“One hour,” says Louisa, “you’ll need it to get the burgers.” She hangs up the phone and then she says to me and Jody, “It’s all right when it’s bugs dying or being eaten, their hairy legs being torn off, but when it’s these drooping elephants they show, I can’t watch it. Who can watch this?” She turns off the television and leans back in her chair and closes her eyes.
Imagine the slut now still holding her hand on the receiver of the phone. Frozen in the act of putting it down and ready to pick it up all at once. Call the girls back. Tell them one thing more. Tell them anything to get them to really come, because she doesn’t think they really will. Except, ah yes, the food. They will come. And she lets go of the phone and pulls takeout menus from the night table by the side of the bed. She jiggles the drawer, the paper menus are caught up under whatever runners or knobs there are that make a drawer slide. “Oh, damn it,” she says. She yanks harder, and her tennis bracelet gets caught up on a hook and breaks, falling with a jingle.
She stands and looks out the kitchen window. There is nothing out there, no person, only trees in the dark, maybe a wind off the river.
The girls eat in the station. Blood drips on their hands. The cop is not fat, too thin maybe, his chin meant for putting up in the air, his elbows for getting by in crowds, angled for jabbing.
“Shauna,” she says, and maybe he’s Irish because he spells it S-E-A-N-A-H and she corrects him, taking the pen from him, warm from where he held it.
“And them,” he grabs the pen back to point.
“Direct relations,” she says, “his daughters. Come along, girls. Come give your names.”
The cop has a few questions. He wants them to name places their father might be.
“We don’t know,” Louisa says. “Have you got a globe?” The cop does not. He only has maps of uptown, huge ones in plastic hanging from wooden sticks on a rack.
“So when can we expect the dogs to be unleashed?” the slut says.
“There are no dogs,” he says.
“I know,” she says. “When will you start the search, I mean?” The girls have gone outside. They have two jump ropes they uncoil. She gives the cop a photo. Cal at Easter, a roast duck in the foreground. Crystal and eyelet linen. They start the jump ropes circling.
“The search is going on, right now,” the cop says. “For the father of those girls,” he says, his chin pointing out the precinct’s glass doors. The girls now double-dutching, skipping over what could be a mirror image of the nighttime sky, a sidewalk sparkling under street lamps lighting all the flecks of starry rock and sand.
John is in for his hip. That’s what the other hot dog men say. One pulls out a hot dog from his bin and says, “This is how long the metal rod will be that will go in his body.”
John comes back weeks later looking like a woman. Sharp bones protrude on his thin wrists. His hair is longer, gray and brushing his shoulders, blowing in breezes off the river. He’s gentle with his tongs, the hot dogs gingerly laid between slit buns.
“I didn’t come to visit you in your hospital,” I say.
“No one did,” he says. “I didn’t tell them where I was. I’m wearing a goddamn dress with no back—all of me for whoever out there to see, I want visitors? No,” he says. “I read books.”
“What books?” I ask.
“Books I’ve already read, the ones I still like.”
“What about TV?” I ask.
“The nurse was always in the way, her pointy hat cutting off all up to the tits of the broads,” he says.
“My father’s gone,” I say.
“Your fucking father never leaves you,” he says. “Fathers hang around your neck and bruise up your skin all your life long. You know that,” he says. And then a man comes to buy a hot dog. He wants onions on his hot dog, but John hasn’t got any. Not today.
“What? No fucking onions? What more fresh hell is there in store for me today?” the man says and he leaves, shaking his head and not buying a hot dog.
“There’s your horsie,” John says and points toward the park at my stallion who’s letting his shit drop from his rear on the pavement.
“Nice, I’m glad you pointed that out,” I say.
“Here, take him this,” John says and he reaches in and pulls up a hot dog and I grab it and run across the street with it dripping and palm up I put the dog under the stallion’s nose and he eats it and then I run, the cop yelling after to me to never ever feed a police horse and that next time he sees me he’ll... “Do what?” I yell back at him over my shoulder as I’m running. “Arrest me? Arrest me?” I yell. But the cop isn’t going to let this go, and he spurs the stallion and he’s trotting after me and I’m running now up the avenue and I’m still yelling, “Arrest me? Arrest me?”
