Darling Days

by iO Tillett Wright

  Hunger splits my stomach like a crack in the earth. This feeling is so familiar it actually helps with the fear by making me feel more at home. I squeeze my fist tight around the coin. Light cuts through the fog from tall cathedral windows, and on the opposite side of the room I can see a counter where a big woman in an apron is trading mugs of beer and things wrapped in napkins for fists of cash. I make a game plan; if I stick to the left wall closely, the way you do when it rains in the city and you don’t have an umbrella, I can just retrace my steps back to the door. I check for other doors, but this is the only one like it, so I gather my gumption and make my way to her.

  The woman leans over the counter and looks at me. I’m about two feet shorter than the countertop, but I can see a pile of sandwiches in a glass case if I take a step backward. Her broad face melts into a smile, and she says something in Hungarian. “Nem beszélek magyarul,” I say. She replies in a shrill, impatient burst. That’s the problem with being able to say you don’t speak a language in that language. It’s a conversation starter. I just stare back at her. She points at the glass case. I nod, and she pulls two sandwiches out. One is long and skinny, the other stout and round. I go for the small one. I can probably afford it.

  One of the potbellies is standing at the counter, watching this transaction. He grins, and reaches his hand down to me with an open palm. What, does he want me to climb up his arm to her? “Mahnee.” He points to his palm, and at my coin. Hesitantly, I hand it to him, and he gives it to her. He passes me my sandwich and I turn around to leave, but somebody whistles at me like a dog. I turn back, and the potbelly hands me a smaller coin. I didn’t anticipate change. Like a toddler, three years is not far enough from Communism for Hungarian culture to adjust itself to the speed walk of capitalist inflation.

  From my diminished vantage point I can see a basket with candy wrappers protruding from it. I look at the woman and put on the sweetest smile I have, front tooth missing and all. Eyebrows raised, I point at the coin and then at a Kit Kat bar. The man cackles and the woman says something to him I don’t understand. I can see the top of the inside of her mouth when they both laugh and it reminds me of a pit bull. I feel the heat of other people looking at me. The man whistles at me again and motions me closer. I give him the coin, and he hands me the Kit Kat. I’m smiling for real now, and scuttling away along the wall.

  Sitting on a closed toilet in the men’s room, I break the candy bar open. My shoulders are pinched with tension. If my ma comes in, or if someone tells her I bought candy, there will be a huge scene and a fight. There have been so many fights over sugar, I can’t keep track. It is a strictly forbidden substance in our house, along with meat, and generally anything else she feels pollutes the body. I have devised every possible strategy for sneaking it, including a stuffing-down-the-pants-and-socks technique that I have come to call Holocausting. Somehow she always knows. There was one particular instance when my poppa picked me up for a play date and let me indulge in a sticky packaged cupcake from the corner deli—the kind that is so processed you could use it as a baseball, covered in rubbery goo passed off as chocolate frosting, and filled with a bright white cream the texture of whipped Styrofoam. We cleaned up the crime scene really well, drinking water and checking every tooth for evidence before we went back upstairs. Ma was standing over a pot of soup in the kitchen, in direct line of its powerful vegetable smell, but, without even turning around, before we took three steps into the apartment, she said, “Hostess cupcakes.” After that I was convinced she was a witch.

  I break off one of the four pieces and shove the whole thing in my mouth. The chocolate is warm already, melty, the way I like it best. It coats my teeth with sweet cream. I’m in ecstasy. I break a second bar in half and chew it down in tiny, fast nibbles. If I take too long she’ll know what’s up. I break the third one into threes, put one piece in each cheek, the third on my tongue, and wait for the chocolate to all melt. The last piece I wrap up again and stuff into my pocket for later.

  I take on the sandwich. I figure it’s best to eat in that order so the bread will pull the chocolate out of the crevices of my mouth. As I pull apart the pieces of bread, I see it’s a salami sandwich, which I love. There is a huge smear of butter on the roll, and a single cornichon. The bread is soft and chewy, almost like a soft pretzel, and the combination of abundant butter and salty meat make my synapses explode. I eat it so fast I’m not breathing. This is a deluxe feast.

