I wanted lots and lots of new clothes.
Keys to the car, plane ticket, passport, backstage passes.
I wanted to be between visits on a Saturday when we walked Grandfather’s gardens—him with the pruners in his pocket and a cane he used to beat at things while he pruned in rolled-up sleeves. The steeped-tea color of my grandfather’s arms, sure in every gesture, aroused me. I wanted to brush against and lick him: the pouch at his neck, his white, white hair. Stooped, skinny, abrupt in motion, loose clothes slipping off, my grandfather used his pruners. He worked beneath a weak sun and did not sweat or smell of anything more than his ordered soap, green bars with age cracks that looked like saved stones from the bottom of the lake. The lake, from whichever angle we looked, was chipped blues or grays, or buckled, as with ice; and when it was ice, we stayed indoors. We watched for winter birds—blood smears in the trees or the blue jays he detested swinging on the onion sacks and pecking at the suet. The snow was dirty; shucks of seed skirted the trees. There were pawprints and footprints and dog’s canary piddle—too many visitors on any one day.
I’m sorry, I get confused.
The snows that filled the wells of ground about my grandfather’s gardens were unmarked and falling in the lights I thoughtlessly left on.
My father was sick and had been sick for as far back as my grandfather could remember.
Imagine what it was like to have a son who said such things!
But what my father said about me! I had heard him before on how it was with me—me, a hole, a gap, a breach, a space, an absence and longing. Empty. Feckless. Stupid.
“Who can ever fill you up?” my father asked.
Then I was using something sharp on him, just to draw a little blood. I was being showy and so was he, my father—he knew about acting. He was smiling while I cut him, so that it must have been the second wife who screamed—not me. Why would I have screamed? My grandfather in the room saw what I was doing.
METROPOLIS
The things my son may see living with me—the way the windows darken suddenly in our apartment, the night tipping shut, a lid, such things as have happened with me and men—shame me. Somewhere obscured in the obscuring city is his father, we imagine. My son and I stand at what was my window, my room, where now another man sleeps, if he sleeps. But he is gone, too, in these early, strangely inky evenings—rarely blue when we stand at the window, and my son asks, “Where do you think Dad is now?” I do not know the answer to this or to lots of other questions my son might ask me, which may be why my son is angry.
Teachers, mothers, women mostly, tell me my son is angry. They tell me this in the way women do in stories about other boys now pacified and prosperous in the alchemy of growing up. “But these boys were once angry,” they say, prayered hands and lowered heads. The women carry the word angry into talk as with pincers. Bad, bad to be a boy and swinging something he is using as a weapon against a wall.
Should I start at the beginning, then, I wonder, when the rage I felt bleeding on and off for weeks made me needle myself to bleed this child out and try again? I wanted a someone committed to staying. But my son held on; I thought he had to be a girl. The boy’s head lifted to view in his easy birthing, the doctor said, “I think it’s a girl,” and that was what we saw, the doctor, the nurses, the father, me. Before the boy part slipped out, we saw this bright girl mouth pouted for kissing. “Ah,” we said.
The astonishing heat between my legs after my son was gone I remember, me on a gurney in a screened-off pen and calling out for ice.
“Do you have any thoughts?” the teacher asks me when I go to see her about my son. But the rown-leaf color of the desks, the exhausted chalky air, streaked with light as if by candles, the tallowed apprentice quality of objects, crude child maps of the explorers, all catch in my throat like ash.
The dying man who sleeps in what was once my bed sleeps poorly and smokes, listens to the radio. My thoughts are of him and of what my son may hear when the dying man comes home, sanding the floor with his long and heavy feet. Up and down, up and down, past the locked bedroom where my son and I sleep, the dying man moves. He calls out from what was my room, “I am dying. I am dying in this fucking bedroom.” Night after night, I hear him. Pressed against my son in my son’s bed, I hear the dying man and wonder. Does my son hear, is he really sleeping, and how is it I have let this happen to us—opening the door to men who come in or who do not come in, threatening ruin, slapping money on my bureau, saying, “I am dying,” or “This is all I have,” or “This is all you want.”
