“I’ll get around to it one of these days.” A coded smile passed between them.
“Can I buy one?” Bix said. “How much are they going for?”
“I like Secret Sanctuary the best,” I said. “Are you living in that apartment now?”
“Maybe.”
Carmen set a toasted onion bagel in front of me. “Saved one for you, as promised.”
“Do you sleep with Baseball Stats next to your bed?”
“I’m a Yankees fan from way back,” Jem said.
“Orioles.” I tapped my heart. “But I love the Yanks too.”
“You can’t like both,” Bix said. “They’re sworn enemies.”
“Who says I can’t?”
Jem shook his head. “A girl who likes two teams at once can’t be trusted.” He grinned to show he was teasing. “I got work to do. See you all later.”
“Me too.” Bix slid off his stool. “One sec, Jem, I’ll walk out with you.”
Carmen filled my coffee cup and started wrapping up an egg sandwich to go. “For Atti?” I asked.
“You promised to come with me this time, remember?”
I couldn’t think of an excuse not to, and besides, I didn’t feel like being alone. We left when her shift ended.
“Are you going to see Jem again tonight?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, do you have plans with him?”
“No. Why would we?”
Maybe they were just friends, and the dinner they’d shared at Florent in the middle of the night was an anomaly that would never happen again. Maybe they really had tried to find me before they left.
Atti shivered in his bed under three blankets, in spite of the electric heater Carmen had bought for him. She felt his forehead, then unwrapped the warm egg sandwich and insisted that he eat it, at least a few bites.
The apartment was cleaner than ours now. The Marshall amp and the electric guitar were gone; Atti must have sold them. Carmen boiled water on a hot plate for tea and washed a bunch of grapes, putting them in a bowl and setting it on the floor beside his mattress. She took a thermometer from a shelf over the sink and slipped it under his tongue. His face was thin, all eyes and a slash of mouth, his bandaged foot hidden under blankets.
When the water boiled, I made a cup of tea for him. Carmen read the thermometer, frowning. She brought him some aspirin and said, “Let me see your foot.”
This was the part I hated most, the unveiling of the deep, oozing sores. I brought the tea and set it by the bed. “Would you like some, Carmen?”
“No thanks.” She started unwrapping the bandages. I felt pressure in my lungs, the can’t-breathe feeling rising. I went into the bathroom and shut the door. I sat on the edge of the tub and tried not to listen.
She loved him. Anyone could see that. But she could love Atti and Jem at the same time. Why not? Like loving both the Yankees and the Orioles. Jem had said a girl who likes two teams at once can’t be trusted. That was his opinion. I didn’t agree, and I still don’t.
“Phoebe, it’s safe to come out now.”
I flushed the toilet to make my bathroom visit seem legit. Atti was sitting up and had a little color in his cheeks.
“I wasn’t hiding.”
“Sure you weren’t.”
Atti sipped his tea. “Do you want to play cards?” Carmen asked. “How about Crazy Eights?”
“I’ll play,” Atti said. “But I must warn you, playing Crazy Eights fills me with rage.”
Carmen laughed. I got the cards.
“I’m not joking,” Atti said.
Carmen dealt. “Do you ever think about writing anymore?” I asked her.
She discarded an eight of spades over a heart. “Writing? What do you mean?”
I’d promised myself I wouldn’t let her know that I’d found her play. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it, wondering why she kept it a secret. I couldn’t resist pressing her a little to see what she’d say.
“You know, like you did in college. Do you ever think about writing stories again?”
“No.” She frowned at the ace of spades on top of the pile, and drew one card after another until she had another spade to play. “Damn it.”
Atti played the jack. “I loved those stories you used to write about us.”
“They weren’t about us,” Carmen said. “They were made-up characters.”
“One of them had my name,” Atti said. “You used to read them to me at night sometimes, remember?”
“I used your name because it’s so irresistibly excellent,” Carmen said. “It was still fiction. You never had a hat with antlers on it, did you?”
