Outside the attic window, there are no streets, only scrub and scratchy plants, wind or quiet, dust—dust enough for me to write Please Wash Me on the window.
My sister holds a broom and sweeps.
AN UNSEEN HAND
PASSED OVER THEIR
BODIES
My son is coughing in his sleep next to me in my bed, where he has come to spend what is left of this night. My son’s cough is red, noisy, and loose, a clattering wagon on its jagged way down, with me all ears to the racheting sound of my child-self in the bed next to Dad, who is tossing and threatening. “Stop coughing,” Dad says. “You’ll wake the dead.” Bat flap and smoke in the dark of his voice make me hold back this need, hold back from Dad, whose fleshy skull clenches every raw cough I cough. I want to be still. I fix on the chafed, pitted folds at his neck with a promise to sleep, as if my quiet could ease and uncoil this turned-away man, but I can’t and it’s out, rude air through the pipes, a dry sound full of rust. Dad says, “I’m too old for this.” He says, “Oblige me,” and I watch the words turn in this room he calls his own. Dad’s porch, sleeping headquarters, off-limits. How did I get here, close enough to smell him? That’s what I want to know: How did I?
Rolled, damp toweling—the kind Dad sometimes swipes at me—he smells like that. He smells like shaving water, where he floats his brush and lets me blow apart the suds before he snaps a towel, says, “Out. That’s enough; go get dressed.” I only pretend to leave. He never shuts the door all the way, and I want to see, and I can, if I am careful, if I am clever. From where I am hiding, just outside the bathroom door, I can see him. I can see him oiling his back under the sunlamp. It makes me feel lazy just watching him: the way my father massages himself and rolls his shoulders in this heat. So much heat, so much white in wild refraction off the swivel mirror; I see he has to squint to see the parts of himself in the magnified side, where the black eye, lashless and fast, his eye, finds me.
I am almost sure of this—that my father only pretends I am not there.
Like he pretends in his bed this dopey snooze; says, “I give up”; says, “Let me just shut my eyes.”
Am I not the woman he cannot keep out?
I want to wake him still.
I want to shrill in his ear: “Look, you!”
But the thought of him makes me close my eyes, try to sleep, a girl.
I hold to the edge of my bed and watch him sleep. I don’t move. I let my son take up all the room he wants, knowing he will slip away before I am even awake, and even after I have been so quiet, so good.
THE ENCHANTMENT
Someone else was in the room, I think—the second wife. High-parted hair, lips absently applied—the second wife had been the one to go on talking to my grandfather. Not the first—the first left, licking salt from the wide rim of her glass; the third, we knew, was spending Daddy’s money. My grandfather said to me, “We wanted you to hear this,” and I think I remember it happening this way; there was another in the room, not just my father and my grandfather but my father’s second wife.
We were told—my grandfather told us, speaking to me, “Your father is tired; he needs a rest.”
I saw my father’s head fall forward—monk’s bald spot, mad curls. Broad, broad-hearted, rufous chest, a squalling red—my father was alive and in the world and feeling everything extremely.
Did she move to touch him, the blur behind, whoever else was in the room—because I didn’t. In the face of that face then lifted to me, I smiled to hear him name a place, which when I heard it, I might even have been there, or else my memory is so profligate and willfully confused, but I think I always knew this place where my father was going. In a long car that gentled over the grated threshold, my grandfather took him, and sometimes, me, past swells of lawn and more lawn, wind and slashes of high blue sky in the heads of furious trees. Odd men they were I saw standing in the spiny leaves, pinching winterberries; bent-over figures in discourse with the air. How could my father sleep here? I wanted to know, but the second wife was in the car, too, saying it was hard to be surprised this way, come upon by family.
“Visitors is what we are. We won’t stay long,” my grandfather said, and we had made it through the lunch when we saw the other slinkers in the damp strawed beds, heard them call, “Professor!” bow and smirk; and I thought he seemed pleased, my father, until he turned to ask, “Why this?”
“Why what?” my grandfather asked. “Tell me what. What are you asking? What is it you want? Do you know what you want? Do you know what you are doing?”
My grandfather said, “You have no idea,” but my father kept behind, speaking rapidly, voice soft, my father asking why when the windows whirred up, and he was left turning in the turnaround to see us go. A man in a short robe, left unsashed, how did it feel to him, I wondered, the worried, furrowed inside seam of his short robe’s pocket?
In the coats he left behind, I had gritted my nails on the inside seams of Father’s pockets, gritted and sucked them clean.
I did not see him then for a time that passed in the way of winter, colorless and stubbled and flat. The days clicked past same as hangered linens from my grandfather’s laundress, underwear cupped in puffs next to slips—my own, only my own, nothing of my father’s the way it had been when we shared in the last house a dresser, a closet, a bathroom down the hall.
My father’s knocking, I thought I heard it, and I remembered.
“What,” Grandfather said, “you must remember what.”