The teacher, I imagine, has no troubles with money or with men dying. Heavy ankles, yes, and plainer, pulled-back face, but no debts rattling behind her; the teacher wears grown-up clothes and knows how to tie a scarf. Plump and silky, it settles at her neck; I would pet it but for my chewed-up thumbs that seem to snag whatever nice things I touch.
“Anyone would leave you,” the dying man says.
I want to tell the teacher that the dying man has newsprint on his fingers, and that my son has seen things, too—the staples in my head.
“You’re upset,” the teacher says. “Maybe you don’t want to talk.”
I shake my head, saddened and amazed.
At home, my son has seen me mad enough to kick in glass, blood pooling in the cuff of my shoe.
My son’s wet mouth, I could drink from it still.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” I say to this teacher, and want to hold out my hands and feel a ruler on their backs. Bad, bad to be a woman, indiscriminate and needy, linking arms with any man who promises relief.
The teacher, I think, knows this and all else there is to know about my carelessness.
• • •
Here’s scary—a man downstairs in a small light, drinking—and a woman just above him, waiting in a dark bed. From last summer this was, or the summer before; we were in a cabin in the country. The kitchen floor was dirt. Combed black dirt, it stuck to the wet around my son’s mouth—there was no end to cleaning my son—no end to cleaning the cabin. Hypnotizing dust motes I remember and the pine furniture ablaze in the late-afternoon sun, corn silk and fruit flies, spoons stuck to breakfast dishes.
The dying man has called out for his mother in the middle of the night. I have heard him and have sometimes answered his call, banged my way through the dark to the foot of the bed where he sleeps and asked, “What is it?”
“He is angry,” the teacher says, and she describes my son in the class, talking softly as he does, growing louder—the sly smiles to friends, the audacity, the tinny glare about the boy defiant. Bored or hungry, sometimes ignorant of what inspires him to speak, the boy says he does not know why he does it. “A monologue,” the teacher says, “with glancing reference to the class; otherwise, just bloodshed.”
My son’s drawings are all of men.
I see small heads, squared bodies—a robotic, bolted quality about them, no knees, didactic jaws. They are armed; many of them smoke. Trails of ash and fire are the loose horizontals in these drawings of stiff men standing in air, guns pointed and firing. The blood splatter is colored in.
“Is this normal?” I ask the teacher, and she says she does not know, that she only wanted me to see.
Back-to-back on the acrid, skinny mattress we shared in the cabin, we lay apart and still.
I want to tell the teacher I don’t sleep with the dying man anymore, but that there is the night to be got through, living around the dying man, leaving something in the kitchen he may or may not eat, then locking ourselves in, my son and I, in my son’s room. How quietly he lies when I scratch his arm, me under the covers of the boy’s bed, which means I’ll stay the night—tonight, the next night, and all the nights I lie in wait of the dying man’s dying.
In the early morning, me in the closet, standing in to dress out of sight of where the dying man worries what I owe him—inflationary calculations, sums figured in the sleepless night, the old harangue—I like it. I feel the luck of my
good health, and walk past him wearing it, walk around the bed where the dying man lies, leashed and wounded, yapping at me.
Soon, I think, the dying man will be dead, or he will be gone to wherever it is dying men go in a city—to other women, to other apartments, to other parts of the metropolis.
The beginning is always so sweet. They bring good sheets from some life before and a saucepan, saying, “Can you use it?” Great-Someone’s dishes and one or two trinkets from the mother-source, which I have sold, lost, broken.
I have done much damage.
“I told whoever called for you that you were dead,” the dying man says, home early and sitting on the bed.
I ask, “How are you now?”
He says, “What do you care?”
Everything in the bedroom is purely itself, doorknobs, windows, dishes of loose change—and I am afraid. I am afraid the dying man will always be here, picking at his scabs, sniffing at his farts, wiping at his face with this day’s dress shirt, leaving smudge and oil and threaded juices of himself on what surfaces he passes as he goes about his dying.
