a real charmer she was, but I took no less strict an attitude with her than I did with my others. The discipline and training of an elephant depend upon contrast — this is to say, reward or satisfactory reaction when the elephant does as I wish, and disapprobation or discomfort when she does not. An elephant must have absolute respect for her handler — and to be frank about it, this begins with her fear of me. Fear of punishment, I mean.
“My elephants love me, I know that. They love me because I have proved I have every reason to be feared, and because they know I will not administer any pain nor abuse to them unless they have disobeyed me. I have a wonderful relationship with my elephants. They are very good, very obedient, and they work in order to obtain my affection and my praise.”
Kitty finished eating her second plate of fried chicken and poured herself another glass of whiskey.
“I talk to you as though I were still an elephant trainer,” she said, “whereas now I am actually only the dream girl of that bastard Basil. I’m on the skids now, for real. Go away, will you? I am in danger of becoming sober, and I want to make sure that does not happen. Go play in the water or something.”
Her gold net with the blond hair flimsily escaping from it slipped sidewise. Her wan, beautiful features were contorted with distaste. I decided to go swimming and climbed down the ladder of the boat.
I began to wonder about the depth of the water in the bay, and grasped a rung of the ladder firmly. I swam round the boat from the ladder and walked on the anchor rope, paddling with my hands to keep upright in the ice cold green. I let go and found that the water was not deep.
Uncle Pearce had risen from his nap. He and his friend Basil, combining Yankee shrewdness with an almost Oriental mysticism, stood near the shore in green water up to their waistlines and talked about how invigorating it was.
I went under. I explored the sandy bottom with my eyes open and found a dead horseshoe crab, some Easter egg stones, an empty whiskey bottle, a jellyfish who stung me on the leg, a lady’s platform shoe, a poisonous-looking spiky dark red plant, two delicate brownish pink shells like the ears of a faun and a mass of dank dark green seaweed.
I came up. I climbed the ladder and stuck my head over the side of the boat. “Kitty, why don’t you come on in with the rest of us?” said I. “The water’s fine.”
Kitty did not answer. Her eyes were closed, her wide hips were sprawled on a white sailcloth folding chair, she was surrounded with bottles and I wondered whether she were asleep.
“Kitty, may I talk to you?” said I. “I let you talk to me, and I thought maybe you could reciprocate. I’m a student, you understand. My grades are good so far but I don’t know how long that will last, as I hardly ever read anything on the course-lists. I read as I have read all my life — exactly as I please.”
“Those bastards,” mumbled Kitty in her drunken sleep. “Those bastards, those goddamned incredible bastards. Won’t leave me alone. Blame me for everything. Take out all their hostility on me. Oh Bimbo, my darling, my dearest friend. Bimbo, Bimbo, Bimbo. Make those stupid bastards go to hell. Stupid. Stupid. Pick them up in your trunk, Bimbo, and dash them against a brick wall. Bimbo. My sweet Bimbo.”
Darkness was coming down, sending shallows of black light through the bay. Kitty looked now, I mused, like the people on the little island with the Tobacco Road house on it, that we in our boat had glided past. She was barefoot, lifelessly holding a whiskey glass in her hand, and her hair was gray and thin like the grass on the island. Her clothes looked gray, and her sleeping face.
Her skin was wan and gray, like elephant hide. The glass dropped and broke, and she began to snore. I climbed back down the ladder and paddled away.
Ruth Jespersen is the author of two collections, The Strange Ordeal of Edwin Banquo and Other Stories and Pop and Other New York Tales. Her fiction, poems, plays and journalism have appeared in numerous periodicals here and abroad. She lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida.
I.
Blue neon fizzled overhead. As Harvey Andressen put out his scrawny hand to grab the motel office’s doorknob, a dark shadow lurched across the screen. Harvey stepped back. Startled moths flurried away as the door swung and a tall boy with flapping red hair ran out and pounded off into the night. “Florrie!” the boy called out, jamming his hands excitedly into his jeans’ pockets as he ducked past parked cars. “Hey, Florrie! I did it! We’re in!” A car door slammed.
Harvey shrugged and stepped forward into the office. The two men already there looked up at him. The wild-eyed man behind the desk had a grin, lights and shadows doing a dance in the seams of his face. “Hello,” he said, hospitably.
