Routes

by John Okas

  Uncle Early’s there with her. His forehead sweats like a glass of cold beer in a hot room, and the frog in his gravelly throat croaks a high hoarse hum as he vocalizes along with the chord changes. She can feel every bone in her body vibrate as his big hands jive from white to black, making a host of accidentals seem natural. “Hot diggety dog, Daddy-o. Go, cat, go!” is Glory’s word for it. The young Bee’s whole body and soul is buzzing; her throat pitches high hoarse woo with her Uncle Early.

  On the last chord Earl crosses his arms at the elbows and hugs the child, a sign that means “amen.”

  “More!” says the Bee.

  “You’re such a beautiful audience,” croaks Uncle Early, “why not? One more time around for the little lady, boys!”

  Her Self-Suiting Side

  Perhaps Laudette speaks about Glory in glowing terms too soon. The child’s development comes in revolutionary spurts rather than gradual changes. That winter the diapers disappear and it isn’t long after that the baby starts to show off her self-suiting side in a way the sitter is not so happy about. She resists the clothes Laudette buys for her. She runs the other way when she sees Laudette coming with one of those starchy linen dresses, or matching blouses and skirts, stockings and shoes that make her look like a miniature replica of some Daughter of the Freeway Revolution, if there were a tan one, off to a club meeting.

  At first Laudette demands that Glory be dressed thus, straitlaced at all times, but, finding that degree of compliance to be a continual struggle, she reduces her demands, asking only that the child be presentable when she is out or if she is to meet company in the apartment. In the confines of her room, Gloria can dress herself up as she sees fit and Laudette is willing to turn the other cheek.

  The girl with the homogenized honey tan is a perfect blend of her mother and father inside as well as out. Gloria would much rather wrap herself in a blanket, sheet, cape or tablecloth and hide in her tent, than wear regular clothing and go out, any day. In such flowing regalia, at home, she is a Queen Glory Bee. No one can touch her.

  In the mornings Laudette does her errands, and Gloria is expected to accompany her. The sitter is intractable in her insistence the child put on something respectable. Gloria is equally stubborn in her insistence she can dress herself. Laudette believes in encouraging independence in the child, it means less work for her, but she gnashes her teeth when the three-year-old appears dressed harum-scarum, showing off what a knack she has for putting on store-bought outfits in ways that swing. Gloria has her blouse wrapped like a turban on her head, her coat is inside out, tied like a cape and her skirt is turned upside down, the waistband down around her knees and the hem tied to her waist with ribbons she makes from cutting up her Mummy’s old clothes, odd bits of leather, satin, velvet and lace. She also has some of these strips, thirteen of them, pinned to her head, in her hair, hanging down over her face, neck and shoulders; they stream like pennants when she walks, giving her all the flutter of a dragon queen. The costume is royally crazy, and, with its maypole motif and its instinctive use of the number thirteen, shows the influence of heredity. Unknowing, she concurs with her father’s work. She has Corn Dog’s straight-arrow strain but as he was born to make fine arts, she was born to design. Naturally fashion smart, she is the flamboyant type, and shows no signs of the thoughtful, wistful, wishful, suffering temperament of the artist. She is also her mother’s daughter; the warrior in her is cut with the peach’s love for the tender trappings of femininity. But Gloria finds an unadulterated joy playing someone who she is not, a sense of enjoyment Sarah never gets as a slave to the image of a meticulous, totally high-styled, she-woman.

  The sitter knows nothing about fashion high or low; she considers it glaringly unsuitable for a young lady dressed thus to be seen in in public. “Oh, no, no, no, you crazy kid, I’m not standing for any baby I’m sitting for going out like that!” Laudette carries on as she undoes her Baby’s best intentions; she goes over and over again the need for modesty, presentability and seemliness in dress. “There’s not much I can do about the bread in your bones, Baby,” she says, “but I can at least make sure you look as if you had a proper upbringing and weren’t raised by wild, savage, fancy men.”

