Routes

by John Okas

  “Why, you little bug, I’ll admit you amaze me. You must be telepathetic or something. You certainly did pick it up, I’ll hand you that. But so what? You guessed some guests ordered ice cream. You can’t be waking up for that every time. I won’t allow it. Now back to sleep and let me rest in peace with my magazine, huh?”

  Laudette settles back down to read but now Gloria is too wide awake to do as she is told. There is an excitement in the air she can’t ignore, a call from the wild that howls in her bones. The call is so penetrating, so close, it comes out the other side of her. Even the dense Laudette feels a little shaky. She puts down her magazine and smiles, unsure of the reason why.

  In the parlor the peach is in the midst of being naughty. Stripped to naught but long black silk stockings and high-heel shoes, she is trying to get his lordship to express himself quickly so she can call it a day. But, suddenly, a strange ticklish sensation, both warm and chilling, deep in the pit of her stomach, surges up her spine.

  Then there is a knock on the door, clear and loud enough to be heard throughout the apartment. “Room service!” The voice too rings like a bell.

  Sarah shivers with recognition when she hears it, and quickly runs for a cover up, gets half-decent by throwing on the peach colored peignoir, frilly as it is transparent, that she greeted Sir Percival in. The old toad goes to the door to see what this is that’s disturbing his hour of bliss.

  Both the baby-sitter and the baby are up, cupping their ears to catch what’s happening. They hear Sir Percival’s voice muffled by the walls, raised in annoyance. Laudette is quick to crack open the door of the room she shares with Gloria. If there’s something fishy, something that could endanger the child’s welfare, the conscientious baby-sitter has got to know about it.

  The ice cream man has come for them. “Here’s the two gallons of banana-walnut split you ordered, Miss Black,” he says with a straight face.

  Taod, lord of a manor at home, acts every bit the man of Sarah’s house. “You didn’t call out for ice cream, did you, dear? There is some mistake, and such a dreadful flavor at that,” he says. There is a pause. “Didn’t you hear, man? No one here ordered that. Wait! Stop! You can’t come in here!”

  Now there is a commotion in the parlor. An intrusion? Alarmed, Laudette’s instinct is to face trouble quickly and knock it down to the ground before it goes too far. “Stay here!” The big woman commands Gloria, and sets off down the hall. Gloria does no such thing but, quiet as a Running Rabbit girl, stays close behind her. They pull up in the doorway which leads into the parlor, and face the scene together.

  Standing just inside the foyer, holding the bucket, wearing a white suit, too small for him, and a ridiculous conical cap, on the small side as well, is a marvelous looking young man, irresistible as he is funny. His clear bright off-blue eyes shine, his curly, sandy-colored hair, covered at the peak of his head by the comical cap, hangs in ringlets to his shoulders. There is lean muscle on his bones, sunshine in his face, and a fine mouth of teeth that give brilliance to his smile. He is flashing all he has to Sarah who is across the room, backed up near the fire, blenching. The robe she clutches over her breasts is scant clothing, not much to hide behind, nothing to turn to for modesty. Her white hips and thighs show through. Several layers of the gauzy material ornament the gown’s hemlines. The ruffled edging takes over where her black stockings leave off, and provide a bit of alluring cover for the places where a woman is different from a man.

  Sarah has to wonder whether it is shocking to him, or surprises him, finding her dressed like this with another man, an old toad. It’s obvious what she’s doing. She feels more than a bit uncomfortable being caught in the act, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. The buck is not blind, he raises an eyebrow, licks his lips and points himself up on his toes, giving her a longing deep look, a leer, that lets her know he fancies her looking so fine, and that he is a freethinker, game if she is. Everything is all right. He’s not angry.

  Is he thinking what I think he’s thinking? Sarah wonders. I think he is! Ooh, Cornie!

