Tiny Ladies

by Adam Klein

  We slip from view down a dirt trail. I try to imagine my mother walking here along this thin trail, the sounds of children and cars subsumed by the low buzz of insects.

  May stops abruptly. ‘It was around here,’ she says, as though afraid to go any further. She looks around anxiously; the ground is soft beneath our shoes. ‘Shall we have our ceremony?’ she asks. I want to slow her down, to look around this place, but she is out of breath as though the encroaching environment were hands around her neck.

  She holds the box and I open the bag inside, take a handful of ashes and begin to drop them at the tangled roots of a tree. There is no wind here, and we have to make some effort at scattering them. I imagine children hiding behind these trunks, or May and I like children, leaving this gray trail to find our way back. I go much further into the trees, where they have grown almost together, warding off intruders who would come between them.

  May is weeping, standing in the shade with one hand pressed to her temple. I feel awkward going over to stand beside her. It’s enough that I’m here, I think. My presence gives her the chance to feel this grief, diminishes her sense of loss at the same time. I turn from her and hold myself close to one of the trees, closing my eyes.

  ‘Come inside, Carrie.’ My mother stands behind me. I’m sitting on the sidewalk in front of our house. I’ve scratched the word Fuck onto the sidewalk. She opens my hand and takes the rock from my clenched fingers. I’m angry at her.

  ‘Why are you sick all the time?’ I say, standing up and turning around to her.

  She doesn’t answer, just takes my arm. I want to say: You can’t protect me from anything. You can’t protect me from the way I’ve come to see you, see the world through you. You’re a terrible revelation. And though she’s wrested the stone from my hand, I feel like I’m still squeezing it, my hand bunched like cables inside of hers.

  ‘You can’t be angry at me forever,’ she says.

  ‘Yes, I can.’

  May’s sobbing makes me turn back to her. ‘It’s good that we came out here,’ I say, standing a couple of feet away, ash clinging to the sweat on my palms. I wipe my hands nervously along the rough bark of a tree.

  After a while, she gathers my hands into hers. ‘Yes. I’m glad we did. For some reason, I keep remembering her as a child. I think she was happy then.’

  We have dinner not far from her hotel, and she embraces me for a long while before we separate. We agree to meet for breakfast before I fly back to Iowa. The breeze over the ocean is very strong, and she holds her hair in place with one hand. ‘Your mother asked me to give you something,’ she says. ‘I’ll make sure to bring it tomorrow.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say. We look at each other warmly, and for a moment I begin to imagine visiting her again, wanting to do that.

  ‘I’ll walk to my hotel,’ I say, kissing her cheek.

  I cross the street to the beachside, where there are bonfires, silhouettes gathered around them. There are swimmers too, dark figures cast about by the waves. The hypnotic play of oncoming car beams and the intermittent rush of sound from their open windows momentarily makes me forget I’m walking. I feel strangely elevated, one element of the night with no more identity than any of the shadows joining on the waves. I imagine the perfect hiding place where everyone abandons their identities for shadows, sharing equally in the anonymity of ocean and heaven.

  From a short distance I notice the cerulean glow of my hotel casting a cool shell of light over the sidewalk. Its glass doors slide open, and it’s like being bowed to, like being acknowledged by someone silent, waiting.

  I lie in bed still carrying a feeling of elation that makes my limbs seem heavy, drugged. The renovations are recent; the room feels like a showroom. I prop some pillows by the headboard. I decide to call Gina, just to make sure King is all right without me. When she answers, I lie back on the pillows, staring at the empty screen of the large television set and the fruit behind yellow cellophane on the nearby desk.

  ‘How was it?’ she asks.

  ‘Easier than I thought it would be. But I’m exhausted, now. We scattered her ashes today. In the Everglades. I’m sure it was illegal.’

  Gina tells me about the bad weather, terrible icy conditions. ‘I’ve got King here with me,’ she says. ‘I let him run behind your house, then put him in Rachel’s car and took him back here. The weather sucks so bad, I just thought it was better not to be driving back and forth. Anyway, he’s happy with the extra attention.’

