Glass House

by Chris Wiltz

  It must have been Lyle, intruding into her thoughts, who was the wedge, the chink, that let in the fear. Once the fear entered, her body became smaller, this small vulnerable speck of life in the darkness. In the dark her thoughts raced through absurdist associations: if she were small, then she couldn't be seen, couldn't be found, but if she couldn't be seen, she could be snuffed out before she knew it, like an animal on the Interstate or an insect under a shoe.

  Sleep moved farther away. She took a deep breath and let it out audibly, playing her childish game, come and get me if you dare.

  The darkness teemed with more images, the kind you see flashing across the undersides of your eyelids, burning themselves out in a momentary burst of invisible lights. Thea remembered waking once, or dreaming of waking, in the middle of the night when she was a child and seeing an old woman standing by the side of her bed, bathed in a supernatural light, a Gypsy woman in a long dress and shawl, her braided hair wound around her head. She made no menacing move toward Thea, but Thea could not tell if she was friend or foe.

  In the teeming darkness now a form began to materialize by the side of her bed. No Gypsy woman this time, he was wearing a porkpie hat and glasses with one cracked lens, both lenses made opaque, the eyes shot out, by the strange suffused light. He stood there, he made no menacing move toward her. Thea could not tell if he was friend or foe.

  17

  Janine and Sherree had it out. Not right away; it took a few days for the tension to build, a few days before it became crystal clear that nobody outside the Convent gave a rat's ass if the cops put a plastic bag over Dexter's head or anybody else's; they were much more concerned over the media legend of the Bishop of Convent Street; a few days, too, of the housing authority snooping around asking a lot of who-is-responsible questions; a few more days before Janine realized Burgess was spending an awful lot of time over at the rich white bitch's house.

  Janine told Sherree she didn't want her talking to anybody from the housing authority.

  “What you think, girl, you can tell me who I can talk to and who I can't?” Sherree said.

  “Sherree, I jus don’ want you messin things up for Burgess anymore than they already are messed up.”

  “I didn't mean to mess nothin up for Burgess,” Sherree snapped. “I was trying to tell that bitch about what they did to Dexter.”

  “I know what you were trying to do, but that ain't what you did, is it?”

  Sherree said, “Your attitude is for shit, you know that? Or you just pissed cause I was on TV and you wasn't?” She had that hand on that thrust-out hip, her head cocked, her chin tilted, taunting.

  Janine knew if she got into a yelling match with Sherree, she would lose. From the time they were kids, Janine was no match for Sherree's mouth. She couldn't always summon it up at will, but she reached deep down into herself now, so deep down that it sometimes seemed it wasn't a place inside her at all, but outside, yet could only be reached with her mind, and only when her mind was as strong as it could be, and she summoned up that strange quiet power that was so physical it could shut Sherree up and make her hand fall off her hip. She brought it up and said, “I'm tellin you, don't go messin around where you don't belong messin around. Anybody comes from the housin authority, I want to talk to them. I hope you got that straight, Sherree.”

  Janine didn't mean it as any kind of threat, but she didn't care if that was the way Sherree took it either. There were plenty other women would jump at the chance to run the day-care center.

  Sherree's head stayed cocked, but her hand fell from her hip and she turned and walked away, no more argument about the housing authority, no more argument about anything. That had been days ago, and the two women were still avoiding each other.

  Janine was going to have to handle the housing authority very carefully, and if she did it right the Convent might be the first project in New Orleans to have tenant management. Other cities had it; she didn't know why New Orleans always had to be the last on the list for progress. Black progress especially. Even the black mayor of the city would rather talk about tearing the projects down, the worst idea Janine had ever heard. Where was everybody supposed to go while they waited for the new fancy town-houses to be built? Anyway, if you looked hard enough at the Convent, especially with its trim all painted fresh and bright, you could imagine it was fancy once too.