  Corn Dog’s intrusion and his gaze prick her, they challenge her to be free herself, to let her mind and body go where they will. She mulls over his manflesh. In the wide open spaces Corn Dog takes on human perspective, but in the confines of the hotel drawing room he is larger than life, like a moose in a gilded cage. The thin cotton suit, vanilla white, is skin tight, hip-hugging, and shows off his physique nicely. The cap, starchy linen over a cardboard backing, in the likeness of an inverted ice cream cone, is at the same time absurd and liberating. She gets Cornie’s joke: a freethinking cap. Inside she is laughing, singing, whistling, overjoyed, but it is not her nature to express herself directly. She has more practice at being who she is not. She should be all over Corn Dog like hot peach sauce on a sundae. But as a split personality, she has her pride and her shame in the same bucket. The one thing she is good at, that she takes pride in, is modelling. The success of her career is based on her coolness. Never let the customer see you sweat. She is delighted to see her buck, but her model poise, her professional aplomb, tells her it will never do to come apart at the seams and throw herself on the ice cream man in front of old man Taod.

  If Cornie’s not angry, well maybe I am, the split personality thinks as she does her damnedest to put on the expression she uses when all else fails, as it so often does, of cool superiority, distance, contempt. At long last they are reunited and she can do nothing but hide behind the expression of habit, that polished veneer, and wear a sulky smart smile on her face. Her better half stands by watching her helplessly watching herself.

  Corn Dog smiles with understanding. If only she knew! The same paralysis seized him that day he saw her leaving the hotel. Suddenly, acutely, he was lame, dumbstruck. He sees her now not as the resplendant Queen of the Night, the beauty he is speechless and immobile in front of. He sees her for how crippled, how human, she is, chronically unbalanced, burdened by this block of fear; and while her imperfection diminishes her divineness in his eyes, it in no way eclipses her beauty or his desire to have her shine it on him.

  The brave has been there and back. To break the ice he takes a step closer to her. Sarah, her back already to the fire, stands pat. She does not say, “No” to Corn Dog, nor does she say, “Yes” to him.

  As a young man Sir Percival was an officer in the Brutish Army in Mahabharata, the Makashwar Fusiliers, and distinguished himself in the Ghanji War, but now he is in too poor shape to do anything physical to stop Corn Dog. However, he continues to intervene by kicking up a fuss with his mouth. “Move back, sir! Out, damn you!” He yells. “I’m warning you! Get away from this lady. You didn’t hear her say she wanted this bloody ice cream, did you? You are trespassing. Do you know what that means? Now if you don’t leave this instant I’ll call the hotel security and have you removed by force and arrested.”

  It is a tense moment of confusion and stifled upheaval. Laudette knows when to keep her mouth shut, and Gloria is a match for her father in strength and silence. She is too young to understand precisely what is happening, but she knows the ice cream man even if her mother acts as if she does not. No one has to tell her. She can see her face in his, living mirror-image proof that she is extraordinary for there is no shortage of handsome features in the man for her to identify with and be proud of. Gloria grins at him with unabashed delight and the beam draws his attention her way. When he looks over at the hall doorway and sees her, her eyes, star-spangled rainbows, looking up at him with wonder and recognition, his grin grows brighter yet.

  He pushes past Taod and dashes over to Gloria, squatting, leaving just over an arm’s length between them so as not to threaten her, so they can see one another eye to eye. Again, as when he met her mother, it is a case of love at first sight, and the feeling is mutual. How naturally and nimbly he moves, a child like me, she thinks in her natural mind, feeling her thoughts all through her body. And he thinks, what a honey she is!

  Taod stamps his feet and pic
ks up the telephone as Corn Dog hops forward. A step closer, Gloria goes to him without shyness or anxiety. His bright sunshine smell, his slender strong bronze arms around her give her a lift and a roll of natural woman’s pride and power.

  Daughter is mother to the woman. Seeing Gloria, her high spirits boosted in Corn Dog’s arms, causes the shadow to pass away from Sarah. Her hard smile softens, her eyes lighten up. “Percy, no, it’s all right.”

  Crying is the first step in the right direction. She lets the floodgates of joy behind her eyes open.