  Gloria’s sense of containment, her need to express herself, runs silent and deep as her father’s, and, as for her passive resistance, she can be as unreachable as her mother. She cannot do otherwise than show who she is every day, in every way. Let old Lawdy bluster. Gloria remains both defiant and cheerful. Impatient with the limitations the sitter places on her, she is sure that someday she shall overcome. Someday she will be bigger than Laudette, and no one will be able to tell her what to do. Left to her own devices she will present herself in any wild way she wants.

  She endures the trip to the market, but no sooner is she back in the apartment than she heads for her fantasy hideaway in the bedroom, insisting Laudette serve the soup and sandwich she fixes for her in her tent.

  Soon, later. “Let’s go now, Baby, time to go out.”

  “Again?”

  “Again.”

  “Kane’s!” Gloria insists.

  “No, not today, it’s a beautiful spring day. Don’t you want to go to the park to play on the swings?”

  The swings in the park don’t interest her as much as the swings in the beat. “No, I don’t want to. I want to stay home.”

  Of course it’s impossible. Sarah has a booking at two. They must be out by one-thirty. The big woman puts down her foot in a way that makes a loud stamp, and pulls away the spread that covers the girl, exposing her and the inside of her camp to the light. “Goshdarn it! What a mess!” In the privacy of her home within a home Gloria has used the water-color set Harry bought her to paint herself. Beyond cosmetics, it’s war paint for real, her arms and legs, stomach, chest and face, are daubed with yellow and blue stripes. In her careless childish way she has let the colors run where they may, leaving drips and splotches all over the outfit Laudette had dressed her in, the cushions she sits on, and the floor—a mess that Laudette must work hard at with wet towels to clean up.

  Then, late, it’s back to the dressing room, a quick dunk in the tub followed by a square outfit: underwear and socks, a green sweater, skirt and jacket and shiny shoes. The long wiry Gloria does all she can to frustrate the sitter’s attempts to redress her. She puts up a strong silent fight, letting her limbs go limp and heavy, her joints stiffen, all the while laughing like a fresh pixie. Laudette has to shake her to get her to put her legs back into her underpants one foot at a time.

  “Come on, Baby! Loosen up, don’t make my job so darn hard.”

  “Ow! Ow! Lawdy, leave me be!”

  But there is no overcoming the stalwart sitter. Out the door they go at five of two, just in time, the big woman pulling the child, dragging as if she has feet of lead, to the park. She gets on the swing and lets Laudette push her from behind. “When you’re old enough to buy your own clothes you can dress yourself, and make a mess with paint, but as long as I’m taking care of you, and I’m the one that’s got to clean up the mess, you’ll dress the way I say, and put all paint on the paper place, the paper, please. Or else! Is that understood?”

  Reluctant Gloria makes the best of a bad situation. What Laudette doesn’t see is that, while she is handing her ultimatums behind Gloria’s back, the child has been working off her underpants, little by little, down her thighs, over her knees, until she is able to drop them in the dust right at the sitter’s feet. Whee! Now every time she swings a breeze goes up her dress that gives her a faint sneezy feeling that goes from her nose down to her toes.

  Mickey and Rickey

  In her log cabin library days the split pea Sarah, even though she loved fur, agreed with Corn Dog that no animal should be killed for it unless one first felt it as a brother or a sister. But here in the penthouse of the Golden Gate, Sarah lets up-to-date elegance come before sibling consideration. She accepts and wears gifts of fur, leather, feather and bone, tossing them in her bi
g walk-in closet without a thank you, as if they were so much junk. She eats Gourmet goose liver without giving a second thought to the goose.

  Meanwhile the underdog’s daughter has friends in low places, animal spirits whom only she can see and hear. Mickey and Rickey are a pair of shape-shifties, fuzzy animals, fairy mice, mischievous imps, made of the same stuff that dreams are, imaginary. But to her who can see them they are as literal as Laudette and her Mummy. They are the little elves that help Gloria custom-make her own look.

  One cool damp spring night a light comes buzzing around her bed. “Hi, Mickey? Where’s Rickey?”

  “In Mummy’s closet and won’t come out.”

