“The clouds are cloudy,” Louisa says and we see what she means, the sky layered with gray clouds and white clouds and puffy ones and streaked ones all at the same time. We can see no blue.
“Merde,” our mother says and she sits down at the edge of the mattress and pulls a cigarette from her breast pocket and lights it with her lighter and smokes. Our brother comes down to the street wearing a blue silk robe that has a Chinese dragon shooting gold thread out of its flaring nostrils. As he walks past us, the robe’s lapels gape and his smooth chest is bared.
“That’s from my father,” my mother says as our brother walks past. “He had no hair there either, and his face never even needed a shave,” she says. “It’s all passed down.”
The traffic starts to lighten on our street as rush hour quiets down and it gets darker. My mother says let’s eat dinner outside. So she brings down the pot of chicken and rice she has made and our plates and our forks and we set the pot on the curb and she doles us out our portions.
When we’re done we go back up to our place, bringing the plates and the pot and leaving the mattress, now stained with grease since we wiped our fingers on it.
“We’ve left our mark,” our mother says and then we all say so long to the mattress and wish that the next person who sleeps on it has sweeter dreams than the last person.
Days later, the mattress is gone and in the paper we read that a couple was killed while making love on a mattress in the subway tracks. “The sound of the roaring train got my girl hot,” the dying man confessed.
Louisa’s cray-pas drawings on the water heater start to melt. The faces of the boys she likes at school no longer look like faces and could be candle wax drippings instead. Louisa says it’s all right since she doesn’t like those boys any longer and we ask her who she does like and she doesn’t say and instead she goes to the roof and leans against the wall of the elevator shaft, the part with the gears we can see through the elevator’s skylight. She sits there, her head bowed, splitting the ends of her long hair while the gears go round and round behind her. When she does talk she says, “Bring me my French horn,” and so I run downstairs and come back up with her instrument that hits the staircase walls as I go up because it’s heavy and big and I’m small. She clicks open the case and there it lays gleaming and she takes a seat over the edge of our tall building, her legs dangling down to the empty lot below, and she puts the French horn’s bell over her wide leg and her hand up inside it and she starts to play.
It’s Mozart or Beethoven or Vivaldi or Bach. I swear the skinny trees down below seem to straighten their trunks and reach taller to hear her or to be nearer and have her music fall down softly on their leaves. Occasionally my sister has to stop and pull out her valves and blow, draining her spit. Water that will surely help the trees below grow. Jody hears her from down in our place and Jody comes up with her oboe and stands beside Louisa and together they play and I think if there are snakes below in that empty skinny treed lot, they are now sure to rise, charmed. Aren’t all the boys at school in love with my sisters? But then they stop playing and they put away their instruments and they are just my sisters again.
“Dad was a chemist,” our father says. “My mother was a housewife. She baked so much that every time she sat in a chair there was a rise of flour dust off her skirts.”
“That’s lovely,” me and my sisters say and then we say we have to go, we have to get back downtown to our mother who is naked because of the too hot heat, relaxing on her day off, sitting and watching war movies on TV and running back and forth for her cold shower, and where, Oh Daddy O, is the money we’re supposed to bring back to her? And he digs. The cuticles of his large fingers peeling back as he searches in all his pockets. Saying, “hmm,” saying “well,” and then looking around the room at objects as if he will give us a vase instead and that will help buy the food and I imagine myself setting a vase down on the conveyor at the checkout counter at the E & B in order to pay for my meatloaf mix. And he goes to the mantel, where the miracle coin, the billion-to-one-odd coin still balances on top of all the other coins and he says, “I hate to do this,” and he scoops up all the coins that are there and slides them into a paper bag, a Balducci’s paper bag, and he holds it up by the handles and he says, “Here.” Then, “Oh, I was going to throw this out, but who wants it?” and it’s a dirty black wastepaper basket, the kind sold with a blotter pad desk set, but the blotter pad and pencil holder don’t come included in my father’s deal, just the dirty old wastepaper basket that I take, because I don’t have one and this one’s free.
