Prayers for the Living

by Alan Cheuse

  The engine growls louder.

  She starts walking fast.

  The engine growls nearer.

  She breaks into a run. I’m telling you, the rest is just like I told you before. But this part, where I just told you it was different, it was hard for a grandmother to tell you that part, but I had to, because there are harder things coming next that I have to say. And I wanted to get you prepared, and I had to prepare myself. And if you don’t believe me from now on, if you think there are other things I’ve changed already or other things I’m going to change, well, what can I say? So I had to go back and tell you what really happened. And now I have only a little bit more to tell you about Sarah, and I hope that you’ll trust me. You’ll have to trust me.

  Good.

  Because it’s bad. It hurts to say it. To say it for me is to see it, and that hurts.

  And after I finish you’ll know why I get nervous even now, even when she’s a college girl, when she goes out by herself.

  Because you never know when something’s going to happen. You never know. Because look here, even now, in this nice new apartment of ours we’re having trouble with the electricity. What? Look, don’t tell me you don’t see it, the lights are flickering. Sure. Good. I’m glad you saw it too because, kinnahurra, I didn’t think I was going crazy. Even here. In the heart of the city. Maybe especially here. You could look at it that way. Even here. Or especially here. Either way. It can get bad. It can get good. You never know. That’s right. Kinnahurra.

  So she’s walking, remember?

  And now there are many students that she sees, walking the walks, crossing the streets. And buildings with signs, the library, the gymnasium, many cars, and there are a few schoolgirls like herself, and so while some boys look at her nobody finds it out of the ordinary, except if they look too close they see it seems like she’s spilled soup on her blouse, in her lap. She wets her lips. She’d like nothing better than something to drink, something to chew on, a bath, shower, a towel to dry her hair with. Her hair—it’s sticky with soup, someone has spilled soup in her hair, and this is on her mind, or should I say on the surface of her mind? because she’s walking, pardon the expression, like, God forbid, a dead person, and the thought of what she needs rests just on the top of her mind, like a petal from a flower in a pond that’s fallen onto the surface, or a leaf floating down from a tree above the pond, floating there, resting there, turning this way and that in a breeze.

  “Here!”

  Someone catches her arm as she trips off the curb.

  “Thank you,” she says, and keeps walking.

  “Can I help you?” It’s a boy, a student, long dark hair, glasses, stooped shoulders like he’s been studying studying studying.

  “I’m looking for the dean’s office,” she says.

  “Which dean?” he asks. “There’s the mean dean, the lean dean, and the queen dean.”

  “What?” she says. “What?”

  “I was making a joke,” the boy says. “So which dean are you looking for?”

  “The—what?” And she keeps on walking.

  “Hey!” he calls after her. But she doesn’t look back.

  I wish. I wish life was more like a story. Because if that was true, this nice boy, he was a little wise guy, but he was trying to help, maybe he would have followed her, and would have helped her, like from the fairy tale of Prince Charming. But this was her life, not her story, and so he shrugged his shoulders and went about his business, going to study, probably, the way he looked, a good student, a nice boy with a little sense of humor. Maybe they would have gotten along, they would have dated, he would have come up to meet the family, and after he graduated, and maybe went to graduate school, and became, who knows? a doctor? a lawyer? a big businessman, maybe even gone into business with my Manny, there would have been something between them. But that’s a story, a fairy tale, and what I’m telling you is her real life, and it’s darker than a fairy tale.

  So.

  She passes a number of buildings, she passes paths leading to buildings set back from the road, and she crosses the main avenue and finds a little street where there aren’t so many people to stare at her, and as she’s passing by one of the houses where the boys live, one of the clubs with the foreign letters, a house with this—look, she showed me once, and I remember the odd look of them—here, give me again the lipstick like the last time and I’ll show you on the napkin, except this is not paper, wait, here’s a piece of newspaper, some sign like this.

  Not like Manny’s star that you remember.

