by Stuart Dybek
I looked at Stosh, and he raised his eyebrows in the crazed Groucho way he had each time he’d repeated “I went into the jungle, Willy,” but he said nothing.
The cop was jotting in a notebook. “Names and license numbers,” he said. “We’ll know where to come looking.”
By the time we hit the neighborhood, the shadows of doorways had edged down the front stairs and out along the sidewalks. After the blue lake and green-reflecting river and the gardens of Baha’i and shady lawns of Evanston, the streets looked narrow and shabby. Even the golden wash of late afternoon couldn’t transmute the colors of concrete and faded housepaint. I wondered how it would look when we got back from Mexico.
The scratches along my arms from the thorny underbrush we’d slogged through welted up and burned.
“You know what poison ivy looks like by any chance?” I asked.
“Stop whining, we’re rich,” Stosh said. “Figure, if we sell these to flower shops at say six bucks a pop, how many of them are back there? At least fifty. How many pesos is that? Plus we can always go back for more.”
“You’re serious?”
“Why not? We could probably sell these at the Fulton Market, where the fruit peddlers go to buy.”
We wheeled down Washtenaw, yelling, “Orchids, hey! Orchids!” as if hawking tomatoes or watermelons.
“Pull over,” I said, and Stosh swung to the curb where an old babka dressed in black and wearing a babushka despite the heat was sweeping the sidewalk before a two-flat.
“Jak sie masz, Pani,” I greeted her. “Would you like an orchid?”
She stopped sweeping and regarded us suspiciously.
“Maybe she thinks you’re running the old orchid scam,” Stosh said. “Tell her no strings attached.”
“That was the extent of my Polish,” I told him. I handed an orchid out the window and, when she refused to take it, dropped it where she’d swept. As we drove away, I turned to see her pick it up and smile, revealing a mouth of missing teeth.
“There was someone who needed an orchid, all right,” Stosh said. “Just because we’re entrepreneurs doesn’t mean we need to be greedheads. Let’s give a few away.”
We cruised the bars along Washtenaw, past Harrison High and its cinder ball field, past the motorcycle shop on the corner of Marshall Boulevard where Stosh’s brother, Gordo, hung out. Nobody was around. It was that lull in afternoon for which there’s no name, when the streets seem composed of shadow and the drawn shades of golden foil, an hour only weekdays have, just before the near riot of traffic when, freed from toil, people rush back to their lives. The Merc, rumbling low and liquid in second gear as if Stosh was trying to drive quietly, rolled into a space across the street from a frame house sided in imitation brick where Dahl lived with her mother. The blinds in the windows of their flat were drawn.
“Probably not home yet,” Stosh said. “She got a job working at a bakery.”
He sorted through the flowers on the backseat until he found the one he wanted, then crossed the street, climbed the stairs, and fit an orchid into the handle of the storm door.
“No note?”
“She’ll know who,” he said and took off as if we were making a getaway. “Hey, we’re on a roll. How about an orchid run to Bus Girl’s?”
I looked at our mud-caked jeans, at Stosh’s missing shoe; despite the elation we were riding, it sounded impossible.
“Nah, I’m dying of thirst,” I said, which was true.
“So let’s go celebrate. I got a couple cervezas tucked in the fridge.”
The sudden idea of seeing Laurel again after thinking about her continually since prom night made me feel as if I’d just taken a hit of speed. In my daydreams, I planned on calling her when I got back from Mexico with something pretty I’d bought for her—I didn’t know exactly what—something you could only get in Mexico. We splished down Twenty-fourth Place, our windows open to the spray as the Merc windshield-wipered through the car wash of an erupting hydrant. I tossed an orchid to a little girl wading in the flooded gutter. We turned onto Rockwell, cruising along the truck docks and factories, and as we passed the block length of Spiegel’s warehouse I noticed a shift of women filing out of work.
“Hold up,” I yelled, and Stosh braked and double-parked before the employee entrance. I scooped up an armful of flowers and squeezed between the parked cars into the group of women.
“Who’s that wild-looking bouquet for, honey?” a poker-faced redhead with a hillbilly accent asked.