This is no place for children, I am thinking when I hear my son call out, “I’m home.”
TO HAVE AND TO HOLD
I have accidents in the Fifth Avenue kitchen—cuts, falls, scaldings. What could I be thinking of when I scissor through a plugged cord? My sleeve catches fire on the burner, and all I do is watch its crinkling into nothing. Fast as paper, it burns, filling the kitchen with a stink of burnt hair, my hair, and that is what finally makes me run for the salt, the smell of me catching fire.
Worse things happen in the kitchen—my husband tells me he is in love with someone else, and what do I do? I go out and buy he and she gerbils to make us feel more like a family.
I hate the gerbils. Nothing about them is cute; they twitch and gnaw. The animals live in a plastic ight-glow cage set next to the stove, because this kitchen is small, even if it is on Fifth Avenue, and here they scrabble and play and shred their tray paper—dirty animals that eat their own tails.
The girl was the first at it. One morning I found her dragging her rump through the shavings, scooting around the cage, past the boy. His tail was whole; hers was stubbed, pink, wet-looking. I saw her giddy chase of it. I thought. Maybe this is a mating ritual; maybe this is natural. What do I know? Except a few days later, some of the boy’s tail was missing; now both of these cannibals are nearly tailless.
This eating has nothing to do with making baby gerbils. I don’t think the two of them even like each other. When the gerbils escape from their cage—and they escape every night, squiggling through a gnawed-away part—I never find them huddling. I might find the boy under the sink, the girl near the warm and coiled back of the refrigerator. I catch them up with a dishcloth; I can’t stand to touch these addled savages—who could?—especially since they’ve started eating themselves.
I want to know why my husband picked this woman to love, this woman who has been in my kitchen, who once helped me dry the silverware. This woman my husband loves is always, always on my mind here in the kitchen, where she once hugged me good-bye in her fur and pearls. I split open the coals of feeling to feel the buckle on her belt heat up in my hand. I touch her skirt and the stitched spine of her high heels. I am in a kind of hurry. I snatch at her nylons, her bag. Her bag is the color of toffee; I could eat it; I could gnaw off the clip to where the lining riffles with the scent of her perfume and pennies and lipstick. Would she want to trade her clothes for my kitchen? Does she want babies?
The Fifth Avenue kitchen is so bright and clean. My husband says the counters are still gritty with cleanser. He says the food is ashamed to be seen.
I admit it, I am driven. Last thing I do each night is wash my floor. One of the reasons the gerbils are such a problem is that they are so ridiculously dirty.
I should get out of the kitchen.
I should set the gerbils free.
I should let the scrub pads rust and the inky vouchers stain the counters. I should mess up.
My husband says the fridge door reads like advertisement. He says the door is not a bulletin board. He says, “Why don’t you get a date book, act like other people?”
I thought that’s what I was doing: acting like other people. So much space glinting off the white dune of Fifth Avenue: I thought. Other people must want this, but not, it seems, the woman my husband wants. She, he says, wants to pitch her umbrella elsewhere.
Where?
I am standing here with the gerbils, who are loose again and scrabbling over my bare feet.
There is broken glass on the floor.
I can’t help what happens.
The kitchen is sprung like an army knife, and I am in a hurry.
I have thrown open the window and am moving fast to catch these gerbils with only my hands. First the girl, who is trembling and trying to nip me—I swing her by the leg out the window; she is gone. Then I make for the boy, hiding in a corner.
I think he thinks he is safe; he doesn’t move. Lost, pointless, filthy boy.
I toss him underhand—just like rice.
STEPHEN, MICHAEL, PATRICK, JOHN
She wanted to touch the sister’s back as she saw it in the light beyond the door where she stood, breathing through her mouth, a spy on the sister in the sister’s house—yet waited for, welcome.
“You see that yard?” the sister asked. “That’s my garden.”
