Tiny Ladies

by Adam Klein

  And was it wrong to find the thought of cleaning comforting almost fourteen years later, during my hospitalization? A nurse who comes in and disinfects everything while you lie on your back, but the dirt is in your blood and your memories?

  Drip, drip, drip. The detox baths. How many have I had, waiting for the poison to sweat itself out? Pre-toxic states. Were there ever any?

  And what did Rachel say the rules were? You can’t be something you don’t know? And who is this woman in the bathtub after the water’s gone cold, afraid of the windows? She is a fugitive everyone forgot about. If there were justice, she’d be dead. Maybe she is dead, and no one’s told her.

  My mother was once pretty. There were a few pictures of her, unglued, stuffed between the black pages of a photo album. She hated those pictures, but she kept them. She hated everything she kept, and loved everything she lost. Her real face, the one not in the pictures, the one no one took a picture of, was lined and fissured, the skin pulled taut between poles, having and not. Her smile was pained and rare. Her love for me was my first encounter with tragedy.

  ‘Having you was the best thing that happened to me, and the one thing I didn’t deserve.’ She said these things when I was young, when she could afford the generosity of emotion, applying it like a tincture, from a dropper.

  She would lie in bed, holding a small hand mirror. ‘You do a nice job with that makeup,’ she’d say. ‘I like it to look natural.’ Though it was rarely natural light she would venture into. She’d stand outside in her nightgown amid the motorcycles and under the moon, smoking her Old Golds. Sometimes she couldn’t stand still, and I’d watch her erratic gestures as though she were possessed, kicking pebbles and dirt in our parking lot, or wandering over the grass in the yard. I remember the record cover for Hullabaloo – a woman in go-go boots, navigating her way through pools of colored light. Somewhere snuffed out, beneath my mother’s paste-white skin and perpetual sunglasses, the lurid sensuality of the late ‘60s lingered like smoke after a party.

  She’d dance to Ike and Tina Turner. She loved Tina’s voice, the spectacle of her and the Ikettes on television. Do I love you, my oh my, river deep, mountain high, she’d sing. She’d call me into the living room to join her. ‘Dance with me,’ she’d command over the music. She was particularly good at the funky chicken, lifting up on her toes and bending her knees inward with a strange rubbery smoothness. I learned that dance in a dream and awoke with the skill strangely acquired. When she danced with me she seemed more like an older sister. She’d wail out the lyrics of Dust My Broom while she cleaned the house, letting me spray the lemon-scented dust wax before she wiped it with one of my father’s old T-shirts. She had red, wavy hair that she wore beneath wildly printed Peter Max scarves. She wore her eyebrows tweezed thread-thin.

  She could fall into deep moods that seemed to shut the entire house in darkness. There were countless days when she wouldn’t leave her bed. Her demands became frequent and excessive. I would do my best to fix her food, but she rarely ate. ‘Oh, honey, just pour your mother a drink.’

  She’d ask me to organize the Valium in her pill case, the plastic sections embossed with the first letter of each day of the week. I remember that pill case better than most things I treasured; it was a lemon-yellow plastic and its upraised letters were like a Braille I’d run my fingers over while talking to my mother in her sunless room. I suppose keeping the pills organized that way was her ineffective attempt at controlling her intake. By midweek, there was nothing left in its finger-deep days.

  Sometimes I’d slip pills from her, taking them alone and falling asleep in a neighbor’s tree house. I didn’t like the way they made me feel, rubbery but not like dancing.

  ‘If I knew it was going to come to this, I would have killed myself a long time ago.’ When your mother says it, there’s no need to repeat it, even to think it. I tried to imagine her expectations, the impossible things that left her so defeated. I’d pore over magazines in which kitchen floors were the blue of prized marbles. I’d spread out magazines on her bed, but they did nothing to console her. Her vision of well-being was inaccessibly lodged within her, a darker room than the one into which she invited me.

  There are good fears and bad fears. In the hospital I looked at my own arms against the white sheet, under the overly bright lamp, arms that seemed to reach out for fire without the normal inhibitors. I remember my father’s hands on my wrists, pulling me out of sleep. I slept like the dead. I slept through the endless waking and shifting of figures in our house, bottles and bodies dropping to the floor.