  On tiptoes, I stand at the sink scrubbing my fingers. I dig under each nail to make sure there’s no trace of chocolate. I don’t stop until the skin is raw and red. I feel no guilt, only that I’ve done something forbidden and that getting away with it is imperative so I can do it again. I get the sense that I’m not old enough to know how to outsmart my mother yet, so I have to settle for diligence in my cleanup.

  I bound up the marble stairs and tear into the theater with a little more zeal than I should, and walk straight into the eye of a screaming match. The veins in Yanik’s neck are protruding and his bald head is engulfed in a flame of purple skin. He is stomping around the area in front of the stage, yelling in a mixture of English and Hungarian, about how his time is being wasted with petty bullshit. If we could just get on with the making of the show, we could be creating something beautiful, but instead we are all forced to haggle over minuscule garbage that is unimportant and boring. For God’s sake, move on from this, and move into what is truly important. Creation, questions, answers, no answers, freedom. He is indirectly directing this at my mother, who is standing at the edge of the stage. She appears braced for further battle, enraged and ready to strike, but perhaps a little embarrassed by the scene. Our time in Hungary has changed her. It’s as if her wardrobe has taken on the emotion of the postcommunist Eastern Bloc. She wears men’s slacks and button-up shirts, all in muted browns, and a pair of Italian leather shoes. Her eyes are a blazing bright blue, glowing with anger now, the only color on her.

  She looks at me as I enter and I’m instantly worried she knows what I’ve done. I’ll be punished. But she returns to Yanik and his rant. She fires back at him with something that pushes him beyond the scope of constructive discussion, and someone intervenes. It’s Dante from Sullivan Street, a handsome Italian American with a hook nose, deep brown skin, and a crown of bright white hair coifed like a leading man’s. His gold cross bounces on his bronze chest as he steps between my mother and Yanik and says, “That’s enough. Let’s call it a day. Come on, Rhonna, let’s go for a swim.”

  It should be mentioned here that I have almost never seen my ma sit down. In my nine years on this planet, I have never once seen her use a chair as anything other than an instrument to stretch her body over. Except in the act of lying down to sleep, she is a vertical creature. She stands on the subway, on buses, and in bars. We don’t often eat at restaurants, and if we do, she is likely to take her food outside and eat it on her feet. She likes to be in natural daylight and fresh air, and standing, at all times. Health, exercise, and physical excellence are her religion.

  She takes a classical ballet class every single day. She dabbled in modern and jazz, and not so long ago she was an extra in Fame and Hair, show-tuning her way around New York, but now it’s strictly ballet. Before we came to Europe, I filled in a coloring book on the floor backstage at Radio City while she auditioned for the Rockettes, for the third time. She moves, my ma, and if she can’t, she explodes. The first thing she does when we get to a new city is look up the local ballet studios. If she finds nothing to her standards, she turns to swimming. One day I hope she will swim the English Channel and put her stamina to use, and maybe buy me some new shoes.

  In Budapest, the public pool is a vital well of sanity for her, and we go almost every day. Dante knows that the only thing that will bring her out of the heat of her argument is the temptation of release, and he’s right. She says to me, “Let’s go, Kitty,” and stomps out the door.

  The pool compound is crawling with women and children. The
re is the occasional man, but this is a predominantly female landscape. A jungle of wrinkled asses spilling out of one-piece bathing suits, and cellulite-stricken arm jiggle. The men wear tiny shorts and have the same sinewy muscles as my mother. The kids look undernourished and energetic, like me. Everyone is Hungarian. This is a city untouched by tourism. The expansive complex of pools is state run and almost strictly for locals. My mother makes a show out of her entrance, strutting out of the building like it’s a catwalk, head high, hips swinging, chest forward.