“Howdy do,” said Harvey, blinking at the jellyglasses on the cluttered desk. A couple of empties, and one half full. “Go on ahead,” he waved his chickenclaw hand. The stripes in his seersucker suit rolled and wavered. “Whatever you’re up to, don’t mind me.” His skin sagged off his bones in yellow pouches, so that even when he was trying to smile gaily, he looked sad. “Don’t mind me …” He peered now at the man sitting on the floor, with his back against the wall. Sweaty shirt gonna stain that wall, thought Harvey. But then. None of my beeswax. “You havin’ a party here, hey?”
“Damn love nest,” said the man on the floor. “It’s the times. Still. Kid that young … ought to be protected. That’s why they got laws …”
“I liked the boy,” the man behind the desk said. “He’s a good kid. A brave one. Drink your drink and don’t insult my guests.” He shuffled through a pile of what looked like unpaid bills to find the register book, and then shoved it forward to Harvey. “Sign here,” he said. “Pay no attention to my friend.”
The old man wrote a spidery script, like the writing on beer bottle labels. But the motel man managed to read it upside-down. “Andressen. Harvey Andressen.”
“That’s me,” said Harvey, writing on. “This here I’m giving is my daughter’s address, but Lord knows I don’t plan on livin’ there no more.”
“Don’t tell me,” the man on the floor groaned. “A run-away.”
“Ohio’s a nice place,” said the man behind the desk.
“Nice place my ass,” Harvey croaked. “Tell you the truth. They got no respect for they elders, in Ohio, not no more. Put you in some in-sti-tuition, that’s all they think to do. Call it a home. Home my ass. Wham bam and you’re in and no gettin’ out, and no damn thank you ma’m, neither.” The wrinkles in his seersucker suit rolled and valleyed like a sea as he jiggled up and down, agitated. “Not this old man, they don’t put in no home, o, no, sirree. I’m goin’ to Mi’mi, where they got respect for older folk. Pretty gals set in your lap … I seen them post cards.” He nodded energetically. “All them titties bouncin’ up and down that beach. Well. That’s for me, that’s what I say, and to Hell with O-hio.”
“I’ve been to Miami,” said the man on the floor, breathing as though he might be in some sort of pain. “It’s no different. No different from here.”
While the motel man took Harvey’s money and made change out of a battered tin candy box, Harvey tried his best to educate the man on the floor. “Well sir, what you got to have is a positive atti-tude. Set your mind right, and you can grab off all the tittie you want. Think it right, and you’ll do it, ever time.” Harvey hopped a couple of excited hops. “Wasn’t it you just called this place a love nest? Here, right under your nose?” He snatched at the key the motel man offered. “Think on that!” He skittered toward the door. “I hate to run,” he said, “But by golly when you got to go, boys, you got to go.” Going out, he flapped his arms and looked more like a frightened stork than anything human. “So I say … goodnight, all …”
The motel man looked serene, counting the money into the box. “All I know is, them sweet titties better watch their … O, Christ, Otis, you know what I just did?” He picked up his half-full glass and observed the glitter of light in the liquid, solemnly. “You know how dumb I am? I gave that crazy old man the key to the room right next to that nice kid. And the walls … Christ, at night you can hear the paint flaking off and falling kerplud on the floor next door, that’s how thin those walls are made …”
“Kmmp, kmmp.” The man on the floor either simpered or choked. “You got any idea how high those hearing aids turn up?”
“I didn’t see any hearing aid.”
“There was one. On this side.”
The motel man leaned back in his chair and laughed before he swallowed his drink. “O Jesus.” Sweat beaded up on his nose, glitter wet. “O, Jesus God. I hope he doesn’t blow a fuse.”
II.
Harvey wondered what the girl in the room next door looked like. Young, she’d be, for sure. The kid who’d run out the office door was still wet behind the ears – ears stuck out like handles on an old milk jug, at that. He wondered why he suddenly remembered those ears.