“Merde,” my mother says, holding up the paper bag of coins and reading the writing. “Balducci’s, the fancy place,” she says. We stack the coins into piles of their denomination and then roll them into paper rolls using our school paper, the kind with lines.
In the morning, as my mother leaves for work, she tells me to walk the dog and take a roll of coins and go buy myself breakfast, a muffin and a juice at the Greek diner next door. We have been going to this diner for years and they know me by name. I tie up the dog to the pole that supports the ripped awning outside and I go inside the diner and get my muffin and my juice and I pull out a roll of my father’s pennies to pay and Niko, his hair greasy and his apron splattered with Yankee Bean soup, says they do not take pennies. He will not accept them. I tell Niko, “Fuck, money is money,” and he still says no and then I start yelling at him and asking him what’s the matter with my money and his brother Spyro walks over and stands by Niko and tells me to get out of their restaurant. I can feel everyone in the restaurant slowly lifting up their heads from their eggs to watch the scene. When I leave the restaurant I slam the glass door behind me and all the glass shatters and comes cascading down in big pieces shaped like crescent moons that break into bits when they hit the ground. I go to untie the dog from the pole and Niko and Spyro run out after me and are yelling that they are going to call the police and they try grabbing my arm but I have untied the dog by now and she is barking and lunging at them and trying to go for their throats and the hackles on her back are raised so high she looks like twice the dog and I have to use all my strength just to pull her next door and back into the hallway of our place where I ring and ring the elevator buzzer for Jesús to come down and get me and when he comes I start crying and I tell him what happened.
He tells me not to worry and he takes me back upstairs and I sit down in a chair and the dog comes over and she puts her head in my lap and licks my face and whines and then she puts her paws up on me and I hug her and feel her cold chain collar on my cheeks and her fur. The coat fluffed big from having had her hackles up is wonderful. Oh, fuck, what a dog.
The police come. They knock at the door and I know it’s them because I hear the crackling voices coming from their radios. Jesús is with them and he has pleaded my case and told them I am just a little girl, a good little girl, and the cops take notes while I tell them what happened and Jesús keeps interrupting and telling the cops that Niko and Spyro had no right calling the cops on such a little girl and he keeps asking the cops if they agree and finally the cops ask Jesús if he could get inside his elevator and run it a little, go up and down a few times while they finish talking to me. It turns out the cops don’t want to arrest me, they just want to make sure I pay Spyro and Niko back for the glass door.
At the end of the day, when my mother gets home, I tell her what happened and she walks over to the diner and talks to Niko and Spyro and sets up a payment plan of ten dollars each time from her paycheck to pay for the door. I ask her why she’s not mad at me and she says why should she be, it was a good thing it wasn’t her they wouldn’t take the roll of pennies from, if it were she would have broken the door and smashed their goddamn windows and then set fire to the place.
Our mother’s cut herself by using a bare foot to swipe with her toes under the washer thinking she’s swiping out a piece of plastic but really it’s a thick shard of glass.
“Hold still, Mom,”
we say. We try to stop the bleeding by tying an old T-shirt around her foot.
“Blood is something else,” she says, noticing how clean the kitchen floor has become after she wiped it with the sponge. The rest of the day she spends trying to peel back the T-shirt and see how her cut is doing.
“Leave it alone,” we say.
“This is nothing,” she says, “this will heal.” For dinner we have no chicken, just rice. “Imagine each forkful a different dish,” she says, so we take turns calling out the fare.
“Roast beef au jus,” Jody says and we take a bite and comment how wonderfully rare.
“Peking Duck,” Louisa says and we all say, “Mmm, how good.”
“Rice,” I say when it comes my turn and my mother and sisters all look at me and groan. “All right, all right,” I say, “Camel meat tartare,” I say and my sisters say yuck, they’d rather I keep it rice, but my mother says, “You know, that may not be bad, on a hot sandy day in a tent with the flaps flapping in a wind after a hard day’s ride to nowhere and back, camel steak tartare may just hit the spot,” she says and eats a mouthful of her rice.