  I hear Rachel call out behind her. ‘He’s getting all the love he needs.’ She sounds like she’s got her arms around him, playing with him, and I think how glad I am to have the two of them as friends.

  ‘Do I need to pick him up?’ I ask.

  ‘No,’ Gina says. ‘I’ll have him back at your place tomorrow. He’ll be waiting for you when you arrive.’

  ‘Let me talk to him,’ I say. She puts the phone to his ear and I call his name. He barks, an anxious recognition that thrills us both. The next morning, I take a booth at Wolfies. There’s a clattering of silverware all around, making the place seem more bustling than it actually is. I pull the photograph from my purse, and the frame I’d intended for it. I know instantly I won’t give her the picture. Let her remember me as someone sensible, sober. I don’t want this picture carried or memorialized. I tear it in small pieces. When the waitress brings coffee, I ask her to throw out the bits of photo in my hand. ‘I do that with my bad pictures too,’ she says without smiling.

  May arrives flushed and with two packages under her arm. They are wrapped in bright pink paper. I know my mother didn’t wrap them, and, sure enough, she apologizes for having done it.

  ‘One’s from me, and the other from your mother. When I wrapped one, I couldn’t resist doing the other. Have you ordered?’

  ‘Just coffee,’ I say, suddenly taking her hand in mine. ‘You shouldn’t have brought me a gift.’

  ‘I thought you should have something to remember me by. Let me give it to you first. Here.’

  I unwrap the box and there’s a small note she’s written. Dear Carrie, So you always sleep with warm thoughts. Love, May. Inside is a throw she’s knitted. Before I can respond, she asks, ‘Do you know how long ago I made that for you? I made that when I first moved here, long before you ever left home. It might be a little small for your bed, now.’ She reaches over and lifts it, still folded, from the box. ‘Use it if you can.’

  I put it to my face. The generosity of someone sitting very quietly in their body. ‘Thank you. It’s beautiful. I would have cherished this as a child. I appreciate it even more now.’

  ‘This is what your mother wanted me to give you.’

  I unwrap it, knowing what it is by its lightness. The cigar box brings me to tears even before I’ve opened it. I don’t know where these tears come from. The ochre judges have faded; the box looks battered, the seam of the lid slightly torn. Inside are yellowed papers, early letters from my father, and the perfectly preserved bar of violet soap my mother used to initiate the box.

  There are other things: a photograph of the Wallaces’ horse, and a picture of me in our backyard. Behind me, you can see the tarred stump of our orange tree, a motorcycle my father never fixed. It would have been mine if I’d graduated or he hadn’t gone to jail. I think my father’s friend Ernie took the picture, and I seem happy in it though I must have known it would all come apart. I must have recognized the desolation, like a child who plays on the burned beams of a lost house. I look closer at the picture; it’s odd to see myself managing that knowledge.

  May’s hand touches my cheek and shocks me from my rumination.

  ‘I hope you don’t find this too upsetting,’ she says.

  ‘No,’ I answer. My eyes return to my younger self in the square-format picture, its muted colors suggesting the vagueness of those years, the sad, bleeding colors of those Florida afternoons. ‘I had a photo I intended to give you, but I think this one is better.’ I fish the frame back out of my bag
and slide the old picture in, arrange it so it’s at least sitting evenly behind the glass.

  ‘You’re always welcome to come back,’ she says, taking the frame from me and looking closely over the photograph. ‘You haven’t lost your courage, Carrie. I can see you’ve always had it, even way back then.’

  8

  What would you do if you bit down and your teeth raised blood from an apple? Flesh from an apple? What would you do? Flesh and blood from an apple. What would you do with the apple? How would you feel?

  Gayl Jones, Eva’s Man

  The airport parking lot is like a wasteland; it’s edged in gray light leached from a featureless sky. Rows of cars are iced over. I pass their strange shapes, imagining each one as an impermeable shelter. I find my Valiant, open the trunk, take the ice scraper and begin to clear the windows. I pull out the heavy parka I left behind, zipper it up to my chin. Again I remember how foreign winter is; how Gina had to introduce me to tire chains, to the dangers of black ice. You leave it for three days and return to find it more entrenched and brutal. A fortified enemy. A bad omen, I think, finally getting the engine to turn over.