“Florrie,” the boy had called her. Well. Whatever Miss Florrie looked like, she talked a tarnel stream. The murmur of her sharpy voice came through the wall, but you couldn’t tell from that about her face or shape. He tall and she tall that’s one thing, but if she were a little bit of a thing (and he kind of guessed that’s what she was – the name was like little flowers, pale and ruffley and pink) that’s another. She was probably a bit like that Carrie Jones had been with the dirty neck like a plucked turkey’s, there in the fifth grade cloakroom. All those bags of lunch and sweaters on the hooks, smelling of peanut butter and squashy bananas and wool … Carrie’d had the dry heaves, he remembered, after it was over. But quietly, so nobody could hear, that was the kind of girl Carrie was, and that was as crazy to remember now as the look of that boy’s ears. Harvey ran his scrawny yellow hand across his cheek and scratched at his own ear. Funny, how the hearing aid made it itch sometimes. Well. Little or big or tall or squatty, what he absolutely knew was, they were taking one damned long time to get to bed.
Here he was in his nightshirt already. And there they sat, one on each side of the room it sounded like, in all their clothes, far as he could tell, sitting and jabbering. All that jibber jabber, sure no else was going on.
He’d pushed the sprung-out wicker chair ready against the wall poked it comfortable as he could with the pillows from the bed, and a water glass handy. “But,” Harvey muttered, not realizing he was making any noise at all. “That glass won’t be no use, just the receiver on the wall and the controls up, and it’s like the voices are water pouring down a funnel, into my head.”
Beyond the wall, the voices murmured, back and forth, a steady stream. Still gabbing on.
Harvey scowled at the suit jacket he’d hung around the chair back. Deep creases in the seersucker like reflections of his gnarled face. Wrinkles. “Guaranteed! Wouldn’t you know?” He ought to take it back to the G.D. store and throw it through that window with a brick. Guaranteed. ‘Won’t wrinkle for a lifetime’? Pig shit. A butterfly’s lifetime, do they mean? Look at it!”
The voices next door abruptly stopped. Harvey clamped his lips together tight. What were they listening for?
The girl beyond the wall giggled shrilly and Harvey skittered to the wall. Something goin’ on, at last. His hearing aid receiver, dangling a thin loop of wire, snuggled tight against the wall.
“You could turn the light out, Davy,” the girl said, and Harvey grinned. He could even hear the light switch. It rasped, like it had a load of rust. And the bed creaked, too. Harvey scratched at his belly, enchanted now.
“Maybe your mom won’t take on too bad,” the boy said. “Maybe she’ll even think it’s kind of … funny!”
“Funny!” she gasped. “Davy you don’t know my mother one eensy teensy bit if that’s what you think. Maybe Selma Morganstern’s mother would laugh, but mine? Are you out of your head, anyhow?”
“I didn’t mean funny exactly, I guess. But it is, kind of, you know, to come all this way into Georgia and then they wouldn’t …”
Harvey groped for the chair and sagged back into the pillows, letting the receiver fall into his lap. Still a-jabbering. That all they intend on doing? Mercy on us, Moses. Talk you can do on some streetcar, on a bus, in a library. Anywhere. What the Sam Hill ails them two?
She said something, and he answered. Harvey stood and took up his listening position once again. Might be worth his while.
“Sure I am,” the boy, Davy, said, clear as clear. “Honest, Florrie. Sure I am. You know I am. Just as glad as glad could be.”
“You don’t act it.” Her voice faltered. Harvey could barely pick it up. “But I’m glad you’re glad. If you’re truly glad.”
“I’m glad you’re glad I’m glad.”
She giggled. “I’m glad you’re glad I’m glad you’re glad.”
Harvey writhed against the receiver. Blabbers, he thought. He wanted to scream at them, shut up, shut up! Save your damn blabbin’ for fifty years from now, when you’ll be needin’ it.
The glow around his lamp was warm, and seemed to throb for a moment, as if something brighter had passed through, into his room. Harvey nodded sheepishly, and mouthed a shy apology. Mae was just beyond that glow, he supposed, and he could guess the look in her eye, hadn’t seen it years and years, sweet look that still could let him know he was up to Sin again.
“Could be,” he muttered. “Maybe Mae, you’re right. You sure always used to be. And I got to agree it serves me right, all this talkin’ goin’ on. But it’s not so bad as if I was lookin’ in the window, now, some peepin’ trick like that, is it? And they’re young … fair game.”
“This sure is nice, though.” Davy’s voice came through the wall, clearly, dreamy. “I mean, just you and me here like this, with the clean sheets and all.”
“Sheets.” Harvey choked on sudden, helpless rage. Sheets! By the Great Harry, now it’s sheets. Anger filled his head, blotting out reason with its red heat. His hands shook as though he were palsied. Sheets! He reached out to turn off his own light, tipping the lamp crazily, before the light switched off with grim finality.