Gray morning yellowed here and here and pinched with ribbed red leaves. Impossible to believe that they had slept through to winter again or that this was April—and snow, she in the bedroom with the sister, and somewhere around the house the sister’s husband, caulking windows maybe, wrangling locks. Not much seen, this husband, but she sometimes heard him brush against the wall, bulked shoulders and the clack of buttons. The sound reminded her of parts of him, the husband’s black hair shocked off his wide wrist, his hairy fingers fixing things.
The sister said, “I see a doctor now. I’m on a medication.”
“What kind?” she asked. “Since when?”
The sister said, “Since it happened,” folding blanket squares and sacks that crackled with static, the sister’s hands had snagged on the clothes. “And the sparks,” the sister said. Even pulled apart, hand-ironing, the sleepwear had stuck to the sister’s palm, and the tips of her fingers had felt coarse to the sister.
The sister said, “I raked the little clothes like leaves into giant bags and lugged them to the basement.” She said, “I tossed them. I didn’t care where they landed.”
The sister said, “Want to know how you can help? You can throw out the flowers. Burst tulips are obscene—black and dusted parts exposed. They don’t dry shut or turn to paper. They are never quite dead.”
She saw the husband in the yard was waving something away.
“Maybe the dog,” the sister said. “You’ll hear him howling. It’s all very gothic. The neighbors are afraid of us. Everyone, I think, is afraid of us.”
The sister said, “The food I buy spoils on the drive home, and you’ve seen what has happened to my doors. The strips of torn-up bedclothes are to warn off the birds. There is nothing we can do about the howling.”
The sister’s hands were cutting into pillows, when what she had expected—what she always expected—was to see fleshier hands, the sister’s once, flushed on flushed breasts under cover of their bedroom.
She said, “What can I do to help?”
Tucking in the bed tight, beating the pillows, the sister said, “Talk,” and then they didn’t.
White sheets and pillows, white lace curtains very white, and the way the room was arranged, she saw, the high bed, the nightstands, the mournful dresser, all was familiar, was their mother’s room, early morning. The light was a salt in her eyes, but she kept blinking into it.
Spit-writing names on the wall, she remembered, and spying on their parents. The sister had dared her to look.
“What do you see?” the sister had asked h
er.
“Nothing,” she had said, when what she had seen was Mother heaving on the stairs, carrying her wrong babies low—Stephen, Michael, Patrick, John.
Her sister stood close to the mirror on the door. “I’m glad you’re here,” the sister said.
She said, “I hope,” and stood near enough to watch the way the soft powder caught in the small lines of the sister’s skin, the sister powdering, putting on lipstick—pain for a mouth.
She said the husband was lucky to have her, the sister.
“Really,” the sister said, dressed and on her way downstairs. The sound the sister made was of soft cloth on cloth.
“That?” from the sister in the kitchen when she asked. “That’s for bread,” the sister said. “I never use it.”
The sister said, “Most of our friends are afraid to visit, I think. I wouldn’t visit us if I could help it. I didn’t think you’d come.”
She said, “Please.” She said, “I’m sorry I wasn’t here,” but she couldn’t think of how to finish; she took out the plates instead.
The sister said, “No, he already ate,” and she leaned against the sink—they both leaned against the sink and looked out at the yard. They couldn’t find him, the husband. The sister said, “Maybe he went into town, or maybe he’s around the house too close for us to see.”
“We’re not good company,” the sister said. “My husband is depressed. He sits up nights and drinks. I’ve called out, ‘Aren’t you cold? Aren’t you tired? Do you want anything?’ But he doesn’t answer, which makes me more afraid.”
The sister said, “Oh, why am I telling you this?”
The sister said, “I was the one who found the baby.”
She said, “I know. I am sorry,” and she touched the sister’s shoulder, put her hand there, softly at first, then firmly, finally to feel how feebly constructed, bones light as balsa wood for toys with daylong lives.
Nightwork: Stories Page 6
