“You’re welcome. And she said she dreamed you put little silverbells on all the more beautiful flowers, so no one will miss them.”
“What?” said Claire.
“Like in The Nightingale. In the garden of the Emperor’s palace. So everyone would see them.”
“Did they do that?”
“Yes. Swamiji read it to us.”
“Michaelaen,” she said, “what else?”
Michaelaen rocked from side to side. Claire interpreted this to mean this session is over, so she turned to go.
“Cause she’s scared if you get scared, then you’ll die, too.”
“Oh, poor thing,” she said.
“Yes,” Michaelaen said.
“You make sure she understands I’m not going to die for a long, long time. Not for as long as the lot of you need me, at least.”
“Okay. Good night.”
“Good night. Oh. One more thing. Did Dharma ever tell you where she got her stones? The pretty stones?”
“Oh, those,” he yawned again. “Her father gave them to her.”
“You’re sure?”
“That’s what she told me.”
“All right. Sleep now. Say your prayers.”
She stepped carefully around Swamiji and left the door open just a crack. The light in the hall was on. However big they acted, Claire knew light was a tangible strength for children. She stood in the hallway at the top of the stairs and looked out the high, stained-glass window at the Dover house across the street. Tree would turn in her grave if she could see that satellite dish atop her good Queen Anne Victorian. Claire pushed open the vent. She turned and heard someone scream. She shut off the light by pulling the plug behind her out of the wall socket, and crept back to the window. The scream again. Up and down the block she saw nothing, only parts of things torn loose from the wind and bumping into crumpled other things. She fine-tuned her ears and eyes. No one was up. Someone was screaming, really screaming. A woman, losing it. It was someone’s TV on the next block. “Oh, God,” she said out loud, remembering the eyes of Mrs. Dixon. She would have to look into them now for lots of long and lonely moments when no Johnny waited down the stairs to comfort her. She’d have to look, because that was the only way to forget it. If you tried not to see it, it would always be there, wouldn’t it?
Imagine Dharma worried that she would perish, too. A natural fear in someone who’d just lost her mother, she supposed. But as she stood there, hesitating at the top of the step, she remembered her own dream just the night before. There were people, officials on the pier at Brighton, explaining to her that she was losing her hearing, they were going to give her a course in communication. She had to go to the restroom and so she did, walking along the vast planks until she got there, and opened the door onto a poisonous, fast-spreading cloudy gas. Quickly thinking, she ran and raced away—gasping for air, coughing already.
Claire shook her head. Funny she should remember that now. Dharma’s dream must have jarred her own. And Carmela’s too. All these dreams at once. What was she, the dream lady? Oh, it made you tired. It made you just want to quit. She rubbed her neck and heard it crack. Suddenly, she had a yen to be wedged up tight against the hard, familiar calm of her husband’s own mysterious body. Down the ever-steepening hardwood stairs she went, strangely unconsoled by the gray and horrifying dragon’s end.
CHAPTER 9
Alone in the dawn among the withering lettuce, Narayan looked at the house. He could hear his bewildered incentive, Zinnie’s bewitching and vaporous song. Was it possible that no one else could hear her? Was he the only one up? The only one who lived at this moment? It was a nice old song Lenny Welch used to sing, “Since I Fell For You.” A sad song, but Zinnie sang it with such joy that it transcended its own meaning. “Hello,” he called. “Hello, Zinnie?” He cupped his mouth and called up to her window. A crow, black and enormous, sat between them up there on the sleek birch branches, listening too. Zinnie was drying her hair while she sang. She supposed she went on unobserved. Narayan hesitated. I would flee and I would stay, he thought, experiencing dread. In the end, he decided he’d better get going and buy the bread. Tonight would be the play and there was much to be done. Fetching the bread was his job. Every day he went. He’d walk down to the Jamaica Avenue bakery and buy a loaf from the back door just after it came from the oven. This was his offering to the family.
At first he’d thought that when he left for Berkeley, then they would miss him, not tasting that superb freshness every morning; they would be reminded that he was no longer there. Now, it had come to mean something else. Now it was he who would miss the hauling of the bread, the face of the baker, the kindly passage of the silvery change. The pale, even faces of this family who rose each day to muesli when they could have any sugared cereal from the shelves of any luxury supermarket. It was he who would miss them. Terribly.