  The lights in Gloria’s mind flash on her other spirit friend, nesting where she spent her infancy, in a cubby home in the closet. It is late and her baby-sitter has dozed off for the night in the bed across the room. The coast is clear to get the missing fairy out of the closet.

  “Come on,” she whispers to Mickey, “and ssh.”

  Quietly Gloria and her fine inconspicuous friend make their way past Laudette and into the hall. She can hear murmurings in the parlor. Her mother is busy entertaining someone. Mister Swan, she can recognize the voice. She is cautious not to be heard as she slips past the doorway, but she must pause a brief second to see what the grown-ups are doing. They are lost in a clear liquid from a crystal bottle, something they drink that looks like plain water but isn’t. Swan is sitting on the sofa in his shirt sleeves crooning something low to her mother that sounds like a prayer, and her mother is looking crispy and smooth in a emerald pea-green taffeta dinner dress, pacing nervously back and forth in front of him, drinking and smoking a cigarette in a long silver holder.

  Gloria is tempted to make herself known, get her Daddy-o to see her so she can have a short friendly exchange with him before her mother shoos her off to bed, but she has an innate respect for the privacy of others. She has learned that sleeping, eating, drinking, kissing people are less likely to bother you if you don’t bother them. The good girl takes extra care not to disturb her Mummy, but minds her own business, and continues on with Mickey to Sarah’s wardrobe. There, sure enough, they find Ricky, stolen away, wrapped in black mink. Gloria and Mickey are bitten by the snuggle bug and must get hairy themselves. They shut the door behind them. It’s dark in there but they can feel one another. Mickey tries a lynx jacket, Gloria puts on the white fox coat. Then the three lie down, curl up together snug as three blind mice, or little bears in a cave hole.

  Mickey and Rickey are flighty, full of mischief, and they can walk through walls. First they lure Gloria where she shouldn’t be, then they fly the coop, without opening the door, leaving Gloria alone in the dark to face the music of love between her mother and Mister Swan. When the clock strikes one the couple finally reach the bedroom.

  Gloria awakens to the sound of one man flapping. “Cupcake,” Swan is saying, “how about the time the cloudgatherer dropped as sweet gentle rain on the daughter of the oceans?”

  The playboy is murmuring about how their re-enactments of classical situations make him feel as if he were sitting on top of the world, the fabled god heights of the ancient Hellions. Gloria does not exactly understand what he means, but she gets the gist of it. He is trying to convince her mother to play some sort of game.

  “Do you remember the ballet we saw last week? I’ve been thinking about that god who turned himself into a cob and took the mother of the face that launched a thousand ships from behind … How’d you like to let me goose you, Cupcake?”

  Sarah, a trifle drunk, backs up, grinds her emerald pea green buttocks against him and says, “Let me hear you honk for it, Sire.” She overemphasizes the last word.

  Unlike many children who are shy of the facts of life, Gloria finds that the truth does agree with her. She never consciously bothers herself with the details of what her mother does with Mister Swan, or the walrus and the money magnets, but, having inherited Corn Dog’s sharp hearing, she never misses a trick, even though she never listens. Of course, the Golden Gate is well-made and voices in other rooms are faint, no louder than murmurs, but they are there nonetheless. Things that a child is steeped in day after day cannot help but sink in. As the son of a carpenter becomes familiar with wood and wood-working tools, imbued with a sense of measurement and squareness, the daughter of a professional mistress absorbs certain trade secrets and skills without effort, too. Gloria is endowed with the know-how to throw an intimate party, to capture a man and keep him in rapture. However much of this professionalism is already in her marrow, tonight, finding herself in such proximity to the action, the passion, she is inquisitive about the particulars. Her ears curve outward like pert question marks, cups overflowing with sounds that do not make complete sense to her. She wants to see exactly what goes into making the bread in her bones, so she noses her eyes out of the closet door.

  She sees her mother has stepped up, in place of the lamp, on the bedside table, standing straight and tall, on her gown rather than in it. She turns around and Gloria sees her Mummy’s silver white backside shine like the moon. While her Mummy admires herself in the mirror Mister Swan is being silly as a goose, flapping and honking, doing a barny dance behind her and playing with—so that’s what men are made like!—his ding dong. What are they doing? Having fun? She assumes it is something like the games she plays with Mickey and Rickey. It’s fun to pretend that you are things that you are not.

