I heard Mitch walking on the concrete floor below. He tapped with his pencil on the water tank, a small reverberating sound that echoed itself. I looked over the edge of the attic opening and saw him figuring on a tablet, holding his OCD manuals and a tape measure. He wore the same khaki clothes at home that he’d worn at the plant, before Clayton died and the business was sold. Now he wore shirts and ties to work and called on customers; I think he hated selling. Too proud not to resent doing it, and at his age. He must have been fifty. I was thirty-five, but I didn’t feel young. Looking at him from above, I felt so distant I could have been watching from another planet. He stood inspecting the door to the patio, so involved he was unaware of the light on over his head. He turned abruptly and strode away into the garage.
I stepped back, switched off the light, and took up the bulky clothes in the dark. The ladder was difficult. I held on with one hand and was halfway down when I got stung. Hornets always nested in the attic in summer, but I’d supposed they were gone by now. It was ludicrous; I wasn’t willing to drop the clothes on the dirty floor and then sort them all again, and I couldn’t move my hand. I called to Mitch but he must not have heard. So I climbed down while the hornet kept stinging me, unable to see over bundled wools and corduroys, and walked into the kitchen where I could put them down.
My hand felt as though it were on fire; there would be some welts. Mitch came in and I stepped behind the heaped ironing board to give him room in the narrow kitchen.
He put a list on the table. “I can make an airtight shelter back there—rig up an air-pipe vent and hand pump through one of the windows, then brick them up with cement block. We’ve got the water tank we could siphon to supplement the containers, and I’ll need about a hundred sandbags to block the doorways.”
“Isn’t there room for us in the town shelter? We’re only two miles away.”
“They recommend having your own if you can.” He put the manuals on the ironing board in front of me. “You need to read these.”
“How can we afford—”
He nodded once. “I’ll need your help on this.”
What he meant was money. I looked down at the booklet and saw a gray and yellow illustration of a man shoveling dirt onto a door. The door was propped at an angle against an outer wall. His sweater and the dirt were yellow, as though he were already covered with dust. A Plan But No Time: Pile the dirt from the trench on top of the doors. I scanned the words, not really seeing them. Try to get in a shadow; it will help shield you from the heat. The ironing board was piled high and the supper dishes were still on the table; my hand was throbbing and I felt almost dizzy with frustration. I turned a page and read: Time But No Plan: Fill buckets, sinks, a bathtub, and other containers with water.
“I can’t read these,” I said, “I’ll be up until midnight as it is. And the kids need coats this month. I can’t give you any help.”
For a minute he just looked at me. Then he leaned toward me over the ironing board. He was a lot bigger than me and seemed huge. “Damn it to hell,” he said. “I should know better than to expect help from you on a goddamn thing.”
The door to the breezeway was behind me, but I wasn’t going to turn around and leave my own house. “You’ve got no right to talk to me like that. For your information, I’ve paid half the bills in this house and bought all the kids’ clothes for two years.”
“And don’t you think you’re goddamn great for every penny you’ve spent!”
So we started. You remember his short fuse—breathing heavily and shaking with rage in seconds. That’s probably why he never raised a hand to you and left all the discipline to me—he got too angry to trust himself. I think I shoved the ironing board against him to get out from behind it. Then we were walking back through the house, just shouting. I was trembling but knew enough not to move too quickly; almost by instinct, he would have reached out and grabbed me.
I realized I was headed toward the back room, our bedroom, and I walked into the bathroom and locked the door. You’d better stay the hell in there, he yelled. There was silence except for his voice. I imagined you and Billy in your rooms, listening. I heard you open your door ever so quietly and knew you were afraid.
I told him clearly, I don’t have to stay anywhere. There are laws to protect me from men like you. The words came out of my mouth as though I’d had them in my mind all along. Later I wondered if I’d heard my mother say them to my father.
You say I planned for years, but there was no plan. He was earning less and less; I had to earn more and more. All those extension classes and summer courses to get the master’s, almost a doctorate, then insisting we put that house on the market and move into town when you kids were in high school. Finally he agreed. You know, I told him I’d move out alone if he’d sign an agreement to pay for your college educations. But I would never have left you. I was only gambling.
I couldn’t take it anymore, struggling on his ground.