  The moon was still out. ‘C’mon, honey, get dressed.’

  ‘We’re going on a drive and Mom’s already packed your bag.’ My father leaned in the doorway.

  She stood beside him with a round, pink suitcase all zipped up. I was surprised to see her out of bed, not just because it was 4 A.M., but because she’d been depressed all week. Now she seemed oddly energized. I noticed the makeup on her face: eyes drawn with blue liner, and her lips a creamy orange. She walked me into the bathroom and washed my face with her violet soap.

  ‘Your dad’s got some important business to do, and I want you to keep him company. You want to borrow my headband?’ She took a large brush to my hair, and I pressed my face into her breasts. She smelled of Charlie and cigarettes. But why was she treating me like a child? And why was I acting like one? I was almost fourteen.

  ‘Try not to ask your father too many questions and don’t get in any trouble while you’re away,’ she said firmly, detangling my hair section by section. I wondered if my father had finally decided to do something – the thing that would keep her from spending whole days in bed. Another scheme, I was certain, but I had no idea how desperate they’d become. And then I heard Jim was coming.

  Jim drank too much. He punched me once when I insisted I was tough enough to take it. He didn’t hold back. My arm stung and went numb, and by the next day it looked bluish where he’d done it. The thought of traveling with him depressed me.

  My mother said she’d have me excused from school for the week. When my mother’s mood was good, I loved her moodiness. She’d come out of her depressions as though out of prison, hungry for life, generous to the point of recklessness. I knew she would have to explain my absence from school. The last time, she took me with her when she spoke to the principal. I stood beside her, engulfed in her shadow. The principal had long since ceased to discuss my potential for learning. He was now determined not to recognize me, as though absence were my fate. My mother assured him this would be the last time. I thought she sounded as though she were pleading or trying to seduce him, and I looked away from them, embarrassed.

  I traveled with my father, short trips ‘up and down the line.’ We’d been to Georgia and Tennessee. I was too young to take much interest in whatever business he was doing. I’d wait alone in the car, sometimes for hours on end. As a reward, he’d let me drive, sitting in his lap and carefully turning the wheel while he braked and accelerated. We rarely stayed overnight in a motel. Those were particularly special events. Once we slept in the truck in the parking lot of a Motel 6. Before we left, he let me go swimming in the pool. No one was up, and I had the pool all to myself. I walked from the shallow end until I was on tiptoes, not even a third of the way to the other side. I remember just trying to float there, somewhere between shallow and deep. I wished my father were with me instead of in the truck. I would have ventured further. Instead I got out of the water, cold and without a towel. I looked at all the rooms with their drapes closed and wiped the water off my arms, shivering.

  I put my feet up in the bath and adjust the knobs with them. Hot water, so I can sweat these poisons. Though there are no drugs in me now, I still run the water too hot, trying to get the blood and the memories clean. I slide down and let the water fill my ears. And I remember letting the air out of my lungs, and settling at the bottom of a hotel pool, imagining myself slipping through the grate over the drain and surfacing somewher
e else altogether.

  ‘We’re off to New York,’ my father said excitedly. He meant upstate. He put a dirty fingernail between his teeth when he was thinking.

  Jim lived in southwest Miami, not too far from us. I was already hungry, but I didn’t say anything. All the restaurants were closed. The moon was still out, and along 8th Street the trees rose up like dark arches. I opened my window and hung both arms out the window. Once I’d taken a bus with my mother to Dadeland Mall and an old Seminole Indian sat behind us in her hand-stitched skirt. I felt her touching my braids and turned around quickly to catch her at it. My mother turned too. ‘Such a pretty girl,’ the old lady said. ‘Pretty hair.’

  ‘You want her?’ my mother asked. She was holding her compact in one hand. ‘You can take her.’ They both laughed.

  ‘I want to go with her,’ I pleaded.

  ‘You see,’ my mother said. ‘She has no loyalty. She can’t be loved enough.’