  Then again, returning has never felt like a homecoming for me, not here or anywhere else. I imagine the gratitude I’m supposed to feel on returning. Despite my apprehensions, I’m looking forward to seeing King and Hannah and Gina. But some people feel connected to the place where they laid down roots, for the local bar where people know them, or even where no one knows them. That’s as close as I get to home: a local bar where no one knows me. I’ve made a home of Iowa City, but returning feels odd, as though the plane might have landed anywhere. That’s how I arrived here, searching for an anywhere.

  I know these thoughts – these feelings of displacement – recognize them for what they are and where they lead. Victor is behind these thoughts, in the restlessness and anxiety they inspire. I think of how pervasive he is, how he’s part of my thinking now.

  And it’s Victor who occupies me on the drive home – not my mother’s death, or the kindness of my grandmother. I tell myself that thinking about him might diminish his threat. A person waited on never comes. But Victor came before I knew what to ask for. I’d been waiting on something in that office in San Francisco, something to direct me once I’d lost Bill to drugs. I thought at first my job could save me, but I was unprepared for the regularity of the office. The normalcy of it was too much at odds with me. It demanded a constancy I didn’t have. The drug addicts I knew – like some tribe with their needle-induced scarifications, their language, and superstitions – seemed more comprehensible to me.

  Victor knows my story long before I venture to tell it; he can smell the vestiges of dope in my cells. He knows how it makes each day precarious, undermines whatever semblance of authority I have. He senses it in my compassion, my show of confidence, the way I fight to maintain the upper hand while I’m writing his case notes. I know it’s all clear to him, but I persist. Tough interlocutor. This toughness he’s seen in the places he doesn’t recognize as ugly. This one negotiates, compromises, risks, he thinks. This one never got anything for nothing. She won’t stay clean; she wants this kind of life – a job where her past gives her leverage, expertise – but she knows it isn’t her. I can remind her of who she is. I can give her back to herself.

  He whittles away my resources. I know they’re diminishing, but I willfully imagine them in reserve. I’ve lived with the feeling that everything is used up too quick, that there isn’t enough to go around. I want to believe I have this control of my life, that I’ve worked for it, and that it’s abundant. I can play up to him and not give up to him. And if I whisper to him at the desk, if I tell him my story to get his, nothing is compromised so long as no one hears.

  And he whispers too, because he knows that these are confidences and we are close to sharing blood. What we share is a current between us, not an intention. We surrender to our similarities. I can do my job better if he lets me know him, and he can learn from me if I let him know me. And on and on. I am in the dizzying world of desire and justification. I’m so busy sweeping over my tracks I no longer know where I’m going. And he persists, from appointment to appointment, a formal suitor obeying the conventions of the state. Two more weeks of furlough and then the long parole, which doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t mean he can’t embrace the new life we’re establishing.

  I issue a check for $300 for interview clothes. He comes in wearing the suit, modeling it for me. It embarrasses me, the way he stands at my desk, flexing his muscles in a business suit. My coworkers look away, flushed. They’re charmed by him too.

  ‘He’s something, isn’t he?’ Leslie asks in the break room. She offers that look that says, ‘Yes, I can imagine it.’ But she’d rather not; she plays at being naughty the way Victor models the suit – without the slightest intention of carrying anything out. We have both gone through the same training; we can joke about temptation. I joke about it less than the others. It makes me uneasy.

  I notice myself anxious about his appointments, but he always comes. He is always late, though, and I begin to wonder if he stands outside smoking, knowing I can get nothing done while I wait. And it goes on like this, until he whispers he’d like to kiss me, and I imagine the smoke on his breath. I imagine myself being carried away on it, something burned up and released. He smiles while he gives me excuses for missing job interviews. He gets away with this, promises to make it up to me with the kind of smile that makes me nervous. Sometimes I think he must have this kind of power over everyone, and then I remember he was locked up. You can’t melt the bars or charm the guards. But my sternness is staged, and my professionalism is staged, and the whole damned office is like a worn-out drama, eight hours a day.

