The Infinite Now

by Mindy Tarquini

  Because the old man didn’t like her tea. And maybe the old man likewise didn’t care if I ever made enough money to get to typewriting school.

  Well. I’d see about that.

  I ran upstairs, scribing as wide a circle around the curtain as I could manage. There’d been nothing scary about it in the night, just a piece of velvet that stayed hooked on the nail like any bit of fabric should. But it had been hanging down, projecting my five-minute-forward upside-down market when I woke.

  I arced around it, then arced around it again. “Don’t hurt me, all right?”

  The curtain didn’t answer. How could it? It was only fabric, and a little embroidery. But it seemed the branches I’d traced along its corner had changed, branches that reminded me sometimes of spring, sometimes of autumn. The branches had filled out and flowered, looking like summer. I took that as friendly, came in close, and gave the curtain a tug.

  It released from the rod. A shower of verbena rained down with it. I folded the material, wrapped it in canvas pulled from the fabric piles on the shelf, then hefted it onto my shoulder as the young man had his leather satchel. I went downstairs, grabbed my coat, and headed out the door.

  I had to know.

  I stood across from the pharmacy, the bell over its door jinga-jangling every time a customer exited or entered.

  Tizi spotted me through the window, face lighting around her mask. She pointed to a sign tucked in the display between a collection of cough drops:

  HELP WANTED

  APPLY WITHIN

  Hope rose like cream on a cold day. I near skipped across, then stopped in the middle of the cobbles, the old man’s admonishment constructing a brick wall fifteen steps short of the curb.

  Tizi disappeared from the window, and reappeared at the entrance, her stance bouncy and boisterous and brimming with joy, a sharp contrast to the cautiously caustic attitude of our first meeting. She beckoned, pinky and ring finger crooking with the downward motion “Fiora. Come on. Mamma says you would be perfect.”

  I shifted forward an inch, maybe two, the welcome I’d received warm in my memory. The guaritrice’s hand on my shoulder, how kindly she’d spoken of the mother everybody else feared to reference. Then the harsh memory of the old man throwing the tea down the drain. Setting fire to the package. How the empty bag shrieked as it fell.

  Tizi put hands on hips as round as her cheeks and suited to somebody older than the adolescent I met on the day I picked up the old man’s prescription. She tilted her head, her expression confused. “Fiora?”

  I glanced to my feet, to the trolley tracks forming the iron line I dared not cross. “You come here.”

  Tizi took a step. Rather, she tried. Lifted her foot, moved it forward, brought it down. To land right where it had been. She lifted the other foot, moved it forward, brought it down.

  Nothing.

  Confusion choked the cheerful from her face. She looked up.

  I looked with her. Attached to the doorway’s bell. An iron ring. The same as hung at the doorway of the old man’s apartment. Twined with verbena.

  Tizi’s hand flew to her breast, and she sucked in a breath, a breath that made her breast appear far more developed than what I’d expect from the young girl I’d met on Parade Day. Then Tizi sighed. The last of her girlish good spirits slid from her shoulders. She took on a sadness of a full-grown woman, exaggerated by her eyebrows’ gentle downward slope. She shook her head. “I can’t.”

  She stepped back into the pharmacy. The door’s spring mechanism pulled it shut behind her. The verbena jangled with it.

  Keeping things out.

  Or keeping them in.

  I thought of the bits and pieces that had showered down with the curtain.

  Or keeping them from crossing the trolley tracks.

  Preposterous. Superstitious nonsense. I stepped again, one, then two. Me, Fiora Vicente, bearing Rosina Vicente’s burden, the burden that belonged to me and me alone. To seek guidance. “Nothing more.”

  The weight on my hands dissolved. I looked down.

  The canvas remained, limp and empty and quivering in the breeze.

  The curtain was gone.

  The doctor was in the old man’s apartment, a hand on the old man’s shoulder, a stethoscope to the old man’s chest. He listened, then pulled out the earpieces and packed the stethoscope into his bag. “The DiGirolamos are very sick, my friend. You shouldn’t have gone.” He nodded to me—“Keep him home. Do his errands for him.”—then handed me some small white pills. “For the tailor and his wife. They need one every few hours.”