“No, but I had that hat with bug eyes on it.”
“Totally different.”
“Len and Betsy would probably love it if you wrote a play,” I said. “Something with a great part for her, so she could make a triumphant return to the stage.”
“I’m not so sure she wants that.” Carmen tossed her cards down in frustration, abandoning the game. “Atti, have you finished your tea? I’ll make you a little soup.”
“You’re quitting? Before my fit of rage?” Atti said. “Does this mean I won?”
I shuffled the cards and put them away. She heated up some chicken noodle soup and delivered a bowl to Atti.
“Eat this. And don’t go out.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And if Dean comes in with some fantastic idea, don’t listen to him. And don’t swallow anything he gives you.”
“I won’t.”
She kissed him, and we left.
“How did you learn to do that?” I asked.
“Do what?”
“Nurse a sick person. Bandage his foot and all that.”
“I don’t know. When you have to do something, you figure it out.”
“I guess.” We walked in silence for a few paces.
Maybe she put up with Atti because she could use the details about him in her play. Maybe she put up with me for the same reason. I thought about Ivan, how I’d put myself at his mercy just to see what would happen, to follow the story. When I’d wanted the story to end, I’d declared it over, but by then it had taken on a life of its own and was out of my control. For the first time I thought: Perhaps even now, this very night, unbeknownst to me, my actions are having consequences somewhere in the world. Perhaps the story of Ivan lurks somewhere nearby, waiting to catch me off guard.
We reached the east side of the park and walked west along Seventh Street. It was dark by now. I kept an eye out for suspicious-looking tall men.
“Phoebe, is everything okay?”
“Sure.”
“You seem distracted.”
“I’m a little freaked out, I guess,” I said. “When I left the club last night, someone followed me home.”
“You walked? Alone?” She punished me with a karate chop to the shoulder instead of a lecture. “Do you think it was the same guy as before, from uptown?”
“I couldn’t tell. They were both tall. But a lot of men are tall.”
“Not enough, if you ask me.”
“Ha-ha.”
We turned right onto Avenue A. A breeze blew puffs of snow off the trees.
“Something else happened last night,” I said. “I saw my father.”
“Where?”
“Right here. In the park.”
We stopped. I pointed out the spot. She held my hand. Neither one of us had gloves.
“I believe you,” she said.
“Thank you.” And for that brief moment I felt, She’s mine again.
16 PURPLE FOOTPRINTS
One morning in March, very early, Carmen and I were awakened by wailing sirens. We hurried to the window. Police cars, an ambulance, flashing red lights, and a small crowd of derelicts had assembled near the marble water fountain, the one that said, CHARITY- FAITH - TEMPERANCE - HOPE. I sensed Carmen holding her breath.
“I have a bad feeling,” she said.
Two EMTs roll
ed a gurney down the path out of the park, ferrying a body covered with a blanket. As they loaded it into the ambulance, the blanket shifted, and a bandaged foot peeped out.
Carmen yelped and ran downstairs in her pajamas. I grabbed our coats, slipped my feet into boots, and followed. The sun rose, daylight drawing a curtain across the sky. By the time I reached her, she stood at the gaping door of the ambulance, talking to a police officer. He unveiled the face of the body on the gurney. “Save you a trip to the morgue.”
Atti.
It was his eyes that did it, their frozen look.
The ambulance pulled away, cherry top flashing but no siren now, because no urgency was required. We stood abandoned on the sidewalk in shock, staring after the ambulance as it grew smaller and smaller and finally vanished. Carmen shivered. I draped her coat over her shoulders. “Bad batch,” she murmured.
The ambulance was gone. The police cars drove away. The derelicts dispersed. All traces of catastrophe had disappeared. But the evidence lingered in my body, as if an electric current had fried my nerves, my skin, my hair, and the static continued to prickle and numb me.