“See here,” my grandfather said to the company—not her, but men like my grandfather with vacation faces, smooth and oiled and brown. Same suits, thin cuffs, glint of heavy watches when they signed. Here and here and here—so many papers.
“What am I a party to?” she asked when she arrived, knife-pleated skirt and filmy blouse, spectacles for reading, a pair for seeing out.
“This,” my grandfather said, as surely as he cleared his throat or pulled at his eccentric too-big clothing; and the second wife came to where we stood hooding our eyes from the dazzle at the window. Water from such a height was a dizzying coin—that, and the hard shore, the palings of trees, and closer to the house, at our feet from the window, the raw paving of my grandfather’s terrace, a stony estate designed to withstand winters that cracked the very roads—to whom now would all of this be given?
I didn’t quite ask, really. I hoped to be polite. “How much do you have, Grandfather? For how long has this been yours?”
My grandfather said for as long as he remembered. He was born in the bedroom where he once slept with a wife. He said, “I have always been comfortable.”
I wanted to be comfortable.
In the sunroom with the easy men in pearly colors, I spoke freely of my father and of what I had seen with and without wives, waking to my father in his sleepless disarray, a man in tears, kissing my foot and saying I had saved him—my father always threatening death—rolled playbill in his pocket, at my face his sugared breath: We should, we should.
“Yes,” she said. “I have seen him with her in this way and been afraid.” His temper, for one, as when the milk had boiled over—scalded; and of course, he wouldn’t drink it, but argued through the rising light before he took his sleep. “Insomniacs,” she said, “are true accountants; they are smug about the time they keep. But he sold the family silver,” she said.
“He is not rich,” my grandfather said.
I did not tell them what my father had bought me, but I wore the earrings and the small, slight clothes he had said I would grow into—and I had. Even as my grandfather spoke, I was lifting off elastic from where it pinched me.
Breasts, my own.
Breasts, hands, long, thin feet and water-thinned soles—mine—walking the cold stones of my grandfather’s terrace, the cold knocking me just behind the knees every time; but not so with her, the second wife in broken shoes, a generous sweater; she was warm.
She asked, “Did you ever think I heard you? Did you wonder if I
knew?”
I had wondered if there was other breathing in the room, a greater dark near the doorway rimmed in downstairs light, and which wife standing, the second, third, or first—in this way alike, watching or sometimes driving for him when Daddy said he could not concentrate to drive—made sick by just the entrance at Grandfather’s gate.
“Was it for money that we came here?” I asked—all those Sunday dinners with the slavering roast sliced bloody on the tines of the carving tools. Grandfather’s rare meat and garden vegetables, not the lunch we had on visits to my father’s last new place, but Sunday dinner and the long white afternoon in a room where we sat reading until supper.
Quiet, the gaping stairways still and cold, cold air hissing through the sills—the rooms I looked into were dark and cold except for where my grandfather was reading Sunday’s papers after the visit to my father; or it might have been after the visit from the pearly men—or any Sunday, really. It might have been that we were alone, long years alone, my grandfather and I, the wives fled and the cook’s night off, so what were we to do but what we did? We took the afternoon’s roast, and it seems to me this happened: My grandfather gave me a knife and fork and said, “Take what you want,” and we cut into the bleedy meat and picked at it standing, not bothering with plates, with no one there to scold for what we did, pouring salt into a spoon of juice and drinking from a meat so raw it still said Ouch! at a prick from the tines of my grandfather’s enormous bone-handled fork.
My nails were grimed with cinder, my lips a smear of grease.
Complicitous season, winter, the day blacked as sudden as did the hallway from my room to his, and we often did not make a visit to my father. We often stayed at home, saying we would only have to turn around again, and so we did not visit—or phone, as my father complained to me, brushing his lips against the mouthpiece of the phone, voice over ocean on the holidays’ connections, sometimes cut off.
The way my father talked! Tremulous show-off, he was, all fustian to-do when in the last new place we saw him with his friends, the same we always caught peeking in on us together. “Still here!” my father said, as if another place were possible. “Come in, please, come in.” We were introduced again, but I remember no one’s name. Even the faces are gone. We had come to see my father. Grandfather and I—and sometimes the second wife—we hadn’t driven this far just to shake some soft hands.
“So why bother?” we agreed, and I often didn’t see my father. Easy to make excuses in the gaudy life—fourteen, fifteen, sixteen—riding on my way somewhere and smoking a cigar, stinking up the driver’s daddy’s car.
“I live here,” I said by way of a good night at my grandfather’s door, yet forgetful of the driveway lights, which shone through falling snow, pooling white on white when next I saw them.
Morning, my grandfather at the table talked of lights left on. He said, “You are not with your father. There are rules in this house, remember,” rules I was told my father never followed—which was why, then. The inexorable logic, how hard I worked to live by it as Grandfather’s darling. No thank you, no I couldn’t, no, please, to what he took from Daddy to give to me.