“Ladies, good afternoon!” I announced. “The Management of Spiegel’s has declared this Women Workers’ Day and asked me to distribute these tokens of appreciation. This is for you,” I said, presenting the redhead an orchid.
“Why thanks, sugar,” she said, cracking a smile, then gave me a peck on the cheek.
“And this is for you and you and one for you,” I repeated, handing out flowers. They mobbed around me, laughing and kidding and popping gum. Another group of women filed out the door and came over to see what was going on.
“What you giving away, boy? Ooooh, cool!” one of them exclaimed.
“Plenty more where these came from, ladies,” I said, handing over the last of my flowers.
A driver in a semi stuck behind the Merc was leaning on the horn. I could see Stosh gesturing to me.
“Sorry, gotta run,” I said.
“Bye-bye!” The ladies waved. “Thank you, thank you!”
I climbed in, and we shot away as if propelled by the horn blasts of the enraged trucker.
“You’re giving away all the profits, man!” Stosh laughed.
I looked in back. The pile had been diminished. “There’s still plenty, and we can go back and get more.”
“I guess a little free advertising never hurt. You probably could have sold them. See what I mean? There was mass orchid madness, an orchid feeding frenzy. I thought they were going to gang-rape you.”
“Hey! I think I might have found my calling: the Orchid Man!”
“All right, Orca Man, let’s go get a brew.”
“Yeah, and we better get the rest of these in water.” I could almost feel their thirst. I could visualize them in a vase of cool water—a tall, clear vase on a bureau beside the bed in Laurel’s room. Sunlight filtered through her sheer curtains and the glass of the vase. She’d wake and the flowers would be the first thing she saw. I didn’t know how I’d sneak them in there, but she’d rise wondering who left the flowers and go to the mailbox and it would be full of orchids, too. There’d be orchids fit into the knocker of her door, stuffed in keyholes, scattered over her front steps, clipped like parking tickets under the windshield wipers of her mother’s Olds. And if I didn’t have enough flowers for all that there were more along the river, growing out of the ooze, surrounded by the drone of insects and songs of birds, still undisturbed, secret.
We were riding down Twenty-sixth, and what was left of the day had come alive. Shoppers whirled from the revolving doors of department stores; mariachi music blared out of bars; at stands under awnings outside groceries, women were breaking bunches of plantains from green stalks; on the corner of Spaulding, a vendor scooped black seeds from freshly sliced papayas. There was the fragrance of tacos and cabrito smoldering on spits. The street names were in English, but the rest of Twenty-sixth read like a Spanish lesson: Frutería, Lavadero, Se Habla Español. I repeated the signs to myself, practicing, and when I noticed the Mayan features of an old woman whom Stosh had stopped to allow to cross the street, it suddenly was clear, in a way it had never been before, that whether I got there or not, Mexico had already come to me.
We parked on Stosh’s street in the rubble lot beside his two-flat.
“Tecate!” he said, to the refrain of “Tequila.” He carefully gathered up the remaining orchids from the backseat.
“They keep them in a cooler at the florist,” I said. “You think we should put them in the fridge?”
“I don’t know. My old man might think they’r
e a salad and eat them.”
I picked up a couple he’d dropped and did an Orchid Man dance with them down the gangway to the rear of the house.
“Oh no, the fucken Orkin Man is getting carried away again,” Stosh said.
Even before we climbed the back stairs to the kitchen, I could smell the coffee wafting through the screen door and hear the women’s voices.
The kitchen was full of women dressed as though it was Sunday. They were sitting around the kitchen table, sipping coffee and nibbling the remains of the devil’s food cake that Stosh’s mother served on the afternoons when she hosted Tupperware parties. This party looked nearly over: ashtrays piled with lipsticked butts, countertops lined with half-empty Tupperware bowls of dip and chips. All shapes and sizes of Tupperware were displayed on card tables in the dining room, where the formal presentation had been. I recognized a few of the women from the parish: Mrs. Lalecki, whose son, Larry, had dropped out of grade school when Stosh and I went there; Mrs. Sosa, who led the choir at St. Roman and whose son, Hector, had been paralyzed by a bullet in a gang shooting; Mrs. Corea, who got up once during a sermon and denounced the priests as Svengalis after her beautiful daughter, Lima, insisted on joining the Carmelites; Mrs. Martoni, who once, wearing only a slip, was locked out of the house in the dead of winter by her drunken husband. Along with the other women, they’d spent the afternoon at the Tupperware party, and we’d barged in on their confidential conversation.