  Oi, signs, signs, signs. I see them a little better in my mind now that I don’t see so good with my eyes, but it confuses me, and so you can imagine my Sarah’s, Sadie’s confusion when they call her from where they’re sitting on the porch, these two boys, they’re dressed in old clothes, and they’re holding beer cans in their hands, and she’s so thirsty that when they ask if she would like a beer, she says,

  “Yes, please, thank you.”

  Never in her life before has she had a beer, not more than a sip or two at least.

  But in a minute she’s swallowing everything in a can. And then another.

  “You go to school around here?” a boy asks, one of his loafers dangling from the bare toes of his foot. He’s got a smile on his face, half question, half wolf-at-the-door.

  “No,” she says, reaching for another can of beer.

  “We better go inside,” the other boy says. He’s been staring at the thin strip of pink sky between the upper band of her knee sock and the lower edge of her skirt. “We’d better,” he says again. “If we got spotted.”

  “Spotted?” the other boy says. “Splattered. Smashed.” They both laugh. And nod toward Sadie.

  “You want to come in? It’s not safe to drink beer on the porch. Not with you.”

  “What’s wrong with me?” she asks.

  “Nothing,” the boy without socks replies. “No-thing, honey!”

  “So I’ll come in,” she says in a voice that later if she had heard it would have surprised her. So tough, so calm. The rhythms of that speech, half her mother’s, I think, half, maybe, mine. But the will? Her desire to enter? Where did that come from? From some empty space? Who was in there speaking? She felt nothing, she later claimed. But who was speaking? Oi, my children, one who heard birds, the other falling sick, and this one, the next generation, opening up her mouth and the voice she lets out belonging to nobody she knows!

  We are coming to the end here, I’ll tell you, we are coming to the end of this part, and I’m sitting here shaking, shaking, you can see, because of what I have to say next. Look, my hands, my rings! Shivering, shaking! And if I told you I lied before it was because I wanted you to believe me now when I’m telling you the truth, because I want you to know that a grandmother would have to be crazy to make up such things about the dearest granddaughter—the only one, I admit it—she ever had.

  To make up the part about going inside.

  To make up the part about drinking more beer.

  To make up the part about going upstairs to the room of the sockless boy.

  To make up the part about sitting naked on the bed of the shoeless sockless boy.

  To make up the part about lying down on the sheets on the bed of the shoeless sockless boy.

  To make up the part about unlatching the belt on the trousers of the shoeless sockless boy.

  To make up the part about the next thing that happened with her and the naked boy. The blood, the soup.

  To make up the part about what happened with the next shoeless sockless naked boy. More blood, more soup.

  To make up the part about the next boy. To make up the part about the next. Blood and soup.

  But who could imagine this and not be crazy? Who could tell you the truth about this and not be weeping? Here. Listen. The sun went down. That’s the next part. The evening shadows fell. That’s the next. Now and then the door to the hall would open and another boy would leave, another come in.
The room was quiet. It smelled of beer and cigarettes and aftershave, sandwiches, sulfur, fish. Sweat poured from the walls—music from somewhere played in her ear, a samba, and then a Frank Sinatra singing

  You ain’t been blue,

  No, no, no . . .

  The kind of music her mother should like, her father, but you know Maby, she was with the light my fire music, and her father only with the bare necessity for the services, what the cantor plays on the organ, he’ll listen to

  You ain’t been blue,

  Til you’ve had that

  Mood indigo . . .

  but here she heard it, ghost music maybe, ghost of music that used to be played here, because nothing that was happening to her seemed to take place in the present, and so it could have been that she was living in the past, or even in the future, some time not her own, with the boys on top of her, the boys naked surrounding her, the boys joining hands in a circle and dancing together, sweating, as ferocious with each other as much as with her, weaving in a circle their jerky wicked dance.