  The Indian woman seemed not to understand or even to be listening. She smiled, and her teeth were full of gold. It terrified me, and I quickly turned and grabbed my mother’s arm.

  Sometimes I wondered what life would have been like if she had taken me, if my mother had handed me over because the woman liked my pretty hair. And wouldn’t that be lucky, to have people look at your hair, and not your eyes that won’t shut up. No, your eyes always give it away. Or your arms that seem to reach out regardless of risk and are marked for it. Because you can’t be loved enough, but you can be loved too little. And whenever we’d get on a bus, I imagined we’d see the lady again. And this time, I thought, I could look into her mouth.

  My arms out the window: chin on one, eye cocked as though through a sight. I imagined scooping up the houses and mini-malls that flashed by; then I crumpled the shoddy architecture like pieces of newspaper. As we got closer to Jim’s house, I moved toward my father, face against his plain T-shirt.

  ‘Find a station,’ he suggested, and I moved slowly over the blasts of talk and jingles. I came to a station playing Bloodrock’s DOA, and my father held my hand still. ‘I like that one.’

  I remember, we were flying low and hit something in the air.

  Jim’s house sat behind two stunted palms and high grass, crooked awnings like poorly sewn patches. My father drove into the yard, jumped out of the truck, and made his way to the door. Jim answered, rubbing his eyes, still in his underwear. I saw the leg then for the first time without the floppy green combat fatigues covering the stump. His body seemed to end and begin there, so brutally it took the wind out of me. He carefully leaned his crutch against the doorway. I pulled my leg up on the seat and sat on my foot, staring at my own knee dropped down to nothing, but it started to hurt so I let it go.

  I put my head on the dashboard and stared at the snow dome mounted there, a few drifts around the Florida water-skiers. I heard the door open then, and Jim was in beside me, laying the crutch into the truck bed.

  He and my father started talking over me, Jim opening the window when I shooed away his smoke. It didn’t really bother me. In fact, I’d been smoking a lot by then, lying back on my bed with that sick, spinning feeling I decided was the best part. And I could just stare at the burning end without thinking, without hearing the records skipping in the living room, the arguments that went ceaselessly on.

  My father warned me not to ask about Jim’s leg. But it was the only thing I wanted to know about. I wondered why he’d cut one pants leg short, and whether he still felt the leg in some unusual way – the way people feel ghosts. I also wondered if anyone loved him now that the leg was gone. How could they? Though I guessed he was handsome, all bashed up.

  We were driving along the expressway and Jim pointed out the Coppertone sign with the little girl on the beach, a dog biting her bikini bottom and pulling it down, exposing her tan line and her butt.

  ‘You know what to say to the dog that tries to do that to you?’ my father asked.

  ‘Shoo!’ I said, laughing.

  Jim said something like ‘There’s gonna be a lot of them dogs after you, Carrie.’ He turned up the radio. ‘Man,’ he said, ‘this song always brings me back.’ Neither my father nor I asked where to. I ain’t no fortunate son. No, of course not.

  The sun was just coming up, and my father suggested we stop at Krispy Kreme Donuts. The thought of food made me happy.

  My father went to the bathroom, and Jim and I sat across from each other. Dough was punched out at the top of a tall conveyor and dropped into a large vat of oil where it puffed up and floated like inner tubes. Then someone drew the doughnuts out. ‘You sure eat slow,’ he said. He wiped his mouth with a napkin and smiled at me.

  ‘Making it last,’ I answered. We both laughed, strangely intimate as though we knew some kind of secret about each other. But I knew none of his secrets, just that there was something shy in him and that he probably killed someone.

  He sat close to me in the truck, and at one point I felt his hand on the back of my head, tenuously touching my hair in a way that made me want to laugh. I closed my mouth tightly and looked straight ahead. I didn’t move an inch. We drove for hours that way.

  ‘Too bad you never tasted combat.’ Jim reached over me and lightly punched my father’s arm. ‘You’re one lucky bastard.’ You could tell Jim didn’t think my father was really lucky. He was lucky like those Washington people, like everyone who watched the war on the nightly news. Fortunate, like everyone the song indicted. My father didn’t respond right away.