RADIO PARADE
Danner
1963
Danner’s family sat in two rows of folding chairs on the wide sidewalk. The parade always passed Bond Hospital and Great Aunt Bess’s house at the very beginning, having formed on vacant lots out by the Tastee Freez, where there was room for all the floats to park. Bess sat on the white porch swing under the awning with Aunt Katie; they stayed back from the street so that Katie was out of the sun, but the cousins and the men and nearly everyone stood or sat in the heat. The women wore sunglasses shaped like wings whose transparent frames were pink or blue; Danner’s mother wore a red scarf over her black hair. On the high porch of Bond Hospital there were chairs and gliders drawn up for the ambulatory patients, and they began to drift into place guided by nurses. Bess didn’t own the hospital anymore and said it had gone down, just an old folks’ home, but Danner waited every year to see the patients in their long robes. The old people weren’t erectly tense like Bess but seemed weightless, nearly translucent, their skin purely white and their wild hair gauzy. An hour into the long parade, noise and confusion and blasting horns an unremitting din, they fell asleep sitting up, their hands in their laps. Heads fallen back, they dreamed with their mouths wide open.
The air smelled of heat and candy and the parade was heard far off, an invisible blare of cornets and the double-time pounding of drums. Scores of boots clicked taps on pavement, and Danner felt the waiting street shimmer. Candy coins thrown by children were already melting in their gold foil; when the bands fell out at the end of the route, breaking formation past the stone gates of the city park, their bulky uniforms would smell of trampled chocolate and sweat. Danner could almost smell them, when suddenly a first corps of majorettes swung into sight under the big trees of East Main. Their bronzed legs flashed and the crowd rippled, standing and shuffling, raggedly cheering as the girls saluted. The drum majorette wore a tall white fur helmet strapped to her head with a silver strap; behind her the others advanced in perfect double lines, the short skirts of their white uniforms starched nearly horizontal and buoyed by layers of red net crinolines.
These were the Bellington girls from the hometown band, always first in line. The majorettes were the same girls who danced at the pool dances and sat in boys’ cars at Nedelson’s Parkette, but now they were other-worldly and startling. Gazing straight down the center of the street that wound past the hospital through town to the fraternity houses and mansion funeral homes of Quality Hill, they smiled the same set, perfect smile. College boys would watch them from balconies hung with rebel bunting; watch them, not applauding. Do you know they set a girl’s hair on fire at the May Day Sigma Chi party? Yes, last week. In the dank basement of the junior high school, girls had stood by rows of battered olive green lockers and speculated. The lockers were ancient, like the rest of the building; Danner’s parents, even her father, had gone to high school in the same rooms and hallways. Now there was a new high school just outside Bellington, with a big parking lot where town boys parked their cars. She was lucky they pu
t it out before her face was burned. Who put it out? Danner, how should we know? What a stupid question, and her eighth-grade compatriots turned away. Danner, reaching into a cluttered metal shelf, found the rouge and the Maybelline eyeliner pencil she kept hidden beside her tattered notebooks; after third period, before noon hour and bag lunches in the gym, she went to the girls’ basement bathroom and lined her eyes while the plumbing hissed. Here in the June sunlight of the festival parade, school seemed to have ended years ago. Danner remembered her own surreptitious face, shadowed by yellowish lights of the low cement ceiling and reflected in the cracked mirror. Lined in black, alive in the empty, cell-like room, her eyes had seemed the eyes of an animal. She thought she looked older than she was, but in a secretive, evil way. She didn’t belong to her own face; except for her womanish hips, she was skinny and gawky, too tall; her straight brown hair wouldn’t curl. She had a reputation for being smart. Boys her age wouldn’t talk to her much; she didn’t know how to make the kind of conversation they liked. Mornings before classes, older boys from the country had to change school buses to get to the high school; they waited on the massive stone steps of the junior high. They scared Danner; they were like men, big and grown, with shadows on their faces and big hands like her father’s hands. They had no money for cars or they wouldn’t be riding the buses; they wore shabby coats and laced-up farmers’ boots, combed their oily hair forward and then back in out-of-style pompadours, smoked cigarettes in defiance of the rules. Danner walked past them, up the worn steps to the big double doors of the school, stealing glances at their mysterious faces. Always, they were watching her, their expressions guarded, sullen, angry. What did they know about her? No one else ever paid any attention. Hey, they sometimes said, softly, appraisingly. Their smiles were sneers. Though she dressed like a girl from town—in penny loafers, full skirt, ankle socks—they watched her openly. She was ashamed and lowered her eyes; the boys looked away then and continued talking as though she were invisible. She heard phrases, snatches of words, as she passed. How many times she give it up? or dead before you know it. Who was dead? Most of them joined the Army or the mines as soon as they turned eighteen. You never saw them except on the steps—not at dances or the movies, or at the carnival in summer, not at the festival parade. Son of a fucking bitch and she found a train to pull.