“Excuse us,” Stosh said, giving me a Groucho look that I knew meant the beer is trapped. He stood there sweaty, shirtless, covered in dried mud, holding the flowers as if delivering a bouquet.
“You boys want some cake?” Stosh’s mother asked. “Stanley, where’s your shoe?”
“We could use a Tupperware vase for these,” Stosh said.
“What you have there?” one of the ladies asked.
“Orchids,” Stosh said.
“Orchids don’t grow around here,” Mrs. Lalecki said authoritatively.
“Yeah, that’s what they all say,” Stosh told her, nodding a look at me and shaking his head condescendingly. “So, what do you call these?”
“Irises,” Mrs. Corea said.
“What do you mean irises?” Stosh said, flushing suddenly the way I’d seen him do in fights. “They’re orchids.”
“Stanley, sweetie, they’re irises,” his mother said. “I got them growing in the back yard.”
“I like the carnations better for the house,” Mrs. Corea said. “The irises are pretty, but they don’t last.”
“Irises,” Stosh repeated, looking at me, then glancing away.
I shrugged, drained for a moment of everything but thirst.
“Let’s split,” he said and slammed out of the screen door.
“So long,” I said to his mother and the ladies.
“Stanley!” his mother exclaimed, looking past me out the door. “Oh, honey, don’t!”
I heard the hiss against the screen and turned to see the violet blur of his arm sweep down and smash the bouquet off the banister, violet petals exploding, and almost in the same motion their headless green stems scattering out over the yard. In the dazzling afternoon light it seemed as if the arc of an orchid aura hovered around Stosh before I realized the flowers had left a streak when he’d whipped them across the rusted screen of the back door.
Lunch at the Loyola Arms
By winter I had acquired a table and chair, but that late September I liked the place as bare as I’d found it, and was content to spread my lunch on the white kitchen windowsill and eat while staring out at the street below.
The street was bounded by the El tracks and a neighborhood cathedral, the name of which I didn’t know. It was a shadowy street with the amplified quiet of a dead end, except for the occasional clatter of the El and, at noon, the uniformed kids from the Catholic grade school playing during lunchtime recess in the culde-sac. The cross-tipped shadow of the steeple creeping along the pavement seemed to add an eerie dimension of echo, which made the lighthearted banter of their voices sound all the more riotous.
The window I sat propped in had been painted open. White paint slapped over cobwebs still foamed in the corners of the sash. Tiny white worms of paint uncoiled from the hinges of the kitchen cabinets. I’d snapped a butter knife prying at the painted drawers, trying to stash the silverware I’d borrowed, along with a pair of salt and pepper shakers, from a cafeteria.
The entire apartment wore this fresh coat of white, through which the inscriptions that generations of former tenants had left behind—bottle rings, phone numbers, initials carved into the woodwork—slowly reemerged. I wondered who my predecessors were, tried to imagine all that might have happened here, but there were no ghosts, no history other than what was waiting to happen, merely two unfurnished rooms, empty except for my saxophone case and portable typewriter, and the suitcase, heavy with too many books, that I’d dumped in the center of the floor.
I was living in exile from Little Village, in a place called the Loyola Arms Hotel, although it obviously hadn’t operated as a hotel for years. The rusted, burned-out neon sign in front had never been removed. It was my first apartment. The rent was cheap but still beyond my means after my friend Stosh, who was a Trotskyite that year and was to have been my roommate, moved into a place across town, closer to the University of Chicago, at the invitation of a Thai girl he’d been seeing. I didn’t blame him.
