Tiny Ladies

by Adam Klein

  In the morning it was Jim who woke me, tapping lightly on the door. ‘He’s asleep,’ I said, letting him in. Jim sat quietly on the bed beside me. He put his hand behind my neck, and I felt a chill pass through me. ‘Hold still,’ he said. I looked at his face and saw his whistling tooth, his kind but somehow vacant eyes. His hand went under my T-shirt and over my back, not like my father’s, but pulling at the skin, and then up under my arms and to my breasts. I thought I had to pee, but I didn’t dare move. Behind us, my father remained sleeping, sound as the dead.

  Jim became more insistent, breathing close in my ear and moving one hand down between my legs. I watched it there as though it were detached and almost funny, working at the buttons of my shorts. ‘Come into my room,’ he whispered hoarsely. That’s when I began to feel dizzy, my heart jumping the way it sometimes would when I raised my hand in class. A wrong answer. So I didn’t answer, I followed.

  He lifted up his shirt. A thin line of golden hair ran up the center of his chest and spread out under his collarbones. We were on his bed, identical to the one my father slept in. He laid back on the bed and unbuttoned his pants, pushing them down just to the point where his leg ended. His penis was stiff and pliant as a diving board, and with one hand he’d press it forward and watch it spring back.

  He said, ‘Just put your mouth on it.’

  As a little girl, able to press my face to the hearts of most full-grown men, I noticed detail a lot, and details excited me – the hair on men’s chests that often smelled sweeter than you’d expect, the hair on their hands that took hold of mine, the heavy gold flexible watchbands and forearm tattoos of my father’s friends. I thought of the girl eating the flowers, the impulse to put beautiful things into your mouth. I thought of my mouth full of the fingers of my father’s friends.

  I listened to Jim coaxing me. I felt his hand on the back of my head, suddenly not coarse at all. A desire that had rolled around in me now came open. This thing we’d talked about, worried over, behind portables at school – sex – it was like I had done it long before, knew it like my bedroom, my private drawers.

  ‘Take your shorts off,’ he said, letting his own pants fall to the floor.

  I got real still and looked over his shoulder at the lampshade, wrapped in plastic like a shower cap. Scrub nurse, dirty room.

  The leg was oddly transfixing, shaped long like a breadfruit with a bone in it. I wondered what it was like to live with an absence like that, and whether it always made him think of the war. It made me think of television, horror shows you watch through the spaces between your fingers.

  He looked at me, then. He hopped around the side of the bed, and at that point I laughed aloud. He was like a strange Easter bunny delivering this carrot.

  ‘What the fuck are you laughing about?’ he asked, falling down beside me. He didn’t want to know what I laughed at. I couldn’t have told him then, the way I could now. Knowing laughter. That’s what they call it. Knowing, helpless laughter.

  I felt his fingers inside me, so different from the way I did it when I was alone. He crawled on top of me, and I felt him pushing his penis between my legs. Though this was something I wanted, I felt paralyzed by the pain of it, the bluntness of the act. I felt I’d done something wrong by laughing at him, so I didn’t dare scream.

  On and on, but I continued to nod my head yes when he asked if I liked it. My whole body shook with pain; I feared biting my lip because I thought I’d hurt myself. I spread out under the pain like a map, him striking impossibly at me. But I also thought I enclosed him somehow, contained him. That’s why the blood startled me – coming back to my own body when Jim raised himself from it.

  ‘It’ll be better for you next time,’ he said.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I answered, moving away from the stain on the brown comforter.

  ‘I’ll clean up in here. You go wash up in the bathroom.’

  I walked in and closed the door behind me. I took a washcloth and blotted at my thighs. An emptiness kept creeping in, as though a part of me was being pulled out of the room by the fan above the mirror. It wasn’t a sadness you cry about, so I didn’t. It’s strange, but I thought more about my father than I did about Jim, his blood and my blood, the secrets we’d made of it. And I think I may have thought myself a woman then, because that was what the sex thing was about. But it was also something that tied me to my mother – a disappointment that sounded wrong if you talked about it, like you’d gone crazy on pills. A bigger part of me wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened, so Jim and I could go swimming sometime and there wouldn’t be any embarrassment between us. Banish embarrassment, be cautious with care.

