Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  As I walked through the street shadows, I passed office workers from Manhattan getting off the subways, streaming to their homes. There were couples among them, a few even holding hands. If the city could capriciously take a woman and child from me, I wondered, couldn’t it quite inexplicably give them back, in the form of a different woman and a different child?

  When I returned to my house, I heard the water rushing through the copper pipes into the deep old claw-footed bathtub in the apartment bathroom. I passed through the kitchen, where Dolores had cleaned up the dinner plates. The door to the bathroom was shut and I crept close.

  “My little fish!” came Dolores’s voice. “Swimming!”

  Maria giggled and I heard the splash of water.

  “Careful. We don’t want to get water on the floor.”

  “I like being wet,” cried Maria.

  “You want to be a little fish!” Dolores responded. “Now here, mi vida, let me put my feet under the hot water.”

  I crouched at the door and peered through the old brass keyhole. Dolores and Maria were sitting in the deep bathtub together, their backs toward me. I couldn’t see much, just a bit of water on the floor, the white lip of the enameled bathtub, and a curve of Dolores’s bare dark back.

  “Is this where we live now?” Maria asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dolores answered wearily. “The man is going to let us sleep here a little while and then Mommy is going to figure out what to do next. That’s all I know, Maria.”

  “Mommy’s figuring out what to do next,” Maria repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, honey,” Maria said, mimicking her mother.

  “Here, let me soap your hair.” I saw an arm reach forward. “Push up some.”

  “My big toes are as big as your little toes,” Maria answered over the steamy rush of the tub. And they went on, with happy nonsense about why soap is slippery and the temperature of the water and cleaning under the fingernails. And big knees and small knees. It was an intimate singsong language and Dolores sounded silly and relaxed in a way I had not seen. Perhaps there was a simple reassurance in touching and being touched by her naked little daughter. I crouched lower, trying to see more, but worried I’d make the floor creak. Dolores would hear me and whip her head around and know she was being watched. And that would confirm her distrust of me. But still I huddled next to the keyhole, spying not much more than what I’d seen before, except for Maria’s plump little hand dangling over the edge of the tub. Dolores leaned forward to turn off the water and when the pipes screeched and vibrated I took the opportunity to slink away.

  I paced about the half-empty apartment, wondering what they might need, and speculating too on how Dolores might act when she had rested and eaten regular meals. I plugged in the refrigerator and then opened the door; the plastic shelves were rife with mold. In the apartment’s kitchen, I noticed a tiny packet on the counter. One side was a piece of cloth and the other clear plastic. I knew my old tenant hadn’t left it. Inside the packet was a tiny golden hand holding a cross and several very small pieces of wood, some sort of beans and seeds, a shell from a nut, pieces of stone, several beads, a small chunk of quartz. Except for the small golden hand, the contents were unremarkable—no more interesting than the stuff that collected in the pockets of a child. But the packet had been sewn together with obvious attention, and on the paper side was a short typewritten prayer. I fumbled in my pockets for a piece of paper. In the few minutes before Dolores and Maria finished their bath I hastily copied the prayer onto a bank machine slip:

  Oh potentose amuleto

  Por la virtud que tu

  Tienes y la que Dios

  Te dió dame suerte, paz

  Armonia, tranquilidad

  Salud, empleo y propiedad

  Para mi y para los mios.

  Que saiga el mal y que

  Entre el bien como entro

  Jesucristo a la casa santa.

  Dolores emerged dressed from the bathroom holding Maria in a towel, her wet hair flattened backward. I pretended I hadn’t seen the packet and busied myself with an inspection of the wooden shutters in the front parlor. Dolores casually swept the packet into her handbag and asked me if I had any clean sheets, I’d forgotten that she and Maria would need them.

  “All that stuff is in the hall closet, blankets, everything,” I said, trying to make them feel at home. “Now, there’s no food down here so just take whatever you want from my kitchen upstairs. Eat breakfast up there tomorrow, too. I’ve got some cereal and juice and toast. I’ll leave the door to the stairs unlocked.”

  “Okay. Thanks.” She pulled out a folded pair of clean pajamas for Maria from her bag.

  “You have stuff for her?”

  “Mrs. Rosenbluth had these, they were her grandson’s.”

  I realized that Dolores didn’t have anything to sleep in. In the closest upstairs were half a dozen old nightgowns that had been Liz’s, all of them reasonably chaste, but it didn’t seem right to offer them.

  “Thanks for dinner.” Dolores fitted Maria’s feet into the slippered legs of the pajamas. “It’s sort of strange to say that, you know?”

  “It’s just as strange for me as it is for you.”

  “We’re going to bed now. She’s going to sleep with me. We’re tired.”

  “I’ve got a spare TV I could bring down.”

  “That’s okay.”

  I turned to go.

  “Oh, can I ask you a little favor?” Dolores asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Do you have a little glass jar?”