The boy’s voice drifted on, soft, dreamy, and even without the receiver, Harvey heard him, soft, more words … “You share a room with Belinda, don’t you? I mean, you did. I guess you’re used to havin’ somebody nearby in the dark like this.”
“O, Davy,” she giggled. “It’s not near the same.”
“Still, it’s different for me. In a nice way. When I was a kid, I used to lie awake in the dark and talk and talk and I was only talking to a make-believe boy I made up, in my head …”
“What’d you talk to him about? What was his name?”
“Didn’t have a name. Just, ‘Boy.’ That’s what Uncle Jace always called me, ‘Boy,’ so that’s what I called him. Talked about what it’d been like, if we’d … if I’d been sent down to Okeechobee and Uncle Mort’s and the ranch with the cattle and all, ’stead of bein’ sent to Uncle Jace and his dernfool everlastin’ cabbages. That kind of stuff. What I’d do, when I got big …”
Harvey Andressen spit off into a dark corner, making a hacking noise deep in his throat. He didn’t care if they heard him. He really hoped they did.
But Davy’s voice droned on, unperturbed. “Florrie, you’d never believe. It’s like tons and tons of sand just shifting and flowing down the road, when they go loping off, those Brahamas. I always wanted that, more than anything. To be down in Okeechobee, with Uncle Mort …”
“Well.” Florrie’s voice turned icy. “Maybe if that’s what you want so much, you could still go down.”
These Goddamn kids were going to inherit his earth. Harvey could have wept.
“I told you it was just kid stuff … make believe.”
“But you’d like that? To work with cows and all?”
Davy was breathing more heavily, rasping. “No. Not really. And you don’t call them cows …” He lapsed into a silence, a broken silence punctuated only by the hoarseness of his breath.
Silence. Harvey pressed the receiver to the wall, and sucked in his breath, the better to listen. What’s that boy up to? Kissin’?
III.
Silence. And in the quiet shadows of the next room, Florrie wondered, too – what’s that boy up to?
Davy’s breathing was so deep and steady. Almost like he might be … But he couldn’t be. Not after all the mess they’d gone through, driving all day up from home, and then being stopped from even getting a license just because they couldn’t prove how old she was, and how they’d tried, two three places, and finally, they’d found this place, even that hadn’t been easy. Davy’s ears always turn red when he’s lying. Nobody’d know that but her, but they seemed to know anyhow, somehow. Davy couldn’t lie for a fool …
She inched closer to him on the musty coverlet they hadn’t even pulled back properly, nubbly chenille sort of stuff against her face – put her hand on his arm, in the warm crook of his arm, the inside of his elbow, warm and smooth. “Davy?”
She couldn’t believe he would fall asleep like that, right here. Not after everything. “Davy? I love you …”
Other than his breathing, now soft, relaxed and steady, Davy made no reply.
Mad and mortified, Florrie snorted in his ear. In the dark, he smiled gently and slept on, exhausted.
Florrie bounced away from him, teach him. Let him think she was just trying to get away from lying side of him, had to get comfortable, is all, bounced and bounced.
The old springs creaked and groaned beneath them, but even that didn’t seem to budge into Davy’s sleep. Was he deaf then? Exasperated, Florrie bounced some more, harder. The old bed, complaining bitterly, hopped and skittered on the sloping floor, banged its headstead against the wall. Davy slept on, peaceful as a child.
Incredible. Florrie was working up a sweat just trying to wake him, yet he didn’t stir.
IV.
Incredible, too, how soothing the sound of squealing bedsprings was to the old man on the other side of the wall. A warm flush of desire spread slowly over Harvey Andressen’s aging thighs. “Hoo hoo,” he cackled into the night. “Them Mi’mi titties best watch out, ’cause here I come, ready or not. There’s life in the old bugger yet.”
“Davy,” he heard the girl moan. “O, Davy, love me!”
Grinning, Harvey turned his hearing aid down to Low, scrunched deeper into the pillows of his chair, and slept. Peaceful, restored. As did the boy next door.
“I hate you,” Florrie snapped, with one final resentful bounce. But no one heard her. “I hope your damned old cows get hoof and mouth disease. I do. I do. I do.”