I get to Rena’s house all out of breath and with legs that don’t want to make it up the stairs but want to sit on the lower bottom step and shake while I hold them and slap them so they’ll be still. I’m still slapping when the Hells Angel boyfriend comes down.
“Hey,” he says and “Hey,” I say back.
He’s wearing leather pants and boots and a leather jacket and leather strings braceleted around his wrists and strung as loops through his nose and leather gloves with the fingers cut off and a leather belt and leather straps on his leather boots and he smells like leather and he pats me on the head as he passes me and goes out the door. His hair is long like my hair, and just washed and brushed it seems to float up as he walks out into sunlight.
Up at the house Rena’s not home but Rena’s mother is there and she is shooting basketballs. She’s got a soft foam ball and a net above her bathroom door and she’s shooting from her barstool and Muy Hombre’s retrieving for her, bringing her the ball back in return for slices of orange American single-wrapped cheese. The empty plastic wraps are all over the floor by her barstool and Muy Hombre’s skidding on them when he runs back to her with the foam ball in his mouth.
“I just want to lie down,” I tell her and head for the couch, but she takes my hand and says it’s time I had my ears pierced. She doesn’t have ice so she picks at the clogged-up freezer compartment with a screwdriver and holds the white ice with ridges formed in it from the freon tubes on my lobe. The needle goes in and I faint.
I wake up with Muy Hombre standing over me, the foam ball still in his mouth, and Rena’s mother’s off by the sink saying, “Hold on, sweetie, you’ve had yourself a fall,” but she’s not helping to pick me up and instead she’s knocking more ice from the freezer, intent on my other lobe.
“Let’s do this one lying down,” she says, “so we don’t have you falling again.”
“Big deal,” my mother says when she sees my ears. “Mine were pierced when I was a baby.”
The new holes in my ears throb, clog, and crust. As I sit in Wood, I can feel them leaking, the fluid running down the side of my neck. We are onto mailboxes. Mr. Lenin shows us how to burn our names into the wood with a penlike tool that plugs in the wall. But the boys have found they can burn their names in their arms with the tool and the room starts to smell like their cooking flesh.
“A mailbox, that’s useful,” our mother says and she hangs it on the wall by her chair and when her ashtrays are full and when her empty soda cans are full of ashes, she puts the ashes in the mailbox along with her twisted empty cigarette packs. Jesús hands us our mail anyway, so we have never used a mailbox. I tried telling this to Mr. Lenin before I started making mine, but he didn’t understand.
“It’s for mail, you can always use it,” he said.
“Fuck, forget the mailbox,” I said and I started to leave the room and right before I did I turned around and looked at him and said, “I hate wood.”
There go the hot dog men, I say when I see them get ready to leave, their umbrellas tied shut with frayed rope or ripped sheet, their aprons stained and wet from a hard day of sloshing and tonging around in their greasy bins. Their socks in their sandals stained also, stray bits of sauerkraut dangling on the many-times-m
ended cloth at the toes, drying there, moving jerkily as the hot dog men move, getting ready to go, closing up cart. They leave like they’re escaping, one by one, silent and quick, leaning over their handles, looking left and right without moving their heads. Any minute ready to crouch down behind their carts to protect themselves from a rain of shrapnel or a spray of bullets.
It is night, the middle of the night, and Jochen the German artist neighbor has hanged himself and the police are in our hallway again and the men in white coats can’t fit the gurney in the elevator and they have to use our stairs and they come through our house and wheel our neighbor through.
“I’ve already cleared it,” my mother says to the men in white coats, almost proud. She means the house, she’s cleared the furniture for our brother to come through.
Jochen worked in oils that stained everything he touched. I can’t see him under the sheet, but I can see his hand, the blue and black and red-stained fingertips, the half-moon nails black as night. My mother reaches out and grabs his hand. “Jochen,” she says.
