In the Slammer With Carol Smith

by Hortense Calisher

  ‘You have a place you can stay, Carol? I always thought you did.’

  ‘I did. Don’t worry. I always have a place.’ I pat the Shelter-Pak.

  Does the other guy get this? Alphonse isn’t sure. Does he want him to? ‘No, Martyn, you’re no rebel,’ he says. ‘He’s an understander, Carol. He’s the one got me in AA. And not in the city. Out-of-town. “For you, Upstate boy,” he said, “the alcoholics shouldn’t be that anonymous.” Heh, heh.’

  I see that Alphonse has the start of a jowl. Is that what a job brings out in you? No more Picasso boy. ‘I think I hear your number,’ I say.

  This Martyn gives me a look. ‘So do I.’

  Once Alphonse scoots off I say: ‘We didn’t hear any number.’

  ‘We don’t know his number.’

  ‘Should we be laughing?’ We aren’t quite. I need these cues.

  He shakes his head. A good one, as heads go. More of a broad front-face than a profile. ‘Alphonse isn’t laughable. But we can laugh.’

  ‘He know you were in the play?’

  ‘May have. Casting news gets around. I teach theater, my country’s mostly. Came here with a troupe I managed. Like to keep my hand in.’

  So he isn’t AA too. Not the one who got Alphonse the job.

  I peer at the stage, which is empty now. ‘He was no wild turkey, Alphonse. But a friend.’

  ‘A friend.’

  ‘We were members of the same club. Though—he was never quite in good standing.’ I see I’ve puzzled him. ‘Not people on the bottle, no. Just a place to hang out.’

  ‘He was once a student in the class next door to mine. I used him once, in a play I did. Saw his work later, now and then. Spotty as it was. Lost sight of him, until today.’

  ‘So he wasn’t—?’ Swingers’ language. My tongue curls toward it but is too out of habit.

  ‘Setting us up?’ That smile. ‘No. But the dinner offer still holds.’

  Noggins? Mine is like opening, at a feverish rate. Careful. If this is memory, the pod bursting, all the brain’s integers on the march—then there’s no pill for it in my bag. ‘I’m kind of full up on understanders.’

  ‘I’m not a professional.’

  ‘I’ve had a lot of those.’ Walking in sand, this feels like. But toward. Not in retreat.

  ‘Carol—’ he says. ‘Carol.’ How does he know to say it over and over?

  The lights are going down, up, down. There’s no curtain. The stage has filled again with people still in the dark. ‘Come to think—’ the voice opposite says, ‘maybe he was. Setting us up. Once he saw us together.’

  ‘Why?’ I haven’t said that spontaneously—since I don’t know when. And for a minute he’s silent. He’s taking advantage somehow of the dimming off-and-on-again light, I do know that.

  ‘I used Alphonse in that play, because we needed somebody who was white.’ It’s then he takes my hands, both of them, like to cushion a blow.

  A blow that would hit us both. ‘Your country—you said.’ I almost know.

  ‘South Africa, yes. I’m what they call a colored. I saw you didn’t know. Some of us are whiter than white. If a bit buttery. Or sallow. Even if we don’t want to pass, in another country we do. When that happens for too long, I go back.’

  The stage is rumbling now with the passage of people still in the dark. Soon they’ll be showing their color, their shape. A good play is a slow revelation. But I owe him one now.

  ‘Have to go,’ he whispers. ‘I wear a lot of silly stuff for the part.… We won’t get through ’till after eleven maybe. If you can’t wait, tell me where to call.’

  Tell me where to call. It tolls like a bell. Hurts. Like a string pulled. Totting up what I owe the world. Or what it doesn’t owe me.

  ‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘I live on the streets.’

  Even in the dim I can see how he’s looking at me, feel it. ‘I know, I know,’ I whisper. ‘Just now—I’m passing. But I’m a homeless.’

  That stops most onlookers. Like the barrier at a railway siding, shunting your tramp vehicle from the traffic rushing on. But he’s not ordinary.

  ‘Bed and board?’ he says. ‘Surely that could be found for the likes of you. But that’s not what you’re saying, is it? That’s not the kind of homeless you are.’

  ‘No—’ I whisper. ‘I’m a professional.’

  Is he going to touch me?