  “Oh you!” She doesn’t look much more than a child herself as she goes to her knees and piles on Corn Dog, laying her hands on Glory at the same time. She cries all over them with her deep dark watery eyes, runs her hands through the curls of his hair, and gives him a big hungry kiss of hello, enveloping his mouth in her big, soft lips. Gloria, marvelling at the man and the different side she is seeing of her Mummy, carrying on so, being so affectionate rather than stuffy, ruining her perfect face with laughter and crying muddy rivers of eye makeup down her cheeks, showering her and the man in the middle with everything she’s got, squeezes in happily, tightly.

  And so the underdog, unable to get a stake in white society by either art or craft, turned to hook and crook, now has a goddess in each arm. Lucky dog!

  “Take off this stupid hat,” Sarah laughs, pulling the cone from Corn Dog’s head. “It makes you look like a dunce. Anyway, don’t you know how to act in the presence of a lady? Make that two ladies.” Her chuckles alternate with sniffles as she nods her head toward the girl he has in his other arm. “This is Gloria Beatrice.”

  The split pea holds her tongue and does not tell Gloria who the ice cream man is. As a freethinker through and through, Corn Dog, a foe of labels, does not formally introduce himself either, but says simply, “Hello, I’m an old friend of your mother’s.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “My Pop calls me ‘Kid’.”

  “That’s a funny name.”

  Gloria takes it that he is her father, but like him, she is naturally free, not one to draw lines and fence herself in with limited concepts of family relations. Laudette is as much her mother as Mummy. Harry is her Daddy-o, Earl her Uncle Early. She is an unusual child. If any one could grow up normally having a Daddy and a Daddy-o or two—whatever her mother might have in mind—it is certainly she. She is a natural in the easy way of open-mindedness and poetry. Subconsciously, she has already collected enough images in her mind of the games men and women play with one another to open an art museum; instinctively, she understands that one of the things they can do is make babies, herself, for example. But she is a daughter at large, any man she gravitates towards is a source she might spring from, a man without a label, her father, generically speaking.

  No introductions are necessary now, she recognizes the man present for who he is, the greatest one for laughing and playing games and being clever at making things, a figure in the flesh not just close to her heart but a perfect match to the one therein. She sees him as noble, a notable, from the homeland of heaven, the good old time and place, where she was before she was born, where she is now inside, in her dreams. He is the cream of the cream of men, the king of the crop that the Real McCoy is Earl of, an elite of a different order than that of the walrus, and the money magnets, smoother and cooler than even Mister Swan, her dear Daddy-o. The little girl clings to the ice cream man and a messy, gooey feeling swells up inside her. Her recognition is a confirmation of herself as a special person. In a flash, a moment of differentiation, she can distinguish herself as a separate personality; the self before it said “I” crosses over into the land of a singular particular first person identity and destiny. She can love herself all the more because there is something, someone, she is and yet she is not.

  While adult and child spend a moment getting acquainted with one another, Sarah must attend to closing shop early this evening. She apologizes to Sir Percival for it. “Percy, I’m sorry about this. But my friend and I haven’t seen each other in over two years. Gloria’s his little girl. He’s never seen her. Isn’t it wonderful! Please understand, be a dear.”

  Sir Percival is more concerned about what has become of his booking than he is about marvelling at the reunited family. In fact he is left a little cold seeing the model throw herself upon a man who in his eyes seems rather common. Still he has seen her charms and hopes that a silly thing like a boyfriend is not something to cause permanent interference. “Can I see you next week then?”

  “We’ll see,” she says, genuinely unsure about what this new development will mean for business, and to her affair with Harry Swan. She is glad she kept her privacy, and never let the thing with Harry run away beyond what it was meant to be, a little fun and distraction for them both. At the same time the practical pea is not one to go out of her way to alienate any of the men who support her. The beautiful boy and girl are birds of a feather, freethinkers, not ones to make moral rules, or act as if they own one another. Tomorrow they will get down to practical and philosophical questions, discuss business and life, tonight the mood is basic: home sweet home is wherever the buck is, every sweet bone in her body is aching for Corn Dog and no one else.