A red line forms up her leg from her cut. “It’s just blood poisoning,” she says the next day. “It could be hours before it travels to my brain.” We take her to the hospital but we don’t have money for a taxi so we put her on Louisa’s bicycle. My sisters walk beside her steering the handlebars and I walk behind, letting her know when her long shirttail is about to get caught up in the spokes. “I could die like Isadora Duncan did,” she says as we go down 11th Street. After an emergency visit she comes out with a shot in the rear and a bottleful of antibiotics. “Or I could just die swallowing all of these at once,” she says and shakes the bottle like maracas.
Back in the house she throws an empty egg carton out the window that faces the lot, saying she hates to see the garbage pile up inside so fast. Then she takes her cigarette, which is burning on top of the refrigerator, burning black into the white, and she inhales and puts it back up on the refrigerator and opens the refrigerator door and claps her hands in front of it and says, “All right, what shall we have for dinner tonight?” She says, “Don’t I get three wishes? Oh, wise and venerable Frigidaire, produce for my family a rack of lamb. No, eh? Is that the way it’s going to be then?” There is mayonnaise and a half lemon in the refrigerator. The lemon is old and starting to mold and shrivel.
For dinner we have lemon mayonnaise sauce over rice. While we eat my mother says not to worry, tomorrow she gets paid and we’ll have steak and potatoes, and then she says merde and goddammit to hell and then she takes her plate and throws it across the house so that it flies over the bed and smashes against the wall and the rice falls onto our bed. “Fuck your fucking father,” she then says and she cries and covers her face with her hands and we continue eating our rice, very slowly, very quietly. We are hungry.
All night I cannot sleep for the smell of lemon mayonnaise sauce on my bed sheets making me sick. I sit in the chair instead and try to curl up. Above me, in the cracks in the wood of the wall, I can hear our cockroaches moving, a soft ticking sound when they jump to the floor and scurry around. I fall asleep. In the middle of the night I wake up because my brother is carrying me back to my bed. He’s still wearing his blue silk robe and it feels so silky against me I think I could slip out of his arms and I want to hold onto him but I don’t reach out because I don’t want him to know I’m awake. He lays me down next to my mother and pulls the sheet up to my neck and tucks the sides under the mattress. I wait for him to leave and shut the door to his room. The smell of the lemon mayonnaise is still making me sick and I struggle out of the tucked-in sheet and go back to my chair up against the wall with the cockroaches in between the wood and I sleep and I dream.
* * *
He’s under the catalpa in a wind that blows the pods off. They hit him on the head and fall to the porch deck. He rubs his bald head and heads for the pool, for the long-handled sieve he sweeps through the water while his slut swims backstroke. Her hands alternately out of the water, the pinkies separated and crooked like a tea sipper holding the handle of a fine china cup. My father circles the pool, skimming off leaves and blades of grass. My sisters and I were told not to swim while she swims, so instead we go to the kitchen, eat cheese and crackers we were told not to eat before dinner, drink orange juice we were told not to drink after breakfast, eat sliced ham we were told is only for lunch.
We run through the house screaming. Our brother has come to visit our father too, and he is It. He is chasing us, the belt of his blue silk robe loosening and loosening as he comes closer and closer to our backs we arch to keep him from tagging us. We are red-faced and hot and running up and down stairs and our brother is growling, he is some kind of bear or bull, and then the robe comes loose and he is almost naked in the hall, his shoulders bared, the robe hardly on him. Our father’s slut walks in from the pool just in time to see our brother with his robe flying open, exposing himself. She runs away, and we hear a splash. When we look out the window, we see she has pushed our father in the pool. He is still holding the long-handled sieve and his shirt is filling with water, ballooning up.