The empty streets grew light and he walked, reconsidering. It wasn’t as though there were no Indian families here in Queens. Wasn’t it true that there were families moving in left and right of Lefferts Boulevard? All the grand old houses were going to Punjabis. He had never seen an Indian and American couple, though. Not with children. But surely there must be such a thing. He’d seen couples like that down in Calangute, in Goa. White and black, with some inevitably dwindling magnetism between them, people who’d run away from both societies, only that never seemed to be very successful together. Somehow, you always got the feeling they had no friends who weren’t there for the precise reason that the couple was interracial. They were sorry, gloomy misfits in their pretty, rented homes along the beach, with their canopy beds from the Portuguese settlers and dirt floors and rats in the kitchen.
This, however, was America. Who, as the albino Jews from Matancherie shrugged and said, knew?
The empty street began to fill with the darting forms of sleepy people, each attached to a dog by a chain. He smiled benignly at each one of them. They clutched their coats around themselves and hurried their dogs along. Narayan might see himself as a harmless, well-educated chap strolling down Venus’s own street, but they saw him as a big black man without a dog up here in their neighborhood, so what was he up to?
Narayan, without incident, obtained his bread and headed back to Claire’s house. He deliberated about his future. He told himself he was arguing the pros and cons of a relationship, but the truth was, Narayan was already hooked. The real question was where, then, would they live? This was charming enough, he mused as he looked around, but there was something shabby about it. He much preferred up east of the woods, the Kew Gardens part where Stefan and Carmela lived. It was more to his class. They could never live in India. Never. Zinnie would never put up with his sisters’ arrogant superiority. Let alone his mother, a woman not unlike the matriarchal Mrs. Panchyli. He broke into a sweat at the thought.
Just then, Narayan spotted billowing smoke from a basement window. Without hesitation, he raced to the corner and pulled down the fire alarm. He raced back to the house, a big gray one, and pounded on the door. It was treacherously silent.
“Hallo!” he shouted. “Fire! Make haste! Come out of the house! Fire!”
Somewhere a shutter flew open and he heard the sound of running feet up someone’s stairway. He banged on the door again. He looked frantically about. A boy, Michaelaen’s age, watched him, wide-eyed, from the corner. “Fire!” Narayan alerted him. The door before him opened. A portly woman, fiftyish, neatly set for the day in a dotted print house dress protected by an apron, stepped back with alarm. She held one arm across the door, barring him.
“Fire!” he gasped and pointed to the side of her house.
“What?” she squinted, no fool she. He probably wanted to get in so he could rob her. Well, she wasn’t born yesterday. She shut the door. “Malcolm!” she cried. Down the steps came Malcolm, shaving cream over half of his face, suspenders down around his pants. He grabbed hold of a golf club and threw open the door. “Fire!” Narayan blinked at both o
f them, stepping back and pointing to the side of their house. Something in his rebuking demeanor let them know he wasn’t there to do them harm, and they followed him out to the porch where they stood, the three of them, watching the innocent puffy blue air from the dryer escape in a billow of sachet from the vent.
“I’ve rung the alarm,” he assured them. “Is anyone left in the house? Any children or animals?” He was fully prepared for grand valiance.
“What are you, some kinda nut?” Malcolm kept a good grip on his club. “That’s just the dryer! The regular dryer!”
His wife stood, beginning to shiver with cold, right behind him.
Not only that, but the fire brigade would arrive at any moment. Narayan, sensing dilemma, ran charivari away up the block, leaving his bread and his lofty intentions behind.