The men carry Jochen down the stairs, his paint-stained hand now showing from under the sheet, as if he is reaching out to the wall, still trying to paint on flat surfaces.
* * *
“I hear Jochen walking through the house at night,” our mother says. “I hear his footsteps.” We say we hear him too. We hear the floorboards creaking in the middle of the night. We smell the oil paint.
“He’s watching over us,” our mother says. Days later we find money in our hallway sealed to a filing cabinet with a glob of red paint.
“Jochen left us this,” she says. I buy food for a week with the money and give the cashier at the E & B the bills with red paint still on them.
My mother thinks of things to do for him. Light church candles, name a star, send money to somewhere. She has one of his small unframed paintings he gave her years ago. She takes it to her office and hangs it in her cubicle. Coworkers tell her what they see in it, all sorts of things. Men without heads. Horses striking. Two moons. The cleaning people spray it with cleanser each night. It seems to change color and crack. My mother says she never saw anything in the painting before, but now in the cracks she sees bison.
“Surely bison,” she says, “I’ve seen them before.” We ask where and she says, “Merde, I can’t remember where.”
She tells us things she did not do in France. She never wore underclothes, like they do in this uptight country, she never bathed every day, she never ate cereal for breakfast. She can go on and on, there was so much not done over there, she says. She says she wishes she could turn around, turn her head back and see it all before her. The sea and the esplanade and the streets and the sardine vendors. She would breathe it in, she says, and then step into it and shut the door behind her. “Click,” she says. She shuts a door we can’t see, grasping a handle that is just the air in our house.
Tallulah Bankhead’s lost at sea. She’s wearing fine jewels. Her wet hair still holds a curling iron’s wave. Our mother says, “That’s me, that’s how I feel,” and she points to the TV, to Tallulah Bankhead who’s now bending over boatside trailing her ringed fingers through misty waters of the set.
“We’re supposed to want her dead,” Louisa says.
“Poor Tallulah, misunderstood,” our mother says.
Jody sits in the chair with her down coat still on, having come from a walk with the dog. She’s been sick all spring and won’t take the coat off. Its orange nylon is stained all down the front, its holes patched with peeling silver squares of duct tape. She snorts, moving mucous along her passages, all throughout the movie. We give her dirty looks and then we throw things. Every time she snorts she gets a paperback or a pillow or a cat thrown at her.
“I’m sick!” she says.
“Well, get over it,” Louisa says.
She sleeps with the coat on, over her nightgown under her covers. We hear her snort and cough all night.
“She was born too young, her lungs barely formed, that’s why,” our mother says and then she says, “Was that Jody?” when she hears a noise.
“Yes,” I say. “Go back to sleep.”
“She’s like Beth in Little Women,” Louisa says from her bed. “She’ll die this spring.”
“Don’t say that,” our mother says.
“Am I Jo?” I say.
“No, you’re Tiny Tim,” Louisa says. My mother and Louisa laugh from their beds. I hit my mother in the back. She is smoking in bed and the cigarette falls from her fingers and onto the sheet.
“Oh, merde,” she says and bangs at the mattress, putting out the burning ash.
Then my mother starts to cough her smoker’s cough and Jody starts to cough her sick cough and Louisa and I join in with fake coughs.
The loft next door where Jochen lived is about to be shown. The landlord’s left the door open for cleaners. On the table that is really an old door over sawhorses are paint cans and brushes and dribbled dry paint and a dropcloth and a bell and a book and a candle. The candle was melted at the bottom. It stands at a slant in a pool of its wax. The bell has paint on it, the clapper is gone. The book is the Bible, a copy in German. Some pages torn out and used to wipe paint from his brushes are crumpled in balls on the floor.
They’ve left the rope, but not the loop. I hold onto the cut rope, pull myself up, a one-armed chin-up. The pipe it’s tied to spills dust in the air.
His paintings are all over the house. I can’t see anything in them. It’s hard to tell if they’re finished or not. He has even painted over windows and on the stove. Like spillover from boiling pots, splashes of paint stain the oven door and hide the numbers on the range’s dials.