  If you were to strut the entire length of the place, first you would see an Olympic-sized pool, with lanes divided by floating buoys, designated for lap swimming. Several middle-aged ladies in shower caps, and one chiseled young man, are working their way back and forth. Just beyond that is a toddler pool for parents and infants, where a few mothers stand in the shin-deep water, dipping their tiny children in and out. Then the teenage hang, a pool of varying depths, teeming with yelling youths, squawking and tossing each other in from the sides. Finally, farthest away from the ruckus, is the lazy hangout pool. It isn’t as deep as the teenage basin, and mostly the shy, awkward kids are milling about here, playing with plastic dinosaurs, practicing their water dancing and kung fu moves, talking to themselves, narrating undrawn cartoons. This is my domain—the realm of the weirdo. Here I can be alone, not be picked on, not have to admit that I don’t speak the language, and not have to fit in. Here I can spend time with my thoughts, make up characters, really loosen up.

  I fill an hour with conversations with myself, punctuated by canonballs and belly flops and discussions with imaginary friends in foreign accents. The sun is beginning to go down, and I figure my ma is probably close to being done with her lap swimming, so I get out of the pool. Shivering a little in my shorts and bare chest, I make my way over to her. I can see her long, muscular form, cutting through the water with powerful strokes. I wonder to myself how swim caps work, and how amazing it is that hers can hold all that hair underneath it. As she makes her turn by my feet she glances up and smiles at me. She is calmer now, like a creature in its habitat. Another lap, another turn, and I reach down and tap her hand. She stops. “Hey, Ma, what do you wanna do?” She takes quick, deep breaths. “Go back and play. Dante is still here somewhere. He’ll take you home when you’re done. Okay?”

  I walk along the concrete edges of the basins, balancing my weight like a tightrope artist, until I’m back at my station. There is a little girl there, even younger than me, splish-splashing around with her father. I watch them as he grabs her under the armpits and lifts her high up out of the water, then dunks her back in. She squeals and kicks her feet with joy. It dawns on me that I don’t really know how to swim. My doggy paddle is solid, but everything else I only know how to fake. I think about my poppa and where he is right now.

  At the start of the tour he joined us for ten days in northern France, working on the play with Yanik. The cast stayed in a quaint hotel with a rickety staircase that I would climb with breakfast for my ma to eat in bed. I made it into a fairy tale about staying at the Ritz. She would wrap food in napkins and hide it for later. She is the great master of Holocausting, and we can live for a week on what she stashes away from leftovers. Ma got furious when she found out Poppa was sleeping with Yanik’s pretty assistant, even though it had been years since they’d had any obligation to each other. She thought it was tacky with the mother of his child around. When we left to perform in Antwerp and Amsterdam, Poppa took me to Paris. On a houseboat on the Seine, he took a piss off the side. When I demanded to do the same, he handed me a watering can and I shrieked with delight. I don’t know when I’ll see him again, but I make a mental note to ask him to teach me to swim when I do.

  I move around the edge of the pool, tightrope balancing, until I’m three feet from the little girl and her father. He is speaking to her encouragingly in Hungarian, making cute noises and blubbering sounds, as she giggles and thrashes her way through the water, upheld by his big hands. The sun sinks a little farther as I sit and watch them. My feet are dangling and my toes start to feel a little pruney. I look around for Dante, but I don’t see him. Maybe he’s in the teenage pool.

  The father is taking the little girl out of the water on his shoulders, speaking to her, probably telling her it’s time for dinner. I look around again. No Dante. I stand up and scour as far as I can see, in all the pools. No Dante. With a small twinge of fear, I look back toward the lap swimmers for my ma, but I can’t see that far. I feel like it would be better to stay here in case Dante comes by than to run and look for her when she’s probably already gone. I could miss both of them, and then I’d be screwed.

  Within a half hour, the weirdo pool is empty and streetlamps have started to come on. The city buzzes and clanks outside the chain-link fence, but a silence rolls across the still waters of the pool complex. I am not afraid of a lot of things, but the silence of solitude knots my insides. I’m trying to distract myself by doing one-armed handstands on the bottom of the pool, pointing my legs straight up and out of the water. If I can hold it long enough, maybe I’d be able to do one outside the water, with both hands. I have to hold my nose when I go under, but the last time I do it I stay under too long and panic a little, so I let go. Water floods my nose and throat and I come up coughing and gasping. I’m over it. Where’s Dante? I look around. Almost everyone is gone, and it’s nearly dark.