Nervous excitement rattled the bristling cold branches around Mary’s house. This was the day her one daughter’s play was to open with the other daughter to sing the brilliant lead. A chill went right through her. There wasn’t a leaf left on any a tree. A sickle moon ventured out, loud as the day, and the sun stood one-eighty degrees there against it. Must mean something, Mary thought, she, a great one for symbolics but always too busy to bother. It wasn’t good to see the new moon through the glass, though, she knew well enough. It didn’t bode well. What rubbish, she scoffed at herself, but she lowered the heat on the iron. She was spray-starching and ironing her best green silk dress; she wouldn’t chance scorching it. Freddy was having them all back to his place right after the show. A little spray starch never hurt, she consoled herself, keeping it hidden just the same from the likes of ecologically conscientious Claire. Ridiculous notions! All these experts! They should have lived as she had, down south of Cork on the ledge of the land out of fair Skibbereen, yank your laundry through a wringer and blue-rinse it again and again. These young girls didn’t know what progress was. She held the can at an adequate angle and let go a frothy white mist. Like a shower of ease, this stuff was. Like a bloody fine advert they’d show on the telly. Oop. She heard someone coming. Mary put the can out of sight behind the cannisters and peered through the curtains. “Bugger,” she said.
It was Iris von Lillienfeld. She considered pretending not to be home, but that wouldn’t do any good; Iris’d only come back and she’d do it when the rest of them were about or Stan would be wanting his tea. She might as well face her. Mary patted her hair and flung open the door. “Sure, look who’s come to grace this house,” she beamed and held out her strong arms with a delighted, bright counterfeit welcome.
Over at Claire’s, mayhem reigned. For some reason, Carmela felt her home was off-limits to the cast and she’d directed them to Claire’s. When Claire got a good look at the dwarfs (in this case “dorks”), she understood why. They were a salty lot.
Johnny put every quart of classic Coke under the onions in the pantry. “The hell with them,” he said, “let them buy their own damn Coke.” Swamiji agreed. He’d got the sodas each for ninety-eight cents at the big coupon sale, and he and Mary had transported them home against a stiff, frosty wind. Swamiji, lips busily pursed, now trundled ginger ales, one by one, down to the cellar. These were Anthony’s, he sniffed. “Children thrive on effervescence.”
“Oh.” Claire, astonished, folded her arms across her chest. “And what am I supposed to serve them, water?”
“Yes. Or just plain tea is good enough. And, by the way, it’s not your job to serve them anything. That is what they have ‘take-out’ for. This is the twentieth century, New York, U.S.A.”
“Wait a minute.” She recognized Zinnie’s favorite argument. “Aren’t you the fellow who renounced the world?”
“That means,” Swamiji spoke with his head down at the bottom of the refrigerator, “that I own nothing and everything.” He emerged, agitated, with Michaelaen’s most-favorite chocolate puddings in miniature Rubbermaids. He and Mary had made them the night before with the extra half-gallon of milk. No way these ne’er-do-wells, these vultures, were going to make off with the children’s own yummies, as far as he was concerned. And where were Dharma’s lemon yogurts? He dove back in.
“I suppose you’re right,” Claire agreed distractedly and went into the dining room in search of Carmela. Freddy, on his knees, looked up with a mouthful of pins. He was hemming Portia’s costume. Portia stood on Claire’s newly upholstered hassock.
“Portia, would you mind taking off your shoes, please?” she asked her, more nicely than she felt.
“If she takes off her shoes,” Freddy protested without opening his teeth, “she won’t hem right.”
“Well, then put her on some telephone books.”
“All right, all right, you don’t have to be so testy,” he said, and he winked at Portia.
Claire was about to say she would let that one pass when she noticed Andrew sprawled comfortably across her love seat. Just his being here, languidly ogling Portia’s creamy big jugs—half in and half out of quivering blue crepe de chine—burned her up. He was supposed to be visiting with Dharma. That was the reason he’d come.
The telephone rang on the table beside her and she picked it up angrily. Through the living room flew the dorks. They were rehearsing the bit where they stood on the top of the couch and tipped it over slowly, nicely balanced, the way Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn would do.
“What!” sputtered Claire.
Carmela raced up and patted her hand. “Now, Claire,” she pacified her. “Don’t be cross. It works so much better on your couch than on the one we’ve got over on the stage. Daddy said he’d be very, very careful when they move it. You know how fastidious he is.”
“I never said—”
“Oh, I know you didn’t, darling, but just look how well it works. Just watch! All their hard work is finally paying off. They’re not real dancers, you know. They could use any break they can get.”