  When he leaves I go into the little closet with its reclining couch. We call it the headache room. It’s dim and stocked with Xerox paper boxes. I drape my arm over my forehead, like a woman in a painting or a movie. And this is temporarily comforting; to feel the unreality of everything even in my gestures, to make a storeroom a fainting room. It’s all so dreary, I say under my breath; everything here is dreary. I’m the English lady who walks through the gutter. I convince myself I’m a woman who will make a bad choice simply because I’ve only made good ones up to now. And then the voice of my supervisor breaks the spell – though the fantasy couldn’t last much longer – and I’m back to my desk.

  Victor suggests we go to lunch. He wants to do something nice for me, despite the fact that I haven’t found him work. He tells me he can look for work on his own, but having lunch alone, that’s a different matter. I meet him at a Thai restaurant where every meal is new to him. He makes jokes about the names of the dishes. Chu chee pla is at first perplexing, then something he says again and again, imitating our waitress, not with malice, but trying to amuse me. It’s so silly, it brings me to tears. And later, when I think about it, I imagine how he enjoyed those words on his tongue.

  I tell him it’s not ethical. I can’t see him after work, though I already have. He suggests I close out his case. Easy enough, and after all I’m getting nowhere with him. He sees the hotel I live in and wonders why I don’t have an apartment. Nothing crosses his mind that doesn’t cross his lips.

  ‘I’m living paycheck to paycheck,’ I tell him. It’s a first lie, and not even necessary. I’m afraid of things like electric bills and phone bills. I’m afraid of making something and losing it. The logic is simple, if it’s logic.

  ‘We’ve got to get you out of this,’ he says. And for a moment I imagine him as capable as Bill – strong enough to look at the holes in my life and love me anyway.

  I drive home slowly. No wonder Gina didn’t want to make the trip. At several points the car feels like it’s about to slide completely out of control. Closer to my house, the roads are empty; then it’s simply a case of trying not to slide or brake too quickly on the ice. Ten minutes away from my house and I begin to think: People don’t come here by accident. They don’t get lost here
. I consciously try to keep my adrenaline from racing; I know how it works on me. It doesn’t focus me. It confuses me, makes me jumpy. When I pull up to the house, I feel almost pinned down by waves of apprehension. I scan the outside. Everything looks fine, the way I left it. Everything’s fine. Maybe Gina’s inside.

  I carry the ice scraper up the walkway, try the door handle, then put the key in the lock. I turn on the lights and call out to King. Nothing. The place looks all right. Gina’s gathered the mail and put it on the couch. Everything is fine, but she hasn’t brought the dog back. I walk through the rooms; they appear intact. I can’t live with this fear buzzing in my head like bad wiring. I go back out to the car and bring my bags inside. I call Gina but no one’s there. I leave her a message: I’m home. I’ll pick up King. Just let me know when you get back. Then I call Hannah. The thought of unpacking – of taking off my coat – never occurs to me. I turn up the thermostat, though. By 4:30 P.M., the place is freezing.

  We meet at the Sheep’s Head. By 4.30 P.M., the light outside is diffuse, almost completely obliterated. Hannah has a beer. I drink the coffee I’ve ruined with too much sugar. She wants to know about my grandmother. She has never met hers, either.

  ‘Exterminated.’ She says the word bitterly, washes it down with beer. ‘I have pictures of her. My family has a thing about pictures. Anyway,’ she turns her head, not interested in pursuing this line of thought, ‘did you like your grandmother?’

  ‘I’d think about moving closer to her,’ I say. ‘I think she’d like to have me around.’ I wonder if I’d really consider this; the thought is insubstantial, a smokescreen. I talk to Hannah about May but find myself confused by the feelings. May commented on how my mother had stopped making choices until the idea of choice never entered her mind. It seemed to throw Iowa City into question for me; it made me wonder if I’d ever chosen to live here, and whether I could choose to live here now.