I tried to lead Carmen back inside, but she resisted. She twitched from foot to foot, her legs jittery. She’d never be able to sit still or lie down or sleep, not for a long time. So we walked around the park, trying to shake off the memory of his eyes. We walked in silence, slowly, down A, rounding Seventh, over to B. Her breathing was ragged, a kind of dry sob. To distract her, and myself, I started talking.
“This is probably not helpful,” I said, “but did I ever tell you about Snookie?”
“Your dachshund. The Bark Button?”
“This is a different Snookie story.” I paused to help her slip her arms into her coat sleeves. “I was about nine, I guess. I went to a sleepover at this girl Donna’s house. It was summer, really hot. She lived two blocks away, so I walked over there with my patchwork hippie girl sleeping bag and a little duffel with my nightgown and a toothbrush in it.”
“I had one of those patchwork sleeping bags,” Carmen said.
“We played Stiff as a Board, Light as a Feather. You know that game?”
“Something with fingers?”
“Right. You get someone to lie on the floor and pretend to be dead. We picked Donna, since she was the tallest and heaviest girl there.”
“The fat girl.”
“More big than fat. The type who plays volleyball. She lay down on the floor, giggling, and closed her eyes and crossed her arms over her chest like she was dead. The rest of us surrounded her and touched her with two fingers from each hand. We tried to lift her, but she was too heavy.”
I stopped to gauge Carmen’s interest in the story. She frowned and kept her eyes on the sidewalk, but she said, “Keep going.”
“We chanted, ‘Stiff as a board, light as a feather; stiff as a board, light as a feather,’ ten times.”
“I remember this game now…”
“When we tried to lift her this time, she floated high into the air.” I demonstrated, raising my hands slowly. “It was so cool. After that, everybody wanted to do it. We stayed up half the night chanting, ‘Stiff as a board…’ ”
“I thought you said this was a story about Snookie.”
“It is. I’m setting it up.”
We rounded the corner of Tenth and B. The story would probably last us another lap around the park. It seemed to take her mind off Atti for a few minutes, to give her a little relief.
“I woke up early the next morning, cranky and hot and tired from sleeping on the floor of Donna’s basement. Everybody was hot and cranky and tired, and the party wasn’t fun anymore, so I took my sleeping bag and walked home. It was Sunday, and Dad was away at a conference or something, and I figured Mom and Laurel were still sleeping, so I let myself in the back door. The house was quiet. It was too hot for cereal. It was so hot, the only thing I could stand the thought of eating was a Popsicle, so I slipped down to the basement to get one.”
“Why did you keep Popsicles in the basement?”
“That’s where the extra freezer was. We bought Popsicles in bulk.”
“Okay.” The ignorance of the lifelong apartment dweller.
“It was one of those long, low freezers that looks like a coffin. I lifted the lid and looked for the Popsicle box… and there was Snookie.”
“In the freezer?”
I nodded and caught my breath, still upset at the memory. “He was lying in a clear plastic bag, all stiff and frozen.” I left out the worst part—about his eyes, glassy as marbles, staring at me—in deference to Atti.
“Zowie. What the hell.”
“I ran upstairs to my parents’ room, screaming, ‘Snookie’s in the freezer!’ Mom was in bed. I threw myself on top of her, and Laurel came in all sleepy, asking what was wrong. Mom told us that Snookie had died late the night before. He had a seizure on the kitchen floor and died. She used to be a nurse, so she knew for sure he was really dead and not just unconscious.”
“Okay, but—the freezer?”
“It was late on a Saturday night, during a heat wave, and she was afraid the body would start to decompose before she could take it to the vet. So she put it in a plastic bag and put him in the freezer, thinking he’d last there till Monday. She didn’t mean for me to find him like that.”
“A dog Popsicle,” Carmen said.
“She meant well,” I said. “But I couldn’t let it go. I couldn’t stop crying. Mom said, ‘He was very old,’ which was true. But I kept yelling at her, ‘You shouldn’t have put him in the FREEZER, with the MEAT! Maybe you killed him! Maybe he was still alive and you suffocated him! You never loved him!’ And things like that.”
“What about your sister, did she yell at your mother too?”