  My father tiled our bathroom floor just after he got out of prison. Gold-sparkling pink and white tiles swimming in grout. They were small tiles, designed really for sink tops rather than floors. I would take off my clothes and lie on them, the roughness of the grout interrupted by the cold smoothness of the tiles. I imagined it like a grotto: the sound of water running into the bathtub and the moisture between the tiles. I looked at Titian’s The Bacchanal and Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. Otherworldly nakedness. I’d look at the impressions the tiles left on my back, large scales, a new kind of skin.

  I left Jim’s bathroom reluctantly. I wanted to lie down in there, but there was water on the floor, and I wasn’t sure if it was from the washcloth or if it was coming from the bottom of the toilet.

  ‘It’s been a long time, baby doll,’ Jim said as I got into bed beside him. I wondered how long, but didn’t ask. Since he’d lost his leg? The war settled between us, silent, evacuated, as I nuzzled him, lips grazing his neck. I wanted him for the tragedy he lived, and the tragedy his silence attempted to protect me from. I loved the obviousness of his secrets, his determined loneliness. ‘You know you can’t mention this to your father,’ he said. I felt certain and confident around this secret – that as long as I held it, it would continue to shape us both. ‘Of course,’ I answered.

  ‘You should go back,’ he said, pulling a cigarette from the pocket of his fatigues.

  I looked at my father. He’d turned over in sleep and had both palms up. By going into Jim’s room, I felt I’d lost my place in this one. I couldn’t rejoin him on the bed – it looked so small, and he looked smaller on it.

  I left the room and wandered up and down the halls until I came upon the ice machine buzzing quietly under the stairs. I put my hands in and kept them there. I pulled them out blue and wet and tingly. Then I shoved them back in and kept them there until they went so numb my eyes watered.

  I think of stepping out of the bath, but feel suddenly exhausted, as though the tub were filled with lead. I stare ahead at the faucets, at the peeling paint near the molding, and remember the apartment I shared with Victor: a stark bathroom, fluorescent light annihilating its surfaces.

  ‘You’re too cold,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t do this! I have no veins!’ I threw the syringe and heard it skitter on the floor. He picked it up and held it between two fingers. ‘Take a hot bath,’ he said, ‘and you’ll see your veins come up.’ He sounded so reassuring. I looked into his eyes and knew he could take care of me, even if I sometimes worried how we could possibly go on with our bodies as adversaries.

  Jim and my father left me under the orange awning outside the motel’s cramped lobby. I walked the full length of the motel looking into windows and doors left ajar. There was a foreign family in one room, all of them packing with a spirit at once chaotic and unified. Through another window I saw a woman stretched out over her perfectly made bed, staring intensely at the ceiling, her arms stretched over her head as though on a rack. Waiting is like that, and you hear the gears going click, click, click.

  There was nowhere to go around the motel. Beyond the parking lot, with its two chained dumpsters, there was only a road through some trees that connected to the highway. The only food available to guests was a restaurant a couple of miles away, or the vending machines that had cans of ravioli,
hot coffee. In the lobby was nothing but the cashier’s booth and a television flickering behind the counter. The man behind the counter did not want to talk to me. He had a thin mustache, spit when he talked. ‘Go play in traffic,’ he said. Very funny, I muttered. I stood there waiting until he said, ‘Go away now.’

  I went back to our room. I thought of Jim and stretched out on the bed much like the lady I’d seen in the other cell. I rolled my head on the pillow, listening to the air rushing in my ear as it changed with my movement. My father once told me you could hear the ocean in the sound of a conch shell. I wondered what sound I was hearing in the pillow. Perhaps it was the sound of the secret Jim and I kept, or the ones belonging to the people past and present who’d slept in these beds, stepping over doorways and into each other’s private universes. I fell asleep that way, as I often did, with my thoughts thrown out like a net, too wide to gather anything but the shadows crawling over the room, the indistinct sounds from the other side of the wall.