“What about using your couch, then, if it’s so important!”
“My couch?! Stefan’s Louis quinzième? You must be joking. He’d never let it out of the house.”
“Well, I’m not sure Johnny would want our”—They looked together at the clumsy, club-footed atrocity before them—“Our whatever-it-is, out of the house, either.”
“Oh, yes, he would. He said we could. He did. He said if it never came back it would be all too soon.”
Claire bit her lip. “Carmela, if anything happens to that couch, I’m holding you personally responsible. I don’t care what Johnny said, got it?”
Carmela arched one pencilled brow. “You’re starting to sound more and more like him every day, do you know it?”
“Carmela—”
“Is that for me?” Carmela looked at the receiver in Claire’s trembling hand.
“Hello?” said Claire.
“Claire? It’s Mommy. Got the whole shebang at your place, I hear. You all right?”
“Tch. Yeah. I guess so.”
“Claire, don’t worry, dear. Nothing lasts forever. Tomorrow this will all be over, won’t it?”
“I guess so.” She watched Carmela sashay off to go bully a dork.
“And Daddy’s there, isn’t he?”
“He’s here, all right, Mom. He’s carting off my couch for props.”
“Oh, well. He’ll bring it back. Mind he watches the legs. That was your Great-Aunt Greta from Pomerania’s good stuff.”
“There are moments I wonder why I just didn’t stay in South Ozone Park,” Claire heard herself whine.
Mary laughed. “You wanted a houseful of people.”
“I did.”
“Next time, careful what you wish for. You’ll get it.”
“I know.”
“And dear, it means so much to Carmela.” She said this with the same worried, tragic tone in which she’d taken to referring to Carmela all the time lately. Poor Carmela. On the verge of her very own play being produced and she didn’t even get her house messed up.
“Oh. Claire. The reason I called. Remember what y
ou told me that time, about Mrs. Dixon coming into the house back then and yanking the hall wire of the radio so it would fall into your tub and electrocute you?”
“Of course I remember.” Claire was losing patience. Someone had ordered pizza and the delivery boy was here and now everyone was waiting for everyone else to go pay. Well, she wasn’t going to.
“That was the day I got my hair cut, remember? You told me that was the same day. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I didn’t quite know what to make of it and I couldn’t for the life of me remember back that far. You know how I forget. And it was so long ago. Anyway, Iris von Lillienfeld was here a little while ago and we had a nice cup of rosy together and we got to talking, Claire and … Claire? It couldn’t have been Mrs. Dixon tried to do that to you, because Mrs. Dixon was with me. All day. See, that was the day she drove me to the cemetery to go visit Michael’s grave. We never did mention that to you because, well, no one wanted to upset you, like. Are you listening, Claire?”
“Yes,” Claire whispered.
“Because, first we went to the cemetery and then she took me to her salon where she always went, on Myrtle Avenue, there, in Glendale, oh, what’s it called? Laraine’s. Or Elaine’s or something. But the point is, she and I were together all the live-long day. See, after I had my braids cut off, I was feeling a mite low and she took me to Jahn’s for a double-fudge marshmallow ice cream sundae. Isn’t it odd? I remember every detail just as though it were yesterday. And all because Iris remembered that Mrs. Dixon and I went to the cemetery. Iris had given me such a nice potted plant for the grave. A pale peach rose.” She waited, shyly. “It’s still there. It took. Anyway, that was the same day I had my hair cut. She says she remembered thinking it was symbolic, that I’d made the decision to move on, like. To come back to the living. And I was annoyed—I hate that psychoanalysis stuff—because I’d come back to the living way long before that, see, and I told her so, good. So Iris and I were talking over old times, the good things about Mrs. Dixon, you know, the way you will be wanting to speak well of the dead and all, she was a good neighbor after all, and I was telling Iris how kind she’d been to me that day, she’d even paid for those sundaes, you know, and all of a sudden I remembered how you said how she’d tried to do that to you on the day I’d got my hair cut and so help me, Claire, it all came back to me in a rush. And I remembered the whole episode, like. So you see, Claire, it couldn’t have been Mrs. Dixon who tried to do that to you. Because, see, she was with me.”
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