“No, she just sobbed and hiccuped. She was in shock.”
“I knew you were a little bitch.”
I smiled. She liked the story. We rounded the corner onto Avenue B again. “It’s true. Even while I screamed at her and blamed her and beat on her bed with my little fists, I knew I was wrong. It was like part of me had risen to the ceiling to watch the scene from above, and that part of me saw that I was being unfair—too old for tantrums, but having one anyway. I was perfectly capable of understanding what my mother had done, but I refused to do it.”
“I was the same way at that age,” Carmen said. “Remember that story about my dad and the kitchen ceiling? I understood what was going on then, too, better than I let on. But I didn’t want to.”
“Funny how both of our stories involve slumber parties.”
“Slumber parties are the source of all childhood trauma.”
The rooster watched us from the fence, flapping his wings as if he were going to take off, but he didn’t. “Why doesn’t he just fly away?” I said.
“Where would he go?”
We walked in silence, the wind biting through our coats, until we rounded Avenue A again.
“You know what’s weird?” Carmen said.
“What.”
“You see a dead person and your first thought is of a dog who died fourteen years ago.”
“What’s so weird about that?”
“Think about it.”
I decided not to. But I knew what she was saying.
She kept her head down. We’d just turned onto Seventh Street, where the sidewalk was marked by a trail of purple footprints heading east.
“My father is not dead,” I said.
She placed each foot on a purple print. “These are bigger than my feet.”
“I saw him,” I said. “I told you.”
“Follow the purple brick road,” Carmen sang. “Follow the, follow the, follow the, follow the…”
Maybe Atti will come back too, I was thinking. He always liked hanging out in the park. I decided not to say it out loud, not yet anyway, because I could tell she didn’t want to hear it. We followed the purple trail along Seventh, and kept going, across Avenue B, across C, south on D, east on Si
xth, along a pedestrian walkway over the FDR Drive, to the East River, where the footprints ended at the river’s edge, as if the purple person had jumped.
17 WAKE
Atti had a lot of friends. Seemed like the whole East Village crowded into the bar for his wake, a week after he was found dead. Dean had spread the word: everyone meet at Downtown Beirut.
A glass of whiskey materialized in Carmen’s hand as soon as we arrived, and her glass was never empty for long. She could have had anything she asked for, and many things she didn’t ask for. “He was a saint,” people said to her. “Too good for this shitty world.”
She couldn’t seem to get drunk, but I was getting drunk fast. We hadn’t eaten all day. I kept an eye out for people going into the bathroom in twos or threes. When a trio popped out of the bathroom swiping at their noses I stopped them and pointed at Carmen, the grieving de facto widow, asking if they could help her out. Sure, of course, they said, and handed over what they had left. Carmen and I shut ourselves in the bathroom and snorted whatever anyone gave us. In the glare of the blue light bulb we read the graffiti scratched into the walls: band names, phone numbers, anti-Reagan screeds, the usual kill-the-yuppies sentiments. Someone had slapped up a sticker saying HELLO MY NAME IS KAFKA; someone else had drawn a cartoon of a man with a snarling dog latched onto his penis.
“Atti hated this place,” Carmen said. Junkies couldn’t find their veins in the blue light. It kept them from hogging the bathroom.
Taut as guitar strings, we popped back out to the bar. Someone played “People Who Died” on the jukebox, over and over. Carmen started pogoing. I put my hands on her shoulders and jumped up and down, mirroring her. People circled us, watching, bopping their heads. The song ended, then began again. We kept dancing. I saw Jem gliding toward us through the darkness, his head visible above the crowd. He broke through the circle and put a hand on each of our shoulders, pogoing along with us, until Carmen threw her arms around his neck. Then they danced together and I danced around them.
I’d thought maybe the Jem thing was over. She hadn’t gone out with him since the night they’d gone to Florent. He did go to Café Lethe a lot, but everybody did. Now she was hanging from his neck at her boyfriend’s wake. She was already into him.
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