There are pictures of his children, German children on the freezer box. Blond and blue-eyed. The photos hang by magnets. Jochen painted the frames with pictures of elephants dancing in tutus and giraffes wearing bowties.
Do the German children know their father is dead? Do the German children sit quietly in a park with pigeons by a fountain in a German town, their heads lowered, their mother telling them the transatlantic news?
I take the pictures of his children and put them in a cigar box. I take them to John. I tell John, “Here, tape them to your hot dog cart,” and he does, saying there are children from where he comes from who look the same, their hair the color of the sun, their eyes blue like sky.
Before we go to school we watch our mother put her makeup on. First the powder on the face, then the eyeliner below the eye and above on the lid an exaggerated stroke like the sweeping end of a Chinese character drawn with black ink and brush. Then a layer of blue and violet and pink eyeshadow. The eyebrows wetted with a licked finger and then darkened with pencil. The bar of blush on the cheeks and then the lining of the lips. She shakes her hand back and forth, a ritual, freeing the brush of her plastic lipliner stick. Don’t we close our eyes, us girls, lean back our heads and listen to the shaking, breathe deeply, smell her L’Oréal, her Givenchy. She takes the Maybelline, licks the point and then dots her cheek with a beauty mark. She teases up her hair, then fastens it back down with bobby pins she’s been holding in her teeth.
When she’s finished we grab our books and stand in the hall, buzzing the elevator, waiting for Jesús to bring us down to the street. On the other side of the wall we can hear our brother snoring in his bed. He sleeps on his box spring now and when he turns we can hear the springs twang like an instrument he is just learning to play with the sharp pointed bones in his hips.
Rena goes to Puerto Rico. She writes that she has met her real father for the first time.
She sends oranges. She has a boyfriend named Ramón. He has given her bracelets of shark’s teeth and a necklace to match. She saw angelfish and starfish. Ramón’s got a brother, Realidad.
“That’s Reality,” she writes. If I came to visit her, Realidad and I could be boyfriend and girlfriend. “Will you come to visit me?” she asks. “PR is hot, baby. We sleep under nets. You will never guess how old Ramón i
s. Ramón is nineteen,” she writes. “Realidad is not so old.” Her father locks himself up and paints during the day and eats dinner with her at night. They go to bars and she dances with his friends. They are dark and have hair on their backs. She will miss the coconuts when she returns, she knows.
“Eat the oranges by slicing a hole in the top and then sucking out the juice,” she writes.
I cannot go to PR.
“Here,” our mother says, “take this instead,” and she digs up a frilly blue negligee from a barrel where we store our clothes. I put it on over my clothes. “I wore that in the hospital with your sister,” our mother says. “I craved corn flakes, not pickles,” she says.
I show John the frilly negligee. I still wear it over my clothes. He asks me to twirl, and I do, holding out the filmy skirt of it while he takes pictures of me.
“Beautiful,” he says. “Here,” John says, and gives me quarters, “buy yourself an ice cream.”
“I’ll take another hot dog,” I say. I stay with John until the end of the day when he folds down his umbrella and says he’s going home.
My brother smokes pot like cigarettes. He rolls them and then puts them in hard packs and keeps them in the pocket of his robe. He flips the pack open when he wants one, and the way he likes them is chained, one right after the other while he watches the soap operas with me. He doesn’t want histories now, he stops me when I start to explain their desperate lives. His heavy-lidded eyes almost closed throughout the show, I sometimes throw a book at him to wake him up and he laughs, not with his voice, just his chest slightly shaking up and down and a smile on his lips.
I walk to see John and all I see is his cart. I think this is it, he’s gone and I’ll have to trundle the fucker of a cart back downtown all by myself. I’ll have to keep it in my hallway for him until the next day and then get up early, join the other hot dog men in the morning, slip into formation and then walk with them and walk their foreign walk to the park and see if John has shown up by then. But John is not gone, he is on the side of the cart, kneeling down and fixing a tire.
Here They Come Page 7