  But nobody was moving on that either. It was all a bunch of talk to keep from having to do anything. Bunch of talk and a lot of studies. The big shots in New Orleans loved studies. They spent all kinds of money to do studies on how not to spend all kinds of money. Like the smoke alarms. The city bought them and stored them because they had to do a study to figure out how to keep the tenants from stealing the batteries once the alarms were installed. Some mastermind thought wire cages would do the trick. Where did the dude come from? Not a New Orleans project, that was for sure. Or he would have known how the junkies sell the wire right off the clothes poles. When Burgess put in alarms, he ran an electric wire to them and that was that. Meanwhile, the city was still paying a storage fee for the other alarms. If Janine wasn't careful about what she said, they might want to raise rents to cover it.

  Or if she wasn't careful, Burgess might decide he had to go away. She didn't think he'd take her with him. He'd never said it to her before, but she could hear him saying, “After a while baby, when I'm settled in. You and the kid, I'll send for you.”

  She could hear him saying it because that's what her own father had said to her mother when she was pregnant with Janine. That was right before he took off for Detroit or Chicago, maybe New York, wherever he could find work, he said. She could hear it because her mother had told her the story till she knew it by heart, like some kids know The Three Little Pigs or Goldilocks, how her father had called from Jackson, then Memphis, as far as Cincinnati, telling road stories, saying he missed her, he couldn't live without her, running up big phone bills until the phone company took out the phone. And after that he was never heard from again.

  Her mother didn't tell the story so much as Janine got older, but then sometimes, when there was whiskey on her breath, she would cry. Too much whiskey and she would yell and throw things. Whatever her mother was so angry about, Janine knew it was all her fault. If she'd never been born, her mother would be in Detroit or Chicago, maybe New York, big glamorous cities where ladies wore tight dresses with fringe on them and shiny high heels and went to nightclubs with their men and listened to bands playing jazz and drank tall pink drinks out of little straws. She knew her mother would rather be in one of those hot jazzy cities than stuck here in this poor town, in this tiny apartment with her. She was afraid when her mother started to throw things. Janine knew she deserved to have them thrown at her, but she was so afraid when her mother got like this that she would wait until her mother was looking around for something else that would break into a thousand pieces, whatever was left that she could smash up against the wall, leave a stain like a star exploding, and Janine would crawl off to the bathroom and squeeze between the toilet and the bathtub and wait there until the raging stopped.

  Janine didn't usually think about these things, but since she'd been pregnant there seemed to be a lot of skeletons raging in closets. There were times, like tonight, that she could feel anger swelling up in a hole right above her stomach. It would swell until it seemed she would burst with it, but she never did. Burgess would usually come home and it would slink back down like a snake into its pit.

  She wondered if that was the way her mother's anger had been, almost to the bursting point so many times that when it finally erupted it did so with a fury that sent things flying. She wondered if it would help to throw things, to scream at Burgess while he wasn't there, shout about how miserable she felt sitting here all dressed to kill, waiting for him, dinner on the stove, in this same tiny apartment where she used to shiver up against cold porcelain in the bathroom.

  Janine didn't think that would help at all. She would just get into a h
abit of screaming and throwing, and it wouldn't change a thing. Neighbors would come at first, then they would stop coming. Eventually she would get tired of screaming and throwing, just as her mother must have, and then she would get sad, just as her mother got sad and started to use the needle until the needle killed her. That was no way to end up.

  She decided to go over to the Solar Club so she wouldn't feel she'd gotten all dressed up for nothing. Otherwise there wasn't going to be much else to do except go to bed, alone, and lie there in the dark thinking gaudy thoughts about where Burgess was and what he might be up to—and get more and more afraid that tonight was the night he wouldn't come home anymore.

  She went to the hall closet where he kept the Corn Flakes box stashed with emergency money. Janine hardly ever went into it because Burgess gave her money every morning, but today she'd spent it all on groceries.

  The box felt light, nothing in it maybe; she could hear a few corn flakes rattling around the bottom of it. So, fine, if all the money was gone, there'd be a few guys over at the Solar Club willing to stand a couple for a foxy lady in a blood-red dress with fringe on the shoulders, coming down the sleeves.