  I didn’t want to ask why. “Under the sink,” I replied.

  I slept terribly, listening to the darkness. Somewhere in the night I heard Maria crying and Dolores comforting her. The sound bounced right up the stairwell from two floors below. Why would she cry? The sound broke my heart. Then silence and time passed. I felt the size of my bed, I rolled around in the sheets with an erection, miserable, thinking about Dolores, worrying about Waldhausen and Beales and what, if anything, I could do to convince the Chairman to approve the deal with Volkman-Sakura. When I am in bed, the acid insinuates itself into my throat more easily, and I lay there feeling it burn upward. Maybe it was the first stages of “Barrett’s esophagus.” I reached toward my bed table for another nizatidine pill. From the open window came the underhum of the night—cars and faraway sirens and the remote throb of the subway, making the windowpanes tinkle ever so quietly. My thoughts turned toward my argument with Morrison over using DiFrancesco to get the V-S faxes. How odd it was that Morrison always understood that I would do what he told me. He knew my age, my ambition; he knew there is a particular moment in the lives of young executives when they believe—as if it were a freshly minted idea just come to them and to them alone—that hard work (I mean grunt work, the pushing of papers and forms, the meticulous presentation of reports that will languish unseen for weeks and then be skimmed quickly by superiors, the religious calculation of the schedule of promotions and bonuses, the cunning pretension of enthusiasm for banal projects, the pursuit of scraps of praise from malcontented and even sadistic bosses) will bring them all they desire—money, yes, but even more important, the knowledge of their own essence. He’d been there. He knew I was driven.

  And for that I have my mother to blame, for during my childhood her voice was forever telling me that enough was never good enough. She was loving, she thought, but was never satisfied with me. I got the grades, I did what I was supposed to do, but it was not enough. Her eyes withheld final approval, as if praise might sate me and I would then go no further, as if I might yet prove to be my father’s son. She did not consciously know she was doing this of course, and I have forgiven her in the rationalized manner of an adult. My mother, these days, is up early and showered, while Harry sleeps the dreams of the well pensioned. Their house on the Gulf coast cost $920,000. She is sixty-one years old. She is thinking of things, but they do not include me. If certain unfortuna
te events have occurred in her son’s life, it is not her affair. She worries about what will happen to Harry if she dies first. Of course, if he dies first she’ll be fine. She is looking toward the first tee-off. This is what she cares about. For her age, she’s an excellent golfer, wins senior women’s tournaments in the region. She drinks her coffee in the car. The golf course clubhouse is close enough that she could walk, but her foursome of women like to be the first to tee off in the morning. The greens, softened by the night moistness, cushion the teeshots and slow the putts. You get a lower score that way, and my mother has always kept score. Yet her own private world is never revealed. She could dream each night of being ravished by the Miami Dolphins and no one would ever suspect. My mother has her sunglasses on in the car and the sunscreen lipstick greasing her mouth. Her teeth have been whittled down to stumps and then recapped; her new smile is beautiful and grotesque in its youthfulness; it aggressively repulses certain widows at the golf club from being too friendly with Harry. Her hair is expertly colored and cut in the manner of the leisurely retired. Her diamond engagement ring, with four stones each as big as a kernel of corn, is kept in the box on her dresser—it interferes with her golf grip. She holds her coffee in one hand and smoothly steers the big Mercedes with the other. What is in her head? I don’t know, maybe I never knew. She has not telephoned me in over three years. It is up to me and I call every month or so. I end up talking about the equities market with Harry. He asks me about the Corporation’s stock price and I remind him that federal securities law bars me from discussing it with him. For all I know, he could go off and buy a block of stock and start telling his club buddies to do the same. Once men like Harry reach a certain age, they expect to be forgiven small white-collar crimes—they’ve earned it, they’ve paid taxes for forty years. This is why Harry always asks. My mother resents it that I don’t tell him. After all that he did for me, she says: the roof over my head, the tennis lessons, the years of school tuition, my first car. “You should be grateful,” she scolds me. “Come visit New York, Mom,” I respond. “I’ll take you to a show. Some good restaurants. It’d give me a lot of pleasure.” There’s a pause. “I can’t,” she answers. “I’m terribly busy right now.” Of course, she is not busy, but I do not press her. I miss my mother and I have missed her for a long time but I do not know what to do about it.

  And how absurd it is that she was once married to my father, who each morning places his knotty, pained feet upon a cold, plain wooden floor, alone, the minister who no longer can minister, a stooped man so poor he buys the supermarket’s generic brand of macaroni, a man who watches television with too much credulousness. As soon as I hit the big money at the Corporation, I paid off the remaining six years of payments on his small house and arranged to have three thousand dollars a month transmitted electronically from my money market account to his checking account. I would have sent him more but he didn’t want it, and he gave away half of what I sent him. Did he want to live with me? I asked. No, he told me, he couldn’t possibly leave his garden. And a few older members of the church still came around for solace. He was starting to have prostate trouble, he’d told me, and, I could see, was slouching toward a soft-edged senescence. He was a slender, pale wreck of a man, a soap peeling of a man. His failure had driven my success. It is unlikely that I have the parents I do, but so too was it unlikely that my wife should die by a random bullet and that in my loneliness I had invited strangers into my house. But there it is.