  He touches my pack. ‘If I take up with one of these—maybe I won’t have to go home. Or not yet.’ His lips compress, whiter than his face. ‘Have to get ready. Will you stay to watch? If not—.’ Pressing a card in my hand, he scuttles down the aisle, vaults to the stage, which is thronged now, and is swallowed up, as if his leap is part of the action.

  As we are, down here in the audience. Up there, the play is speaking for us. War and peace, homeland and rapine—the stage is gradually strewn with their properties. People carry their housing on their backs. Soldiers in shakos bark ditties on their faith, jigging across stage to their own falsetto, or falling wounded. Prostitutes slide their scarlet between the bandages. Children rise jack-in-the-box from their coffins and subside. All human character, or as much as a hall can handle, troops on, eddies into mime and dances off again. Only to repeat the message: all human character, human property, nullifies. Movement alone must suffice. At least in the first act.

  The play might have been invented for me to watch while the flanges of memory turn, serving me up on my own camera, as sharp as on anyone’s. Or keener, for having half-slept. I see a prison yard, painted Day-Glo orange for sun, a metal screening above us allowing in air. Our moving line—round and around, squaring off at the corners, is for others to watch. Yet a one-time, blocked Eden that no flicking of the television button would ever find for me later, endless in the day-room of the hospitalized.…

  I am breathing so hard that my left-hand neighbor, bending curls that brush me, whispers: ‘Are you okay?’ An anxious girl-angel, at twenty still benevolent.

  ‘Oh sure—’ I breathe, just feeling lyric—y’know? And a little crazee—’ and receive a me-too nod. That was quick of me. Who have been so slow, so—immovable? And far better to say what I had, than if I had croaked: ‘And a little—sane.’

  Onstage there’s a parade of personages I can assign to parts of my own saga. That old man, toting an eternal log of wood, hod of coal—he’s Titus, saying to the aunts with a shake of his grizzle: ‘She don’t know squat about herself, do she.’ He sets the gift log in the grate. The gift coal is already down cellar. I am twelve years old and hiding in the store-closet, so near I can hear his joints creak as he straightens up. ‘And Missies—who’s to pay for this?’ He meant for the coal, I say to myself later—he only meant for the coal. But he meant, Who’s to pay for her—the unacknowledged story? Me.

  The aunts could never bear to owe anybody. They left the house to Titus, a man by then in his nineties. In the wills of those who live by heritage does time always stand still? They left me, their fancy scholarship girl, the trust. The two of them dying hand to hand, in my junior year, of the same woman’s complaint they had ignored. We played parcheesi in the hospital.

  And so, my senior year, at Christmas and Easter and many weekends, I became the unfancy visitor—to those four girls. Carey, met in the college infirmary, both of us there on suspicion of anorexia, confided grimly: ‘I’m not eating for two.’ She had just had an abortion. ‘You too?’ I told her of what had been ripped away, leaving me in a town that had never been mine. ‘Don’t ever go back,’ she said, and took me home to Bermuda with her for Thanksgiving.

  … The flesh of well-to-do girl radicals will grow any variant cause; to be down in the melée is their bloom. When I met the other three, Laura, who spat her feminist rage at her boyfriend; Doris, who ate her way through her pity for the poor; Emmy, whose recurrent breakdowns, neatly divided between three residences, seemed only to reinforce her beauty and her backbone as well—I could not further define their politics. As for Minna, their fringe
adviser, an older woman who had picked them up at a college work-camp in the Catskills—she was working-class. Of her, Doris, the dumb bunny who too often put her finger right on it, said solemnly: ‘That’s her career.’ And Minna’s hold on them. ‘I don’t want to owe anybody,’ I said to Carey, on the brink of all the swimming pools. She said, ‘Rats: we all owe you. You’re our token; you know that.’ I was beginning to. ‘I almost appreciate it,’ I said. ‘Back home it was kind of personal.’ And the Memorial Day poppies were never really mine.…

  ONSTAGE.