  After a time, as in even the worst of fires, the flames died down, and in the thick of the stinking smoke the boys began to get scared. The girl on the bed, swimming in sweat and oils, bathed in the spew of their masculine youth and the vapor of their breath, this girl, my Sarah, my Sadie, she began to weep quietly, and then she began to moan. And this scared them all the more. It was not the open-eyed gaze of the girl who now knows something—that was not the look that took over her face. No, no, she was staring at them through the veil of teary fear because into her mind came all that had happened that day, all that she had apparently made happen, or at least let happen, and she feared that she was going to join her mother in the hospital because she understood then that that was why she had dared the world to do something to her that afternoon and night, which it did, which it did . . .

  So that she could become as sick as she thought her mother was sick.

  But this was only a stage, only a stage.

  They helped her get dressed, trembling all of them as though some wind from the snowy North Pole had swept through the house. She was trembling, they were trembling. And just as she had now left something of her childhood behind, though certainly not out of choice—because she did not know what was going to happen when she started out that day—these boys had left something of their maturity behind as well, what little maturity they possessed. And what frightened them was now her calmness. If she had been hysterical they might have known what to do—might have bundled her out the door and into a car and taken her—well, where? they wouldn’t have known, so why should I try to imagine? But calm as she was, and saying as she was now that she wanted to see her friend Dean Sommer—your grandson the dean!—they turned into a pack of whimpering babies. That those who break and pierce and smash and violate the whole things of this world can themselves be reduced to such ash and shard so quickly, it makes you wonder whether anything or not is real, or at least strong! Not even the hate is strong, not even the clenched fist, the forced entry, the power to smash! None of this is strong, not any of it! In the light of the first sun, when morning threatens, the smoke rises from the dying fire that has cooked the evening meal or scorched the hands of children, and it’s still nothing more than what it is, dying sparks, the remains of the heat for good or not, the last of the warming, genug, enough, the end . . .

  You didn’t hear about the scandal, no. There was no scandal. This dean, your expert grandson, he pulled the curtain on everything, closed the door of the house where it happened, threw the boys out of school, put them on record with the police, and would have done a lot more—but my Manny, his old boss, asked him to keep things quiet. Once Sally’s Doctor Mickey informed him that Sarah was not physically harmed he asked the dean to pull the curtain. He didn’t want the scandal—he was just about to pounce like an alley cat on another company he wanted, and he didn’t want the noise or publicity. It was enough for him what happened with her mother in the parking lot that time.

  As for me, his mother, I could see what he was thinking about, and as the grandmother of his daughter I knew, too, that he wasn’t doing what he should. The mother stood outside of it all—or slept. Me, the mother and grandmother, I was caught in the middle, and I was in my heart flapping around like fresh laundry in a big wind.

  Then I got sick, and while I was in the hospital, where they studied my eyes, my Manny looked as though he was patching things up in his life, he bought her the new car, he took her up to the college she wanted to see, and he paid for her to take the trip she wanted, you see because at this time of his life the wife, my Maby, she was already in and out, in and out of Owl Valley, and when she was out he was good to her, a pleasant enough husband, and when she was in, he was with his Florette, and his business, and sometimes you couldn’t tell which was the bigger mistress in his life, the woman or the job, and then he sent Sadie up to the college, and he had time for both his new lovers, the woman, the business, and sometimes he was very serious, and sometimes like a boy he never was because of after when his father died he became so sober and grown-up, and to tell you the truth, I think she, Sadie, forgave him for not making such a stink and a scandal. In fact, I’m almost sure.

  BUT LISTEN, DO you hear a noise? I think I hear it, I think I do, a door opening, the sound of keys? Has she come back? My Sadie, after all this talk, has she come back? I can’t wait to see her, to feel her hair, her face, her hands. But has she come or is it only my misery making sounds to me in the night?

  If you see her, touch her for me, ask her for me, ask her for her own living grandmother because she talks to me sometimes but she don’t listen . . . and I touch her but she don’t touch back, ask her, where are you going? Say to her, like in the song from Baby Dylan, where are you going? Where have you been?