  But how big and red Mister Swan’s cob is! She’s never seen one before. She is born to reign over men’s spermaries, so it does not frighten her, as it might some children. It doesn’t even make her blush. All by itself it almost tells her what is going to happen next. She pushes the door further to get a wider view. But her attempt at observation changes the event observed. Even about to be swept off the pedestal by her playboy friend, the split pea’s eyes are a couple of sharps; they instantly spot the movement in the closet door behind her in the mirror in front of her. She turns to Swan and says, “Harry, dear, how about this time I’ll play the daddy and you play the mommy?”

  Swan, excited by the prospect of any flight of fancy, all in favor of reversal of roles, says, “Aye!”

  “Among the gods as among the birds, the male of the species, is the fancier. Now you close your eyes and wait for a nice surprise.” Sarah says to him, as she steps down and makes for the closet in order to kill three birds with one stone: get some props for her peacock act for Swan, reassure the child within that everything is all right, under control, and close the door on those very same prying eyes. Holding her dress against her for modesty she slides into the open door, closes it behind her, puts on the closet light and faces the nosy mouse.

  Gloria knows she shouldn’t be there. She gives her mother an apologetic smile and goes to say something, but Sarah signals to her to be quiet by putting a lacquered fingernail to her painted lips. The gesture is not intended to stifle Gloria, Sarah can’t help imparting her professional manners, and intuitive Gloria can’t help understanding: it’s not proper to intrude on situations like this. It’s well past time she should be in bed. Sarah moves some shoes from the back corner of the closet, puts the fur down two coats thick and makes a place for Gloria to lie down. The Bee goes for it with pleasure. Sarah covers her with the white fox and kisses her goodnight. It’s been a while since Gloria got such attention from her Mummy, so often cool and detached. It rings back old times. She puts a thumb in her mouth and watches quietly as her mother takes a feathery boa, a high hat and a walking stick with a long ivory handle from among the things in the closet. Before she exits to go on with the show, she turns to Gloria, and again puts her finger to her lips, to remind her, quiet as a mouse. Then she switches off the light and closes the door until it clicks, leaving Gloria in the dark again.

  With her trips to hear the Hot Numbers, Gloria’s ears have already made up for all the hearing they didn’t do in her infancy. They are as sound-sensitive as her eyes are a medley of light. Now the shuffling and
shaking, the breathy silences punctuated by the spewing of inarticulate words, what all else she hears of her mother and Mister Swan raising cane on the bed, are music to her ears. She lets her imagination run wild with what she sees and drifts off to sleep in the closet, listening to the free love bird suite, her young mind full of images of perfection, pleasure, health, beauty, wealth, wisdom, power, queendom and glory.

  No Short Shrift

  All the while Sarah is waiting for him at the Golden Gate, and earning a good living while she does, and Gloria is learning the ways of the world at a very early age, Corn Dog is doing penance in the desert. When one goes above the world, or down beneath it, and becomes the voice of one crying in the wilderness, the Big Wheels keep on turning. But, to the one in the hairy shirt, an hour can seem like an eternity, or a year can pass like a day. In purgatory one’s time is served when one is bright enough to walk away. In Corn Dog’s case thirteen moons fasting, broiling in the day, freezing in the night, banging his head against the stones he sleeps on, is not enough to free his mind from jealousy, and the burning painful need to possess the beauty he loves. But one day, as he is beating his breast in a treeless, windswept flat, munching on a cake of wild sunbaked oatmeal, he sees a small whirlwind of sand and dust, and within it a light, a figure like a flame. He takes it as a sign and approaches.

  During his long trial of prayer and fasting Corn Dog has seen many things a casual tourist to the area would not, including the Fabulous Thunderbird streaking like lightning through the purple rainclouds. He takes such things in stride, but the bright form in this vision makes him choke on his oatcake.