  She took the box into the kitchen and put it on the counter where she could unroll the top of the paper bag lining it. She reached into the bag, pushing her red fringed sleeve up out of the way. The waxy paper crunched. The fringe fell down around the opening of the box, all its long fingers tickling her arm just below the elbow, her own fingers touching the money, a few bills at the bottom of the box, and something else, fringe, brushing her hand, circling her wrist, and all of a sudden the box teeming with life. She ripped her arm out of it. All over her arm, on her hand, running down her fingers, up her sleeve, little shit-brown cockroaches, their tiny legs brushing up against her skin like soft, whiskered kisses.

  Janine flung her arm and there was fringe flying and cockroaches flying, and her neck bulged with the scream stuck in her throat.

  The roaches scurried across the floor and the counters and the sink and the clean dishes while Janine did her best to shake out her tight red sleeve.

  She began to cry and went into the bathroom. She fell across the bed, her high heels still on, her dress pulled up taut around her hips, and cried out all the tightness in her throat. She lay there a long time in the dark, her head cradled in her arm, the fringe making furrows on her wet cheek.

  Her crying subsided and as she became still, the rushing sounds of silence up against her ears were amplified in the quiet around her. She listened and they calmed her, and she was aware for the first time of her abdomen pushing against the material of her dress, making it tighter than it had been. She wouldn't be able to wear it much longer. There was a slight surge of panic at the thought of how her body would change, that she would lose her attractiveness, but the calm took over again as she remembered how she and Sherree used to play babies when they were little.

  They took turns being the baby. Being the baby was supposed to be the preferred role because then the other person had to do everything for you, feed you, rock you, cradle you in her arms. But Janine remembered how she started looking forward to her turn as mother so she could do the feeding and the holding. It would be as if some switch had been pulled and the power cranked up on her imagination. She would cuddle Sherree and rock her back and forth, sitting on the hard ground, and imagine scenarios in which bad men were trying to harm her or her baby, or take her baby away from her, and she would find ingenious ways to outwit them, hiding with the baby under the house behind the gas meter until they gave up trying to find her, putting the baby in the dumpster inside a pink satin-lined box until the men went away.

  Lying there, her eyes closed, she frowned. That was such a silly idea, a baby in a miniature coffin hidden in a dumpster, and she remembered that it came from hearing about a woman who had put her newborn baby in a dumpster until some men—it must have been the garbage men—found it. She was so little when she heard that; she didn't understand; she thought it was bad that the men found the baby. If the woman had only put the baby in a box . . .

  Hiding from the men—it was the only time she ever imagined men in her stories.

  She didn't share these stories with Sherree; she was afraid Sher-ree would laugh at her. But the stories, half-baked, without beginnings or very good endings, were not what she enjoyed. It was the feeling that she was able to protect her baby, that she and her baby were one, that because she was such a good mother she would be able to watch her baby grow and be happy. She had the power to do that, and that was not pretend.

  They played babies without any props, only pretend bottles and pretend diapers. Then one Christmas her mother took her and Sherree to the auditorium across town where there were Santa Clauses giving toys away. They stood in line with lots of other children, and they each got dolls. One of the dolls, dressed in a pink diaper shirt and a diaper that snapped on, came with its own bottle. You gave the doll water from its bottle and it peed in the diaper. The other doll was bigger and was called a walking doll because its legs were jointed at the hips and moved. But the doll walked creakily, not much better than a doll without joints would have moved.

  Janine and Sherree were thrilled with their dolls at first, but playing babies wasn't the same without a real live baby. They stopped playing as much until one day Janine suggested that Sherree be the baby and she would give her water in the tiny bottle.

  Janine, in her dark bedroom, drifting at the edge of sleep, turned so she was lying on her back. She put her hands over her stomach. She remembered how secretly excited she'd been when Sherree had told her she was going to have a baby, secretly because Sherree was so angry at first, knowing she would have to give up her act at the nightclub.