  “But, I—”

  “You haven’t caught it yet. You’re probably resistant. Boil everything you can. Keep the boys away from the pregnant girl. And for god’s sake, get them something to eat.”

  The doctor might have said something else. I didn’t know. I grabbed the old man’s Big Ben and dashed up the stairs, heart pounding an uncomfortable rhythm.

  The curtain was there, hanging unsettled and skimpy on the rod. I pulled it to the left; it gapped on the right. I pulled it right; it gapped on the left. I stretched it from the bottom; it wouldn’t reach the sill. I felt silly talking to it. But I did. “What’s wrong?”

  “The curtain chooses the window,” the old man spoke, husky and matter-of-fact, from the top of my attic stairs. “The curtain can unchoose it, also. Have you made it angry?”

  I whipped around. “Angry? It’s a piece of cloth.”

  “It is powerful and profound and not to be trifled with to earn a few dollars at carnival games.”

  I thought of typewriting school. Of all the money I didn’t have to pay for it. Whatever the curtain wanted from me, it hadn’t liked going to see the guaritrice. “What do I do?”

  “Don’t use it. Put it away. The curtain provides a path, but if you do not respect the road, you may not like where it leads. For now, the Lattanzis need you.”

  “The doctor cannot order me to care for his patients. The Lattanzis are his responsibility, not mine.”

  “How fortunate for you Signora Lattanzi did not take the same attitude when she found you in the alley.”

  I lay a hand on the curtain’s edge. “Is that what you want?”

  The curtain relaxed, settling past the window’s edges. Darkness fell. I undid the centermost flap. Light arrowed into the room, splashing the Ninth Street Market across the far wall, in all its glorious upside-downness.

  Fine. I stomped past the old man, opened the door, and descended the stairs, my attitude firmly in tow. The curtain and the upside-down, five-minute-forward market would be there when I got back. So would the old man.

  The Lattanzis? I sat on the bottom tread, listening to them cough for a full one hundred and twenty-three seconds.

  Maybe not.

  I might have sat there for a hundred and twenty-three more except the tailor opened the door.

  Shivering, skeletal, whiskers sprouting in all directions.

  I’d never met him, only seen him in the neighborhood, an earnest, carefully dressed man, walking with his sons.

  He shuffled past me, heading to the street door. “I thought you were Fipo. I sent him to the market.”

  “I’ll go look for him.” I took the tailor by the arm, turned him around, pushed him back toward the apartment, and into a scene of devastation.

  Dirty dishes piled in the sink, dirty towels across the floor. The younger boy stood in the corner, thumb in mouth, diaper sagging to his knees. He clutched a blanket and stared wide-eyed at his father. I crouched in front of him. “Aren’t you too old for diapers?”

  “He doesn’t talk anymore, either.” The voice came from the still-open door to the hall. Small. And defiant.

  Fipo, the older boy, clutching a paper-wrapped bundle. He crossed the room and placed it on the table. “I got oatmeal and carrots.” He tapped the side of his palm to his stomach. “I’m hungry.”

  The tailor pulled a box of matches off the shelf. His hands shook. “I have to lig
ht the furnace. There’s no heat.”

  “I’ll do that. You start the oatmeal.” I took the matches off of him, ran down to the basement, shoveled coal into the furnace, and did my best not to blow anything up. I’d never lit a furnace. Never made oatmeal. Never worried about feeding anybody else. Not even when Mamma and Poppa were sick. They died so fast, I was still eating leftovers from our last dinner together on the morning the men came to collect their bodies.

  I returned to the kitchen. Fipo was stirring the oatmeal. It bubbled over. I grabbed a swatch of my skirt and pulled it from the heat. A generous arc splashed across my shirtwaist, and into my hair. I set the pot on the floor. “Fipo, don’t use the stove.”

  “Poppa had to sleep. If you ask Mamma for help, she could tell you how to make us hotcakes, instead.”

  “Maybe later.” I took the spoon from him. “Go find your brother a clean diaper.”

  “We call him Etti. And if he had a clean diaper, I’d have already found it.”

  “Why didn’t you get me sooner?”

  “Because you made Mamma sick.”

  I cooked and cleaned. Scrubbed and washed. Every plate, every towel, every gummy corner. Etti tugged at my elbow. He pointed. A smell more aromatic than beans rose from behind the stove.