  Finally he said, ‘If you think being locked up is some kind of vacation, I probably shouldn’t be doing this with you. If you think prison was the lucky break that kept me out of Vietnam, I’ll just turn this truck back around and drop you off and that’ll be that.’ I always felt mad when my father mentioned prison; he’d first disappeared when I was eight years old. I expected he’d go back; it made my attachment to him fretful and melancholy. We all sat silent. After a while, I reached over and touched Jim’s hand with my own. I don’t know why I did it – it was like prodding an animal, just to see it move. I didn’t touch my father because I knew that when he was in a mood he didn’t want anyone to take him out of it.

  Jim looked at me and smiled real briefly, so my father wouldn’t see. And I remember feeling both amazed and proud of the fact that I could shift that darkness in him, if only for a minute. Then I felt guilty that I couldn’t change my father, and hadn’t tried.

  We stayed in Georgia, then in New York, in dirty motels without pools. In Georgia, my father and I shared a bed with a burned, brown comforter. The room had beige walls, swirls of plaster, and cockroaches so bad we had to keep the light on while we slept.

  That night must have begun something inside me, something like a romance with my father, whom I gazed at in that sickly yellow cast as though he were already lost to sepia. His arms had tattoos the color of blueberry stains, some as indecipherable. When I pressed my head to my sleeping father’s armpit, I felt a surge of shame and excitement. He didn’t wake, and I clung to him long enough to watch the cockroaches adjust to the light and move out over the carpet.

  What can I say? You get accustomed to dirty rooms, and the covers fold like your father’s arm over you, and you can stop your heart from racing. Just for a while, you can relax when you think it can’t get worse than this. If I ask myself now what Victor offered me, I’d say that kind of peace. The deep sleep after trauma. The comfort in knowing you’d seen the war, and it couldn’t get worse.

  In another motel we stayed at, my father knew the man in the cashier’s cage. The man had a face the color and texture of handled dough, a red mustache and green eyes. He wore a black hat, an opened black shirt and heavy gold chains, an Italian horn. His name was Tony. He came out of the cage to hug my father, and I noticed his fat freckled hand striking my father’s back while they embraced. They talked a little before I noticed Tony’s eyes, drifting, unfocused. He walked us down a hallway. This room was smaller than any room we’d stayed in, with
no curtains and a punched-in screen on the window. Outside the window was a small pebbled alley, about as wide as an air chute, littered with trash. I hated that room. It smelled like salami and stale cigarettes.

  Jim slept in the room next to us. I heard him breathing with my ear against the rough wall. He taught me Morse code. He said that two knocks on the wall meant ‘You’re pretty.’ He did it a couple of times, then stopped. But I kept listening.

  Later that night I heard a knock on the door. I pretended to sleep. My father and Jim whispered through the chain on the door, then Jim came into the room. My father took a syringe from him and began tapping the top of his own hand. Jim held a spoon over a lighter. I was squirming in bed watching my father move the point in and out of the top of his hand. ‘It’s like alligator skin,’ he complained. I remembered our alligator in a mason jar, and how my father and his friends had filled it with whiskey one night. Even squeezing my eyes closed wouldn’t make the picture go away. I moaned and turned my face into the pillow. My father said, ‘Honey, it’s all right. Daddy has to make himself well. You just lie there and keep your eyes shut.’ When I opened my eyes again, Jim was putting the syringe into a large vein in my father’s neck. I saw the color drain out of him. His eyes went reptile.

  There are good fears and bad fears, good starts and bad ones. I knew I was afraid of these things the way others were, the way I was supposed to be. What I didn’t know was the part of me these sights awakened, older, without fear, almost without feeling, except, perhaps, sexual feelings. The fat freckled fingers of Tony, the explosion of blood in the syringe, the smell of my father in these crummy rooms – against these I held my legs firmly together, the images locked inside me, not in my head. That night, flecks of snow came in through the hole in the window screen, the alley filled up with a dazzling white blanket of snow, and my father’s hands, callused and heavy, marked by these intricate pricks, ran up and down my arms until I’d fallen asleep.