  ‘Look at your arms,’ the nurse said. ‘Why would you want to go and hurt yourself like that?’

  ‘I didn’t know I was hurting myself.’

  And a long bath brings these things up, deep channels, canals where the trash flows on the surface.

  My father woke me up. Jim stood discreetly in the doorway behind him. They were amped up. The air around them was like cellophane.

  ‘C’mon, we’re going now.’

  I noticed it was dark outside the screen window, the room cold enough to make my father’s teeth chatter. I rubbed my own arms, looking for the suitcase my mother had packed with a flowered windbreaker. When I caught Jim’s eye, my arms seemed suddenly not mine, hard plastic like a doll’s. He appeared to waver on a shore of regret – impossible not to share it, it came between us cold and impassable as a frozen lake, his eyes bluer in its reflection. I put the windbreaker on and snapped it up with an attention that gave us both a momentary respite from each other.

  Jim was talking excitedly to my father while I gathered my things. He’d figured it out, he said; he did the numbers. The heroin could net them 30,000 dollars. Real money, that’s what Jim called it. Then he burst out laughing.

  That’s when my father decided to get the monkey.

  The monkey belonged to Jim’s ex-girlfriend; she’d had him for some time and couldn’t find anyone to take him off her hands. She also lived in southwest Miami, but a part that was barely developed.

  ‘Monkeys are just like little kids,’ my father said. ‘And this one’s supposed to be real friendly and smart.’

  Jim said, ‘I don’t like pets that mimic me.’

  My father talked about understanding the monkey mind. The thought of that money had him imagining a kingdom of needy animals over which he would preside. ‘Maybe we’ll start up our own farm for animals people don’t want anymore.’

  There was a sign outside the Quality Inn boasting its swimming pool, color TV, and air conditioning. We had another two days of driving ahead of us.

  There were curtains that ran from the tops of the windows to just above the carpet. When I pulled the cord I could see the pool, glinting with the last pink rays of sunlight. No one was swimming.

  My father was stretched out on his bed, hands behind the back of his head.

  ‘Want to sit with me?’ he asked. I sat beside him. ‘Do you like it here?’

  I looked around the room. The other bed was perfectly made, not a wrinkle in the beige coverlet. ‘What’s that?’ I asked, already getting up to investigate. ‘Glasses wrapped in paper,’ I said, laughing. ‘We should wrap our cups at home, just when company comes over.’

  ‘Maybe we’ll take more trips, just you, your mother, and me.’

  ‘Can Jim come?’

  ‘Sure, if you want.’

  I nodded, rejoined him on the bed. ‘Can you grab that bag for me, baby?’ I pulled his suitcase up between us. From a side pocket he withdrew a small zippered pouch. ‘You going swimming?’

  ‘Will you come?’

  He was already making his way to the bathroom, pouch in hand. By that time, I knew what he was going to do. ‘Don’t do that,’ I whispered. ‘Please.’

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said, turning for a moment in the doorway. ‘I’ll meet you later.’ He ran a hand down my cheek and closed the door between us.

  I went to my bag and opened it despondently. The world that occupied my father in the locked bathroom felt like it had dismantled itself and floated off, leaving me in this strange bedroom with its unmarked surfaces and sterile glasses. I pulled out the bathing suit my mother had packed for me, and immediately went to the door that connected Jim’s room to ours. I knocked on it furiously until he answered.

  ‘Where’s your dad?’ he asked.

  ‘In the bathroom,’ I said miserably. ‘Again.’

  ‘You want to change in here?’

  I walked through the door and put my face against his chest.