  One corner is a field where humped-over figures interchange as the crops they are carrying do: cotton, corn, sugar cane. A line of soldiers advances, their red uniforms and beavers the staples of military dream. From the opposite corner, girls in off-shoulder Mexican blouses pelt the soldiers with flowers as they pass. What era is this, what decade? What agriculture, what war? Are those girls flower children of the nineteen-sixties or camp followers to Napoleon? Or village girls on the Marne, First World War? And who are that other trio who scuttle into a cardboard foxhole: one in a Foreign Legion kepi, one in a cavalry wide-brim, and one in a helmet of pilot-blue? From the wings stage-right a kite whizzes, kamikaze. The actors’ faces are all colors, all nations, and in a portable landscape. All the houses on the roadside are hovels carried on the back. Dust rises and settles after them. Shouts fade, but the singing is steady. Shots ring out, a faraway put-put, the fifing skreeks, but the feet, civilian feet, march drumbeat toward the final detonation. And the single flag.

  And I know what I am seeing. Whoever patched this charade-parade from all the props of history, there’s always some dramatist who will, scarring some in the audience, leaving the majority unscathed—but passing the flag of insurrection along.

  My contribution would be small. I gave up memory. I ceded a mind. And lost a decade. Swaying from side to side, in one place.

  But as the curtain now rises and dips, struggles aloft and wrinkles to the floor, a poor scrim that can’t hide a stage emptying of all its images of revolution, my own images rise there. Again that table, three of the girls seated there—and a fourth, me, ten years ago, exiting in silent turmoil through a basement door.…

  Next to me in our theater seats the twenty-year-old stretches, sighing. ‘Intermission. Wouldn’t think they could top this, would you.’

  I say, ‘Not unless they set off a bomb.’

  She says, ‘You in the cast, huh?’

  I shake my head. ‘Not this time.’

  She’s not stupid. ‘Ah, you’re not that old. You could even join us.’

  ‘Join?’

  ‘Word gets around,’ she whispers. ‘Me and some other guys, we want to be part of it. We’re gonna crash the stage, Act Two.’ Her eyes sparkle. ‘Right from the audience.’

  I recall that old ploy. We thought it was new. Activists swarming up from the audience. Of course you have to choose your play. We four went to a couple like that, but sat tight. We were not vicarious.

  ‘See you—’ my neighbor says, edging past me. ‘Gotta tinkle.’

  Up on the blank stage, as I sit enthralled, the specific scene is played.…

  We are still in practice session, although end-of-semester dispersal is near. All these sessions are so much the same that we might be situated in eternity. At one end of the table a depression-era movie, idly recommended by a history professor, is running. Once more those milling crowds, so skeletal of face they must be real people, pour across landscapes only dreamed of. Steeltowns flare. Slag-heaps loom. Sometimes the other girls will cast a glance at the screen, more often not. Down the table, somebody is always fitting together or dismantling with utmost care those components that on demolition day will cause dogma and deed to interreact chemically.

  Dora, whose fat fingers limit her at this work, hates the industrial documentaries but moons long over the mountain folk. ‘All starving people look alike.’ Then sighs. ‘So do fatties.’

  I watch all the movies. I am not allowed to participate in the handiwork. They will only let me sort parts, classify the smallest in a drawer cadged from an old printing press, and hand these out as called for. I rock from one expert to the other, like a hairdresser’s assistant rhythmically handing out the rollers. Ever so often they order me out: ‘Carol—don’t you need to go?’ In the bathroom I fight off the undertow of doubt pushing at me. Do they know enough history to be making it? Or if simple passion is enough, do my giddy, often winsome friends have the right circumstance for it? They never argue what they’re doing here. Yet their tongues are so sharp.

  When I said, joining up, that I wouldn’t want to hurt anybody, they closed arms round me beguilingly, eyes moist. ‘We’re after monuments, not persons.’ So I was satisfied; their ethic and mine was the same. But they only see persons psychologically; that’s their standard. ‘Of course Carol would say that—’ is their attitude. ‘She’s been hurt.’

  So far, the bomb target is undeclared. Actually—undecided. On this their talk is quite free.

  When I get back from the toilet, Laura is nimbly fitting in the tiny key-shaped metal piece I had last handed her. She’s a lefty. The engagement diamond on her fourth finger glitters oddly as she works. She catches me staring at the weird collage she’s making. ‘You’re not supposed to look too hard,’ she says, crosspatch. ‘We don’t want to incriminate you.’

  ‘She means—if we’re caught, you won’t know anything much,’ Carey says, her eyes as bright blue as the harbor she comes from.