  “I'll take care of the baby at night so you can go back to work,” she heard herself saying again to Sherree, this time echoey, as if in a dream, but Sherree had decided not to go back to stripping, said she couldn't live both lives.

  Janine, her half-conscious dream continuing, held Sherree's baby girl in her arms. She loved this baby, as much as she would her own.

  And now she would have her own. When she found out she was pregnant, she told Sherree before she told Burgess. Sherree shrieked—in her living room they jumped up and down, holding hands like schoolgirls, in slow motion now so she could hang on longer to that feeling of such pleasure, such closeness. Sherree said she hoped it was a girl. But Janine hoped it would be a boy who looked just like Burgess, only she didn't tell Sherree that. Sherree would have argued, and she didn't want to argue just then.

  Sherree is jealous, Janine thought dreamily. She was sad; she missed Sherree. She didn't have anyone to laugh with anymore, no one to tell her secrets to, oh sure there was Burgess, but it wasn't the same as with Sherree. They had been like sisters; they had been like mother and daughter to each other too. They had said they were going to be better mothers than their mothers had been; they'd give their children candy every day and buy TV sets.

  She was putting Sherree in the past and she didn't know why, she was too sleepy. They had fought before, plenty of times. They could be friends again, couldn't they?

  Janine opened her eyes but they closed almost right away and she slept for a little while, lightly. When she woke briefly she was filled with that feeling she had when she used to pretend she was hiding her baby: that power she had to protect, the strength she had to give, and she was struck with the realization that it was the same power she had called up with Sherree, that this time had changed their friendship forever, and she didn't understand how the power to nurture was the same power to destroy.

  Janine slept until the sounds of Burgess coming in woke her. She was wide awake immediately but she didn't move, her body still weighted with sleep.

  “Janine musta gone to bed,” she heard Burgess say. Thinking he would come check on her, she forced herself to turn over, so he could see she wasn't asleep. The bed groaned softly.

  Feet shuffled in the hallway into the kitchen. The
refrigerator opened. Beer cans popped. Feet shuffled back to the living room. Janine felt a small rise of anger: he must be with Dexter, dumb, pain-in-the-ass Dexter, hanging all over Burgess all the time so she hardly got to be alone with him anymore.

  She got up slowly so the bed wouldn't creak. She took off her shoes and crept to the doorway to listen. She was so close to them that if she stepped out into the hallway the overhead light would cast her shadow into the living room where they sat.

  Nothing for several seconds, then Burgess said, “So what you got on your mind, Dexter?”

  “I was wonderin if you heard ‘bout Ferdie yet.”

  Ferdie was one of Burgess’ sixteen-year-old recruits, a gang leader from down on the other side of the project.

  “You mean the trouble last night?”

  Dexter nodded. “Ferdie's gone.”

  “Dead?”

  “Naw. The only body they found wasn't nobody from the Convent. They say he was from across town, Desire or St. Bernard.”

  It was the first shootout in the Convent in so many months that the residents had actually begun to believe maybe there wouldn't be any more. It had happened in the middle of the night, in a vacant, boarded-up apartment down where Ferdie lived.

  Dexter turned the bottom of the beer can around on his jeans. “Another crack deal gone bad—I guess they gon blame it on the Bishop.”

  They might have meant the cops but it might have meant anybody in the Convent, the way Dexter was giving Burgess that look out of the corner of his eye. Burgess’ safety depended on the people in the Convent keeping quiet about him, and he knew if they got too scared, the only way to make sure they didn't talk, didn't inform, was to use more fear.

  “So where's Ferdie?” Burgess wanted to know.

  Dexter just looked at Burgess. They both knew what this meant: Ferdie, like most of the boys his age, wasn't interested in painting or carpentry or masonry or plastering. Not enough money and too much work. Burgess remembered how he'd been at that age. Nobody could talk to you about tomorrow, there was no tomorrow, except for tomorrow's deal. You believed you'd die young; he still believed it. It was the big flaw in his plan.