  Morning came with an insistent slapping on my shoulder. Then a tiny finger poking my arm. I opened my eyes and Maria, standing next to the bed, waited for me to see her. “Is ‘Sesame Street’ on?”

  “Oh, good morning,” I croaked.

  “Good morning, Jack.”

  I squeezed my eyes. “What is your name?”

  “Maria!” She pushed me onto my side. Her hair had been brushed and was pinned back with two red plastic barrettes.

  “Maria who?”

  “Maria Salcines.”

  “Do you want to watch ‘Sesame Street’?” I asked.

  “No!”

  “I like your earrings.” Tiny gold studs.

  “I like, I like . . . I like your funny hair!”

  She had a bit of hot cereal on her little T-shirt.

  “Did you have pancakes for breakfast?”

  “No,” she answered playfully, holding one arm behind herself with the other and rocking on one foot.

  “Did you have chocolate ice cream?”

  “No!”

  “Maria,” Dolores’s voice came up the stairs, “you get down here.”

  “It’s all right,” I called toward my open doorway.

  “She’s not supposed to be bothering you.”

  I turned to Maria. “Did you milk the cow for breakfast?”

  “No, don’t be silly.” She climbed onto the bed and I helped her up.

  “Why do you sleep like a big dog?” Maria asked, sitting on the bed, bouncing slightly.

  “Because I’m tired.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I go to work.”

  “Maria!” came Dolores’s furious voice. “You come down now!” Maria ignored her mother. “What do you do at work?”

  “Make mean faces at everyone.”

  “No you don’t. You talk on the telephone.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Are you going to marry Mommy?”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer. “She’s already married to your dad,” I said.

  Maria grew somber thinking about this. Her dark eyes became unfocused and she seemed to be trying to understand something. “He . . . was . . . we left because he was very bad,” she told herself.

  Her confusion and desire to explain it to herself disturbed me. I remembered my own confusion as a child when I realized my parents had split up.

  “Do you think I should eat breakfast?” I asked, hoping to break the spell.

  Maria’s face brightened. “No! It’s too hot!”

  “But I’ll be tired if I don’t eat breakfast.” I slid out of the covers, meeting the world in a motley costume of stained T-shirt and sweat-pants. “Did you eat oatmeal for breakfast?”

  “Yes!” she said. “How did you know?”

  “A tiny bug told me.”

  “No.”

  “You had raisins in your oatmeal, right?”

  “Yes,” she said slowly.

  “Well, one of them wasn’t a raisin, it was a bug watching you. And when you weren’t looking it flew up out of the cereal and came to me and told me what you were doing.”

  She searched my face for a smile. “Is that true?” Maria asked.

  “Oh, it could be.”

  “You have a hairy stomach!” she exclaimed.

  “That’s because my grandfather was a hairy old bear.”

  “No!” she screamed in delight.

  “I have to take a shower and dress now,” I said. “Will you tell your mother I’ll be down in a few minutes?”

  “No!” She stared at me with brazen happiness. “Okay.”

  When I came down the stairs fifteen minutes later, Dolores was in the kitchen with Maria standing on a footstool at the sink.

  Maria looked at her mother. “Mommy, there was no bug in my cereal, right?”

  I smelled eggs. “No,” she said. “Who told you such a funny thing?”

  “Jack did.”

  She looked at me and smiled an adult smile. “He’s kidding. He made it all up.”

  I flopped the newspaper open, scanned the usual proofs of man’s folly in the headlines. “Yes,” I said, “I made it all up.”

  “Sit,” she said, waving a spatula.

  “Did I have eggs in the refrigerator?”

  “No. Maria and I went out before you woke up. They’re expensive around here.”

  “The Korean grocers know people will pay it.”

  “And I borrowed twenty dollars that was in the dish,” she said.

  “You needed food
in this house. You had so little—”

  “Fine.”

  “I got the receipt for everything,” she said fiercely.

  She handed the slip to me. I crumpled it and threw it in the trash.

  “I haven’t had eggs in months,” I told her. “I’ve missed them.”

  She put a plate down in front of me. “You had four boxes of cereal. Stale. You can’t just have cold cereal every day.”

  “Why not?” I picked up my fork.

  “It’s pathetic, that’s why.”

  I saw her smile, just a bit.

  “Ah, well, I’m a pathetic kind of guy, you see.”

  “No,” Dolores said, putting a glass of orange juice in front of me. “I don’t think so.”