  ‘Caught?’ Emmy says. The more dangerously thin she gets the more feisty. ‘Why do you always harp on that?’

  ‘Because she wants to be caught,’ Laura says. ‘So’s her relationship with Dadda will be complete.’

  Carey says, ‘Lolly.’ That’s a Wasp nickname Laura loves to be called by. Carey’s face is too meek.… Like when her father forbade her to see La Dolce Vita, which was playing the island again. ‘I can’t speak for your friend here—’ he had said, so-o polite. My whole visit, he never addressed me by name.

  ‘Mmm, sweetie.’ Laura is now using a tweezer to insert a coil so hairline I’m just assuming it’s there. ‘Hand me that little tab, Carol. Over there, dammit. I can’t let go.’

  I am about to hand her the tab when Carey says in the softest voice: ‘Laura—do you tell your analyst about the bomb?’

  The word detonates. Laura has almost let go what she daren’t. ‘The installation’ is the term they normally use.

  The boyfriend says, ‘You dumb bitches. I wish I had never. Maybe you better ask yourselves not where we’re to go, but when.’

  Until then I had seen little of Minna. Minna was our labor unionist, already out of the City College, ‘Not a paying one like you gals.’ No clothes you’d notice, a dull accent; wherever she sits there’s like a space of gray. And grayish words. But there’s a crown on her head all can see. She’s done this kind of operation before.

  Getting up, she comes around to Laura. ‘I’ll hold it for you. To do the rest.’

  In slow motion, the hands interchange, then withdraw. I can hear us breathing.

  Minna says: ‘So what are we waiting for?’ Like a bell has struck.

  The boyfriend speaks. ‘I gotta phone my parents.’ It is his house.

  The table stares at him.

  ‘Just to be sure they’re not coming in today.’ But he looks about to throw up.

  Laura blows him a kiss. We wait. That thing on the table—while we wait it seems to grow.

  When he hangs up he says, ‘Somebody on the street already phoned them. Noticing the blinds were drawn. They know we always leave it like it’s occupied.… You heard what I told my folks.’

  We had. ‘I’ll go by and check,’ he’d said. As if he wasn’t calling from their own house.

  Looking back, I recall the glance that the four of them: Laura, Doris, Emmy, even Carey, exchange. So that’s what you do when you join up in a lie. You smile.

  I take no credit for not joining in. Clearly
they find me wanting in tact. Or wanting in the ability to calculate ahead? Or do I want to be a no-show? It feels like that. Under their stern eyes I go to the bathroom on my own.

  When I come back, I can feel the tenseness in the room. They are a team. Minna, in the background until now is smiling at me—‘why? ‘I’m starving—’ she says chummy to the others, ‘aren’t you all?’

  I can still hear their chorus—the boyfriend’s bleat coming in last.

  They want me to go for sandwiches.

  ‘But not to that usual place,’ says Dora, always dependable on food. ‘There’s that new dairy-deli over on Sixth. Bring me a pastrami.’

  ‘Club sandwich for me.’ Laura.

  ‘Deli’s don’t do club,’ Dora says. ‘Or don’t call it that. Ask for a double chicken, heavy on the mayo, and with tomato, on white.’

  Emmy, on some elite diet of her own, says nothing.

  Carey says slowly, ‘Nix on any of that for me.’ She leans toward me winsomely. ‘I have a yen for Chinese. Chow mein. Spring roll. In the next block after the deli, that place. Bring me some, hmm. And take your time, Carol.’

  ‘Thought you were all starving,’ I grumble. ‘And you know what—I’m sick of being the gofer. Why’nt one of you go?’ But in the end, I can’t resist Carey. ‘Okay-y. Join you in Chinese.’

  They are so quiet. Like the bottom has fallen out of all conversation. Then I see that the table is bare. In a heap at the door, their backpacks. Under the table, the bundle stashed there is gone.

  ‘You’re moving the project on?’ I say. ‘Where?’

  I am still on probation in that respect. They don’t trust my allegiance to the cause. Whatever their cause is. Although they’ve never told where they intend to plant that thing, I have heard talk. Laura is for the Empire State Building. Doris wants the Rainbow Room, as a symbol of the bourgeois. ‘Your bourgeoisie—’ Carey shot back. Carey is against the Hague and the U.N.—all diplomats. I have no idea what she is for.