  A Former Virgin’s Prayer

  DEAR LORD. LORD OF THE WORLD. THE WORD. GLOBE. SAND, sea, land, wind, fire. Watch over me. Protect me as I set out on this voyage. Over land, over sea. I know nothing. I fear all. And yet I could be something, could I not? When I am trembling with fear, hold me fast, Lord, by the shoulders and keep me straight and strong. When I am turning my back on those I need most blow upon me and turn me around with Thy sweet strong breath, sustain me, nourish me in my needy hour, cast not a gloom upon me even in the dark but give me the will to move forward, yea, even through the thorniest thickets, through the deepest, roughest waters.

  Lord, succor to youth, guide to the unaware, I cast myself into the oceans of the world and know that Thou will buoy me up. Wind in my sails. Gravity of my world. Brain, belly, and loins I offer up to Thee on the altar of time. May my gift be not found lacking. For if it were, I would sink rapidly beneath the spume and buffeting, sink down, down, so low as never again to find the air.

  BOOK FOUR

  NIGHT

  Put on the light. You’ll feel more comfortable.

  There.

  Eyes can see better now? Good. As for mine, bad.

  But what’s to see now? Now that the light of my life has gone out? My light and your light also.

  Here, let me touch your hand. The fingers. Such nice nails, such nice fingers. And your face? Let me feel your face. Since the lights went out, I like to feel the skin, the hair. Ashamed I’m not, am I? I never was ashamed. I was always proud, very proud. My Manny made me proud . . .

  See how the eyes run? Dark but they still run tears. My Manny. Your Manny. Where is he now? Somewhere in the dark? Or flying on the back of that great broad-winged bird? The one that carried him off. But what, you’re asking what? The bird that carried him off? Sure, I told you.

  Here, you sit. Let me. Your hands. How smooth, darling, smooth. What are you doing for them? You’re using a cream? You’re using a lotion? Me, I bathe now and then, with the help of the little girls who work here, in a large tub of milk. How many cows must give to fill the tub in which I float I cannot tell you, but it must be a number, yes, because I am not a little girl no more. But imagine me floa
ting in the lake of milk, the creamy stuff bubbling up at my old shoulders, laving my chest, the nubs called nipples, aureoles, where first he sucked, my little man, and now he is taken away.

  Put on more light. I want you to see. See? Here? I found it. I feel it. In his pocket we found it. After. Feel?

  All the years. They’ve worn it down a bit. But still the points remain sharp. It’s a wonder it didn’t shatter. And now we remain behind. In the dark. Put on more light. For me, there’s no more left. I hear, though. I sniff the air, the way, you know, you see a dog sniffing? I can tell many things from the patterns of the breeze in the halls, in the room, which nurse wanders here and where, which doctor, by the scent of them, by the odors. One for example, I know, is fooling around with a woman not his wife—because I’ve asked him if the perfume on his shoulders one morning was his wife’s and he said yes, and then came a day when he smelled of another. And the nurses I like, I like by their smell. And there is one I don’t and she doesn’t bathe. I bathe in milk, but she does not bathe at all.

  Kinnahurra. I would like for the rest of my last few days to breathe in only good odors, the trees outside, the smell of the leaves, dirt. It’s autumn now, and the year is traveling toward the end, not on the wings of some bird but on the rear end of a donkey, bumping along toward the end of the rocky dirt track that leads to nowhere. That reminds me of the old country. Here it’s not so much country—in summer you can hear the mower powered by gas. But sometimes at night I believe my ears and listen to the snorts and fidgeting of a horse in the barn, thick-boned old dray. Back in the old country. But, I know, I shouldn’t talk, because for me the old is good and for you it’s bad. And for me it exists because it no longer exists, and for you it no longer exists because it existed.

  Do I make sense? Do I cost dollars? I start talking and I can feel my tongue starting off like a bird that just heard a gunshot—snap! pap!—and my tongue is on the wing, swooping, turning, saying words I never heard, crash! it says, kill! it says, blood and milk and scum and stones and bullets, it says, oi, the medicine they give me, the medicine they give me, it makes my head swim and gives my tongue flight!