Had we split the rent as planned, I could have made it to next spring—at least by my most optimistic calculations—stretching out the money I’d managed to save while living with my parents. They’d been uprooted from Chicago, transferred to Memphis, when the plant where my father had worked for thirty years shut down and moved south. My father had managed to get me a job for the summer in the foundry with his company in Memphis—a situation I was desperate to escape.
So I left and came back to Chicago, ostensibly to return to school, and moved in anyway, imagining that I could live off the city like some form of urban wildlife—alley cat, rat, sparrow. I thought I could slip between the seams like the homeless foreigners who’d roamed through the South Side neighborhood where I’d been raised. I’d grown up studying them: tramps, bag ladies, panhandlers scavenging the alleys in summer like beachcombers; old black hobos fishing along the Sanitary Canal; urban hermits like the bearded mute known only as the DP, who lived in a cave hollowed out under a sidewalk on Twenty-first and Washtenaw, or the Mexican known as the Pigeon Man, who lived with the pigeons in a nest of cardboard cartons that he’d wedged among the girders of the Western Avenue bridge.
My plan was to live on Cheerios and baked potatoes. How much money did one really need, after all? Supermarkets offered free samples and bruised fruit. There were books and records in libraries, paper and pens in banks, toilet paper and paper towels in public rest rooms, soap and socks left in Laundromats. There was Army Surplus and Goodwill. It was September in America, days hazed in gold, streets lined with the largesse of produce stands and flower stalls; the city, to quote Stosh, loaded with bargains at the world’s expense. “In this country,” he said, “what amounts to merely surviving off the crumbs would be a life of privilege most anywhere else on earth.”
But my lunches were becoming extravagant. Picnics on a windowsill: braunschweiger, Jewish rye, mayonnaise, raw onion, potato salad blushing with paprika, a cold beer, an enormous garlicky sea green pickle tonged just minutes before at the corner deli by a young woman with high cheekbones and a Slavic accent, her golden hair stranding from turquoise combs that could hardly contain the weight of curls, ample breasts so loose they had to be bare in the sleeveless blue sundress she wore, and the blond hair growing profusely under her arms flashing as she dipped into a huge glass crock where a school of kosher pickles darted away and tried to hide amidst the dillweed, roiled seeds, and wheeling peppercorns.
Did she realize, looking at me when she seized a pickle and, raising it victoriously, smiled, that there are times in a life whe
n a flash of the natural, humble hair beneath a woman’s arms can seem like a forbidden glimpse, a promise, of further mystery?
I’d walk back to the hotel, my lunch tightly wrapped in white butcher paper sealed with the strip of brown tape she’d licked. It was windy that fall, and the neighborhood smelled of whitecaps off the lake. The echo of noon bells from the church-locked street swirled in the vortex of doorways and mingled with the rasp of leaves and dust; pigeons and sheets of newspaper kited over the wooden platform of the Loyola station. The blind accordion player in an abandoned newsstand caught my arm as I passed, saying he smelled garlic.
“Take me to the turnstiles,” he said. “It’s so windy I can’t hear where I’m going.” And when I left him at the entrance to the El, he started pumping notes just as the northbound train slammed overhead like a part of the song catching up.
Late at night, through the painted-open window, I could hear the El train, stations away, rocking over the hollow viaducts of the North Side—Argyle, Thorndale, Granville, stops with names like English butlers—as I lay on the twangy, flop-out Murphy bed that a girlfriend once referred to as “the debilitated bicep of the Loyola Arms.”
Well, not a girlfriend exactly. She was the same girl who told me that she’d faithfully kept a diary from the time she was a child but that now she wrote down nothing, because recording things as they happen—exactly as they are—means that one is merely a journalist, and she was living her life like a novel.
“The Great American Novel?” I asked, but before she could answer I guessed that no, it was probably a Russian novel—pages of drifting snow, suffering, endless vodka-addled philosophical arguments, and at the end an appendix with a family tree that was necessary in order to follow the generations of characters with their unpronounceable names, names that required you to move your lips while reading.
She said she didn’t know what kind of novel it was, because she—then she changed that to we—were only on Chapter One.
She said that without the least bit of irony, and though that frightened me a little, I liked her all the more for it.