Petting my watch on any Sunday’s visit, my father said to me, “So the old man won’t die with it still on his wrist.” Lucid on the subject of anyone’s belongings, noticing the second wife’s new rings, my father seemed alert to the getting. The shadow boxes and the canes, the grandfather clock, the shoehorns, the brushes, the studs, the links, the pins—such enameled old blue—my father knew the history to and wanted them. He said so. My father said to my grandfather, “When were you last dancing?”
My grandfather’s smile had teeth for this part. Such things as he had were his to give, which he did when he was not afraid of dying—or so my father said. My father said to my grandfather, “Maybe not dancing, but traveling—are you thinking of traveling again?” To the places I had seen in photographs—Grandfather backdropped by the walleyed rams at Karnak—would he travel there again, as once he had, a young man in a high collar, unused to such heats, yet smiling?
Upright before whatever scene the camera found him, my grandfather had traveled, had been to, had seen the famous cities before the modern wars rubbled them. He had plundered the shops famous for their porcelains and brought home plate and platter and sconce: the teardrop chandelier above the table where we ate, and the canes, of course, from London. I heard him speak. Those are Portuguese, those Italian, but the bronze Diana—oh, God, who knows from where? “I bought it,” he said, “but your grandmother was offended by the figure’s upturned breasts. Your grandmother,” he said, “you can imagine how she suffered your father’s first attack, the second—all those wives.”
Grandfather’s disappointment, I could hear it in his voice when he said his good nights, the way the words came out words—and was it with some longing, and for what, from a man who had had and had? Mistresses, my father told me, he had glimpsed in the crowds of the company parties, ladling the punch, stacking plates high with sandwiches. “My poor mother,” my father said.
Sometimes on our Sunday visits, my father cried to remember her. “Mother, Mother,” he said while my grandfather looked on and the second wife coughed, embarrassed.
The way my father dressed, grown fat from too much sleeping, in mismatched clothes, seedy as a poet now that he knew himself as poor—and happy to be poor. Look how he was loved, and he pointed to the men who swayed at his door, saying, “Professor James, sir, may we come in, please?”
“Don’t ask them in,” I said. “Be someone different.”
Be one of the boys at the concerts, at the ceremonies, at the breakfasts. They rarely spoke of my father, or if they did, it was, “How’s Jim?” How was it at this last new place? Expensive as hell was what my grandfather said, but we wanted him well again—didn’t we?
My grandfather said, “Poor Jim.”
The second wife said, “Of all the men.” She said, “I gave him you, didn’t I?”
But everything we did, I thought, we did for money.
In my grandfather’s house, I was given the room with the western view that lit up the matchstick winter trees, a book’s worth at a strike—wasteful, too early, short. Winter afternoons, pitched in dark, we sometimes slept in the library, lap-robed in Sunday’s papers, my grandfather snoring clogged snores from stories. Warty giants who lived in caves beyond the umbered forest—my grandfather was like one of those in his sleep, or that was how I saw him if I was first to wake. I saw the large sore nose, its old-age red, and the rest of him brown-speckled like an egg, and yet I kissed him.
“Too much,” my grandfather said. “That’s enough.”
There was more he was saying, except I moved away with my part of the paper, which was never Grandfather’s part of the paper. His part of the paper was nothing to read.
My father said he could not read. He said, “Now they’ve got me on this stuff, I can’t concentrate. I can’t see. All I do is sleep and sleep.”
I had never seen my father asleep, never known him to be other than fever-pitch awake; flame-tip skin and heat I had felt from his fingers at my cheeks. Not afraid of touching, my father was not, and his roiled speech—sometimes hard to follow what he said. “These drugs,” he said. “It’s not my fault”—any more than he was here in this last new place. “My own father,” my father said. “He did this to me.”
“Did what?” I asked. Left alone sometimes in his room to talk, we talked about my grandfather: hard as the stony place that he had made into a home—and me in it. What was he doing with me on the estate? was the question.
My father lifted at the skirt of his short robe. He asked, “What does he want from you?”
I scratched him.
“You would think we were lovers,” he said, and I hit at his arms, pushed at his chest with the heels of my hands, pushed at the softening parts—at his belly. He laughed and then grew angry and slapped small slaps fast, all over me, until I was backed up against the door a
nd crying; surely, a snotty, messy kind of crying, the body in an ooze, although what I remember is the joy I felt to call my father fucker—“You fucker.”
I told my grandfather, “I wish I were yours.” Almost any Sunday I said it. Even if the second wife were present, as she sometimes was, I said, “I never want to live with my father again.” The second wife thought it best, too. In my grandfather’s house, there was routine: cook’s soft-boiled egg in the morning and a table-set dinner each night. Not as it had been with Daddy, the second wife was sure of this, how it was with my father—she had known me eating at the sink from a bag, school shoes still missing and late for school—yet she had let my father drive me.
“Good-bye. See you later. See you next Sunday, next month, next year. You wouldn’t want me to give up work. None of this, of course, means I don’t love you. Remember how it was. You understand. This is better.” Any one of us could have said as much.
Besides, I wanted every morning to break up buttered toast into the eggcup.
Nightwork: Stories Page 5