  Pulling myself out of the pool by my forearms, I look around. Dante wears bright orange swim trunks, so he should be easy to spot. Maybe he’s reading a book in one of the chairs, drying off. I scan the chairs with my eyes. No tanned skin, no orange shorts, no gold cross. No Dante. A cold feeling begins down where pee happens, like my insides are pulling together, as I start walking toward the lap pool. My eyesight isn’t the greatest; maybe if I get closer I’ll see him. The feeling turns to adrenaline as I see that the lap pool is empty. I know, intuitively, that Dante is gone, and so is my ma. I stand there, my heart fluttering so fast it’s making me feel queasy, searching the landscape in desperation. No Dante.

  Barefoot and dripping water, I turn on my heel and head for the main building, hoping to catch my mom. Shirtless, in my trunks, I approach an old man mopping the floor. “Excuse me?” He ignores me. “Excuse me, sir? Do you speak English?” He shakes his meaty head. The feeling in my belly turns hard, like a stone. I look around him. The locker rooms are to my left, but the building is pretty much abandoned. I step toward them, praying that someone will come out so I don’t have to go in. I really, really don’t want to go into the women’s changing room. My breathing is heavier. The old man says something in Hungarian and I turn around. He is talking to a big woman in a pink shower cap, who has come in from outside. She looks me up and down, and in broken English says, “Help you? You need it help?” I nod at her and ask if she speaks my language. “Little bit.” “My mother . . . she’s not here . . .” “Come.” She motions and pulls me behind her. At the door to the locker room, I slow, hesitant to go in. I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable, because I look like a little boy, but the woman pulls me by the wrist. It’s hard to describe the mixture of shame and defeat that rises up like vomit when I realize how little it takes for me to buckle. Just entering this room makes me feel like everyone in there will know that I’m a girl, which puts a sharp pain into my solar plexus. I hate this so much, but how else will I get home?

  A few older ladies are scattered around the steamy room, performing their solitary rituals of preparation for the outside world. I try and keep my head down. My lady says something to the room in Hungarian. A few women shake their heads, and one says something back. They discuss for a few sentences, and the new woman approaches. She is tall, round in the middle, and has clipped, silver hair. Her upper arms are thick and loose like bags of milk. She speaks to me in English, asking me what’s going on. I explain. I’m American. My name is iO. I’m seven. I’m here with my mother, but her friend was supposed to take me home and he never appeared. I’m a
cting in a theater piece in town. She asks me if I know the name of the theater. Miraculously, I do. She says something in Hungarian to the other woman, who is at a locker, dressing. She shrugs. The woman with the silver hair tells me to sit on the bench and wait.

  I keep my head down, embarrassed, desperate for the woman to finish. I glance up once and get an eyeful of massive, saggy breasts, and that’s enough for me. She asks me if I have any clothes. I tell her my mother has them. She clucks. One quick sound, but I sense what she means by it. I feel defensive of my ma. She’s trying.

  The cold belly thing eases up a bit now that I’m speaking English with someone, and I imagine myself in a storybook. I’m even a little excited to be on a mysterious, dramatic adventure. Lost! In a foreign land! But only because I’m sure this lady will get me home. Or maybe she won’t, and I’ll be stranded here, in Hungary, and I’ll have to live off scraps I find in the trash.

  The woman with the silver hair finishes dressing and tells me to come with her. She hands me a T-shirt, which I put on over my wet shorts, and we leave. She leads me around the back of the building, past the pools, to a single-story stone house. Immediately, my skin starts to tingle. She has brought me to a police station. Of all things that I could do to anger my ma, the worst possible sin is to end up in the care of the cops. She hates the pigs, and she is vocal about this fact. I don’t know what’s worse: being a stranded runaway in Eastern Europe, surviving off scraps of trash, or being brought home by the police.

  I sit on a bench in the entranceway, fiddling nervously with the gigantic T-shirt I’m in, while the woman tells the police my deal. She says a clipped, polite “Good-bye” as she sails out the door. Being soft is not the Hungarian way. Now she’s gone, too, and I’m plunged back into the darkness that exists between languages.