  She closes the book on Sir Percy, shows him out and turns to find Corn Dog teaching Gloria how to braid some pieces of ribbon she had in her hair.

  To hell with the world, she thinks, as she puts her arms around him, glad to again have a grasp on what a real artist feels like. If he has no money, and I expect not, I don’t mind modelling to support him. He will stay nearby. It will be like old times in the log cabin library, love and ice cream in the afternoons. Things will work out, love will find a way …

  They all tremble for a moment together again, divine happiness, the white goddess and the noble savage, the odd couple with child, a family together. Even Laudette gets drippy-eyed.

  Sarah could be full of questions, but isn’t. She’s itching to get Corn Dog out of that white coat and roll his sweet smooth hard bronze body around her soft satin bed. He reads her mind and as he breathes her scent, the peachy pea aroma that hits him hard and gets him feeling light-headed, the charge in the room grows so striking that the sitter knows to take Gloria back to bed. “Baby, you know the rules by now, no late visiting with the grown-ups. Say ‘goodnight’ to this nice man, and thank him for bringing us this ice cream. And let’s get to it before it melts!” The sitter is sensitive enough to take a cue from what wasn’t said, and does not say the word “father” either. Tomorrow there’ll be plenty of time for stories about birds and bees. As the days go by and Gloria grows up a little and gets familiar with this man, it will be easier to explain. Laudette takes the ice cream from the table and leads her down the hall, humming The Lullaby of Dreamland as she does.

  Back in bed Gloria eats two big scoops of ice cream that Laudette spoons out into a bowl, and with that melting in her stomach, her wakefulness goes as it came, suddenly. She wanders off to a wonderland in her inner eye more real than the flesh on the pillow, to dreams sweeter by far than the ones she had the night before when she had the brief glimpse of her mother and Harry Swan and the sounds of their lovemaking on her mind. The young sleeping beauty shudders with delight as she relives the moment when the ice cream man held her and her love sparked and flickered in her pit. In her dream it bursts into flame, becomes a vision of god, the Lord Mother inside her. While her parents explore one another, the two and a half year old sleeping innocent, without guile or guilt, is taken to a land of freedom beyond words: she dreams of herself as the adult within. Gloria pictures herself her Mummy’s age, reproductive, a full-grown woman with soft tan breasts, long tan legs, a fleshy fertile scent, all manner of wiles and wearables, and a look, a style and a touch that conveys all the brutal and beautiful force of her unique womanhood, a woman of her own design. She is the queen mother of music and love, the center of male attention in a swinging universe, light and dark, a playgirl in a set yet to be played, with nothing
inside coercing her to be beholden to male demand. A trend-setter, a leader rather than a follower, she has no fear of breaking whatever rules she wants, and, unlike her parents, no compulsions to break them either.

  The fullness she feels in her guts warms her like ten blankets and means a lifetime of being able to sleep deeply, soundly, and securely.

  In any case she leaves Laudette behind, awake, sitting up in the bed next to her, glued to the tub of ice cream, eating until every last spoonful is gone.

  And meanwhile, back in the parlor, alone at last, Sarah releases the grip she has on her gown, letting it open to reveal her slender, tender neck and shoulders, her breasts, soft, perfumy and white, her navel and the blond thatch on her love nest. The lovers who in time past lost their hideaway to fire now find themselves consumed by a subtle form of that element. They melt in one another’s eyes, then arms, then mouths. His kisses and her love bites, his whispered airs and her sighs and prayers, both of their heavy breathing mix to fan the flames growing below. They forget their past and future, and live forever in this moment of fairy tale ending, happy ever after, they in the sun of their passion, finding the children within them, as their baby girl in the flesh sleeps peacefully in the next room, discovering the woman inside her. For tonight no questions asked about what he’s doing dressed as an ice cream man, why he was not there when he was supposed to be, and is now when she least expects him, no explanations offered of what she was doing with the senior citizen, hardly dressed at all, and about what took her so long herself.