  I put a hand over my nose. “Did you try to change your own diaper?”

  I threw open the windows, scooped the diaper into a bucket, marched to the bathroom, and emptied the contents in the toilet, flushing again and again. Fipo found me. “Poppa threw up.”

  I stopped flushing.

  I’d already done this for my parents. Cleaned puke and piss and poop, washed snot from towels, and mopped blood off floors. Hour after hour, morning to evening. For one day, then two days, then three. Inexpertly, inadequately, because Mamma had always done the cleaning, and when none of what I did helped, when none of it made Mamma or Poppa better, I escaped to the roof, lost myself under the stars, imagined they were windows on the infinite, and wished—oh how I wished—I could find a way to push through to the other side.

  But there was no other side. There was only more cleaning, more scrubbing, this time caring for people I barely knew. Because one had plucked me out of the rain rather than risk running afoul of an irrational fear.

  The contents of the medicine bottle bubbled up onto my tongue, bringing with it a vision of the flower-painted teapot that would someday go to Young Carlo. Young Carlo who got to run errands and didn’t have to clean up poop. Young Carlo, whom, I’d decided, also had a hunchback.

  I slammed the bucket to the floor and flung myself at the entrance to the Lattanzis’ apartment, near twisting the knob off its screws. I yanked the door open, pulled it shut behind, then leaned against it, chest heaving, heart pounding sternum to backbone.

  The pregnant girl stood on the bottom tread of the stairs. “I came to help.”

  “The doctor wants you to stay away.”

  “Then I’ll take the children with me.”

  “The doctor wouldn’t like that, either.”

  “If the children were going to get it, they’d have it by now. If they don’t have it, I won’t get it. So get them. And we’ll get you cleaned up.” She looked me up and down. “Because you don’t want to go upstairs like that.”

  My gaze followed hers to take in my vomit-stained skirt, the poop-streaked stockings. “Don Sebastiano won’t care.”

  “Not Don Sebastiano, silly. Carlo. The young shoemaker. He’s upstairs.”

  Oh. Curiosity, even reluctant curiosity, was a welcome distraction. “What’s he look like?”

  “You’ve been living there this whole time and you’ve never seen him? My goodness, Fiora, how can a fortune-teller be so blind?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He comes every day since Don Sebastiano told him about you.”

  “Me?”

  “Of course. Carlo’s working harder than ever. Saving his money. There won’t be a shoe needs repair for ten blocks by the time you get married.”

  “Married? Why would I get married? My brothers are coming back. I’m going to school. I—”

  The girl put her hand to her mouth again, like when she talked about how her tongue was an unbridled horse. “Oh dear. You really didn’t know. I thought you were teasing me the other day. Thought you thought I was being nosy. From the way Signora Lattanzi spoke, I thought it was all arranged.”

  Like a flower in a vase.

  I thought of the fishmonger rubbing at his neck—“Don Sebastiano is a friend, but I need somebody more permanent.”

  “This is the reason nobody will hire me.” Not because of my mother. “Because they presume I’ll quit.”

  Because I’d. Be. Married.

  To a man I didn’t know. Cooking. Cleaning.

  Keeping the buttons on his shirt.

  I pulled the medicine bottle from my pocket, pulled the stopper, and took a generous swig.

  So this was the old man’s definition of trust. Hand me a husband; his responsibility is satisfied; my problems are solved.

  I took another swig, imagining this young shoemaker, his hunch grown to mountainous proportions and his squint so pronounced he was all but blind in that eye. He’d probably expect me to thread his needles.

  I took a third swig, and thought of my brothers, their letter to the old man—“. . . and handle any other circumstances as you deem fit.”

  Fit. To wrap me up and hand me over.

  Like a bowl of fruit.

  I turned and turned again. The landing was full of doors. To the street, to the shop, to the basement, to the Lattanzis’ apartment. Not one led to freedom, not one to my heart’s desire.

  I headed for the stairs, ire clearing a path. The pregnant girl stopped me. She put a hand on my arm. “Fiora. Please. Let’s go to my apartment. Wash your face. Brush your hair.”