  ‘Not now,’ he said, moving away just slightly. I felt now pressing on my heart like a heavy, flat stone. I felt the air go out of my lungs. My face reddened; I felt lifted, somehow, from a special place I’d occupied, unsure of what I’d been replaced by. Go play in traffic, take a long walk off a short pier …

  Neither Jim nor my father came down to the pool that night. After an hour, I walked up the stairs, let myself in. My father was still in the bathroom. When I knocked on the door, he told me to be quiet and go away. Jim didn’t hear the quiet tapping I did on his door; the faint Morse code I’d made said I’m drowning. I slept by the pool that night. I imagined the lounge chair settling over the drain, held by the quiet pressure of the water. A wind came up, and it was suddenly much colder. I could see mountains between the buildings. I snuggled deeper into my blankets, holding them around me.

  ‘You don’t trust me,’ Vic said. ‘You’re all fucked up about love. You always think I’m going to take it back, won’t give you enough.’

  And I sat there shivering. ‘No, I don’t,’ I said. ‘I don’t think that.’

  But things just run out, no matter how much you’ve got in your supply. No matter how careful you are to make it last. You always use it up too soon.

  And then the nurse said, ‘C’mon on, honey, it’s time for your methadone,’ and my cells flowered like open traps.

  We drove into Miami in the late afternoon and pulled up to a house sitting off a dirt road. The place had high grass out front and blankets tacked over the windows. There were two cars pulled along the side of the house. We all got out of the truck and made our way to the door. A woman answered. She pulled the hair from her face with one hand. She had the look of an old sharecropper; her face was bony and tired looking. Jim got out of the truck with his crutches. He didn’t kiss her, which I’d prepared for. He stood before her, appraising her silently.

  ‘We’re here for the monkey,’ my father said.

  ‘He’s inside,’ she said with some relief. She shuffled deeper into the house. People lounged around on threadbare couches near tilting shelves of dusty figurines, things you might find boxed in the back of someone’s garage. The greasy film over their ceramic surfaces made you not want to touch them or lift them from the shelves. Let It Bleed was playing on the turntable through one crackling speaker; there was no talk between the stoned zombies also tilted on the couch.

  The woman walked us toward the kitchen, where flames shot straight up from the burners with nothing on the stove. ‘God damn it!’ she hollered. ‘You guys are gonna burn this fucking place down.’ I saw the vomit in the sink then, and the woman casually turned the water on it, which made it more pungent.

  ‘Shit, this place stinks to hell,’ Jim said.

  She turned on him, vehement. ‘What the fuck do you want from me, Jim? Lay the hell off.’

  She walked past him and lifted a blanket off a baby crib. The crib was wrapped with chicken wire, and inside sat the monkey. Upon seeing us, he leaped to the wire.

  ‘He’s a capuchin,’ she
said, rubbing her nose as though the accumulated stench of the place had finally found its way to her brain. ‘His name is Puchi,’ and her voice affected a sweetness that sounded unnatural and lewd.

  My father squatted down and extended a finger. The monkey’s hand reached out through a hole he’d opened in the wire and grasped it.

  ‘He’s pretty friendly,’ she said, offering her halfhearted sales pitch as though reading it from the back of a card. ‘I’ll tell you right off, he’s not easy to keep. I don’t want you bringing him back here next week.’

  The monkey’s eyes were round and as expressive as a baby’s. They appeared almost liquid. But his hairless pink face had the wrinkles of someone old. He had patchy brown fur that didn’t look soft, and on the sides of his face two sweeps of yellow hair. With one hand he appeared to pull fleas from his belly. He had a ring tail with sparse hair like a tethered rope. His teeth were sharp and yellow. I could not tell if he was menacing or smiling. If he was like a baby, none of us were close to being a mother.

  We took him anyway. My father got him up on his back, and the monkey’s tail curled tight around his neck like a choker. The zombies on the couch began to move when they saw my father walking him out. ‘Hey, where you takin’ him?’ one asked. A woman stretched over her chair said, ‘That’s my baby. They’re takin’ my baby.’ Their voices were weak, emptied out. The bulky furniture of that dark house seemed to have some hold on them. They couldn’t rise.

  Jim’s ex-girlfriend walked out to the truck, a little unwillingly. She looked nervously around, though there was nothing moving down the main road and no neighbors nearby. She held her hand like a visor over her eyes, and I noticed the ghostly green disks barely marked by pupils.