She does not eat dinner with us. Our father goes to the bottom of the stairs to her room, telling her to come down, telling her he has made steak and ratatouille. We eat without her. We steal food from each other’s plates. I steal steak from Louisa and Jody steals from me and our brother steals from all of ours and our father yells for us to stop. He loads a plate with steak and ratatouille and goes up the stairs to his slut’s room. We hear the plate crash and break and our father comes down with the pieces and some ratatouille on his head. He puts the broken plate on the table and takes bread and soaks up what ratatouille is still left on one of the broken pieces. My sisters and I walk over to him, pull slimy bits of onion and eggplant off the middle of his head.
Then it’s our brother who goes up to see her. He takes with him nothing but a glass of wine. My sisters and I follow him. He shoos us back, but we follow anyway. He knocks on the door and tells her who it is. The door opens just a little bit, not wide enough for anything to fit through except maybe a band of light, so my brother pushes it open more and goes in and closes the door behind him. We tiptoe up to the door, we listen from the outside. At first there is nothing, only what sounds like the soft whispering sound of our brother’s robe swishing as he moves like he’s showing her some private dance. Then we hear someone swallow. It can’t be her, it’s so loud. It’s our brother. He hasn’t brought her the wine. He’s drinking it himself. Then there’s a smash. The glass hits the door right by where our ears are pressed against it, trying to listen. Then we hear her laugh, it’s a laugh that starts off low and then gets high. She’s still laughing when our brother leaves the room and he’s laughing himself, and just missing with his bare feet the glass that lies in shards beside the door.
In the morning my brother takes the car and drives us to the beach. It’s starting to rain and no one is there. The sand gets pocked by the drops.
“Let’s go in,” he says and takes off his robe and dives into the water. I stand by his crumpled robe, the dragon face up, attacking the rain with his breaths of silk fire. My brother waves me in, saying it’s not cold.
He’s right, it’s not cold when I dive in and then come up and stand waist deep in water while he tells me about the transfer effect—the way water is warmer than air when it’s cold because the water steals the air’s warmth. The same way, he says, that when you get into a bed with someone already in it, someone who’s already been under the covers a long time, then you steal their warmth.
Maybe the transfer effect works with things other than temperature, I think. Maybe me hanging out with John all the time will make me somehow lose my teeth. I will feel Rena’s mother’s drugs, her woozy, swirly world. I will dream my mother’s dreams, take on her French, speak words I do not even know as I sleep next to her, an unwitting thief in the night.
“Help! Help!
” my brother says.
He is drowning for us. He is jerking around, splashing, waving in the water. The clouds roll dark behind him. The rain falls hard. He is letting ocean in his mouth, he is spitting it out, he is hanging from our necks, clawing at our skin, a comedian come up from the depths.
We are screaming “Let go of us!” The lightning, can’t he see, the need for shore. And if only the dog were here, to grab his skin between her white front teeth to bite down hard and tow him back, tow us all out, get us all in the car, windows up, wipers on. We are being scratched by our brother’s nails, he is climbing up us, a victim gone wild. Lifeguards must first learn how to kick the victims off them, how to unstrangle themselves from the clutching arms. Before learning how to save the drowning man they must learn to save themselves.
We know this, my sisters and I. We kick him good. Great kangaroo double kicks with both legs underwater up against his hairless chest as we try to slip through his arms. He’s got us all three. He gurgles and slowly submerges while we see our chance and break for shore. We run for the car but he’s got the key on a string on his wrist. We look back to him, what was him in the water, now just surf. His blue silk robe a dark thing that could be anything, a small tidal pool, a fisherman’s cut discarded net.
Suddenly he is behind us, alive, roaring, naked, holding up his monster arms, and we are screaming and the thunder cracks and we grab the key and we are in the car with the rain on the roof and we do not know if the car is on. Who can hear it through the belting rain?
“Is it on? Is it on?” we say and he is out the door again, running for the silk robe under a pea green sky. Yes, it’s on, and he’s back in the car with his robe and we are on the road, the sound of the windshield wipers soothing, a towel being passed around rubbed on all the wet girls’ hair, denied to our brother for the drowning scare he gave us.
Here They Come Page 3