  The jolt that accompanied her touch made the one I’d experienced with the young man when he extricated my cuff from the lamppost seem like a pinprick. Had I been carrying a bag full of apples, I’d have dropped them. The heat crept up my neck and I knew I was blushing.

  I let her take the bottle from me. Let her ascend the stairs with me. Let her lead me to the entrance of her apartment. “I have a fresh waist you can borrow, and a clean collar. So pretty. I know you’re angry, but don’t rush off. He’s a good match. Soon he’ll be a citizen.”

  Signora Lattanzi had said the same.

  The pregnant girl’s touch turned to ice. I dropped her hand, took hold of my skirt, vomit stains and all, dashed up the steps, barreled through the door to the old man’s apartment. My tongue reared on its hind legs, and charged the old man at a gallop. “You can tell my brothers I wouldn’t marry your short, crooked-backed, half-blind Carlo if he were a citizen of ten countries. I’m going to typewriting school. I’m getting a job in an office. And then I’m going to Atlantic City.”

  The old man looked up from his work. He flicked his head in the direction of the rooftop garden, where a broad set of shoulders obscured the open doorway. “May I present my assistant, Carlo Lelii. Carlo, this is Fiora Vicente, a young woman of strong ambition.”

  I turned to this . . . this Carlo, swath of oatmeal-laden hair hanging over my eye, smoke all but billowing from my nostrils. He stepped into the room, and I stared into eyes I already knew, large and honest and of the lightest blue, shining as sunlight on the Adriatic, like the stars overhead, windows onto an infinite filled with music, with truth, with the conviction life is best when lived.

  The young man slid his cap off his head, threw an arm across his midsection, and bowed.

  As he had on Parade Day.

  I lunged for the attic stairs, scooping up the old man’s Big Ben on the way. I burst into the attic, slammed the door behind, and lobbed myself across the light arrowing through the curtain’s single open aperture with one well-formed, whole, solid desire: to escape the path everybody expected, and find the one meant for me.

  The light flung me
forward, propelling me like gunpowder onto the projection opposite, where trolley tracks rode street cobbles crossing the ceiling and chimneys stacked along the baseboard. Where the grocer, the fishmonger, and the lady with the freshly made tomato pies worked above awnings which yawed toward my floorboards, presided below stands which should have fallen at my feet. Where the world was as upside-down as my real life had become and always five minutes ahead of where I’d ever be.

  A pop, a fizz, and the scariest of sucking sounds barrel-rolled me through the plaster. My stomach did a topsy-turvy, blood rushed to my head, the world went pale, my feet slid like ice covered the cobbles, cobbles I couldn’t believe were somehow supposed to suspend me. I clutched the old man’s Big Ben to my chest, an anchor in the tide. Then took a breath. On a world foreign, and familiar, and moving too fast.

  The old man’s Big Ben tick-tick-ticked, its pace moving ahead of Mamma’s clock still in the attic room and still five minutes ahead of the rest of the world. The old man pounded on the attic door, but the rate did not sound urgent. “Fiora,” he called, his voice elongated and low, “Thiiiis . . . iiiis ri . . . di . . . cu . . . lous. Coooome ooout. We wiiillll talk.”

  I wanted to answer, but couldn’t keep the air in my lungs. Wanted to tell the old man to go away, not open the door, to leave, and take his Carlo with him. I was trapped in the image the curtain projected, a Ninth Street market in which I hung upside-down and uncomfortable. A world that would overexpose in too much light, and disappear in the dark. I had no idea what would happen if the curtain were thrown back, or another grommet opened, or if I lingered here past sunset. I was castaway on a magnifying shore, ticking to the increasing pace of the old man’s clock. And the curtain was my only road back.

  The knocking stopped, my sigh of relief whisked into the curtain world’s advancing minutes, then an hour, another hour, half a day, into what had not yet happened. My every inhalation expanded beyond the previous; the subsequent exhale ended before it emptied. The future branched and branched again, an unfathomable complexity, in which one thing happened, and the other thing did, and still a different thing happened. The grocer passed me, time and again. I watched each of his eventualities unfold. Sometimes he turned to the right, sometimes to the left. Sometimes he raised his awning, and then laid out his produce. Other times he laid out his produce first. Each subsequent movement changed the movement that followed.