Danner tried to imagine them now, sitting across the street amongst the families, but their faces stayed coldly vaporous in smoke and winter breath. She was sweating and the sun shone in her eyes. The Bellington band had stopped to perform, three minutes of a fancy march-in-step. Horns glinted sideways above shoulders as the band dipped its knees, strutted, retraced its steps, and rocked. Farther up, the majorettes would be doing a routine; from here, Danner saw batons fly into the air above the numberless blue hats of the band. The bobbing hats were like those of wartime soldiers, garrison caps billed in black, the crowns flat. The jackets were dark blue with gold piping and fringed epaulettes; the trousers straight-legged; the shoes black, polished, the flying shine of trombones reflected on their surfaces. The band was beautiful and massive, a well-practiced shock of gold and silver against the mourning of the dark blue. The gold bowls of the tubas turned left to right above it all. In the back row were the boys with chimes and the base drummers, huge blank drums strapped tight to their bodies with belts. Danner felt a pounding in her stomach as the boys marched near her; they stepped in place and beat double time. The rest of the band kept silence and the boys stood pounding with both arms, their bodies vibrating in the center of the noise. Then it was over and the band marched on, “Stars and Stripes Forever” with horns in full and chimes ringing. Relieved, excited, the crowd stood and cheered.
Danner looked for Billy; he’d like the drums, and she thought she heard him yelling. Inclining her head, she saw him farther down the row. He was sitting on the Styrofoam ice chest, slumped forward in his white T-shirt and dirty shorts, his skin sun-beiged and his blond hair bleached almost white. You kids tan dark as Indians: you can thank your mother’s Black Irish blood. Did that mean Irish Negroes? Last night they’d watched the news on the big Motorola television: police with attack dogs in Birmingham, columns of dark bodies scattering suddenly, as though the film were sped up by mistake. Those niggers have made a fine mess down there, Mitch said, and Jean had called from the kitchen, You don’t need to speak that way. His voice, harsh: Don’t you try telling me how to speak. Then silence but for the water running as she rinsed dishes, and the announcer’s voice continued. Billy had thrown his leg over Danner’s as they lay on the rug; he turned to her and silently mouthed, Jigaboo. It was a word that had made them laugh when they were younger, but Danner turned away now contemptuously. The police were the bad ones; they were the ones with the dogs. No one spoke of it in social studies class at the junior high. They were supposed to discuss current events every Thursday when the Scholastic Readers were handed out; once the front of the six-page paper was a big murky photo of the marchers. Further on was a photo of President Kennedy in the new Rose Garden, and the teacher discussed the history of the White House. Hurrah for the red, white, and blue were the real words of the familiar “Stars and Stripes Forever” march, but the kids at school sang a parody about mothers and ducks. Bored at school, Danner had sung the words to herself, a silent rhythm in her mind, but she thought the word fuck instead of duck. Fuck was the word written all over basement walls of the old school; it was scrawled even on the big round pipes that were too hot to touch. Scrawled with crayon that melted and left a bright wax thickness, then a pale stain after the janitor scraped the texture off. There were ghostly fucks every few feet along the round steaming pipes; an angry, clinched word, wild. A while ago Danner had mentioned the graffiti to her mother, but Jean wouldn’t say the word even to comment. It’s just as bad to curse about sexual matters as to take the Lord’s name in vain. Danner didn’t talk about fucking to Billy, but surely he already knew.
The noise of the band moved off and Danner wished she were at home; the Boy Scouts were marching past and she was embarrassed to see them. Her embarrassment, an anxious sadness, confused her. The Scouts were some of the same boys from school, their crew cuts covered by the khaki caps, and the backs of their necks nearly shaved. Their thin necks looked shy and vulnerable; they did nothing but walk, shuffling a little, the sound barely audible. It wasn’t easy to walk through the entire parade in the heat; only boys thirteen and up were allowed. Billy wouldn’t march with the Scouts until next year, but Danner wished he’d quit before the event took place. Why couldn’t he just lose interest? The little cloth merit badges looked like women’s jewelry on the sashes they wore across their chests; the yellow scarves seemed feminine too, caught at the throat with metal clasps. She’d seen Billy’s up close—it was an eagle like those on Army uniforms or military seals. Painted to look like gold or brass but only iron underneath, dull gray where the wing was scratched. Danner stepped back from the curb and wished them all out of sight as the two leaders, men dressed in drab green and wearing berets, shifted the banner they carried. Of course the men carried it; adults would have felt silly walking along empty-handed. The boys, perhaps fifty of them, were all too warm in their long-sleeved dark shirts. The two Negro boys in the fourth row were wearing Keds instead of leather Buster Browns with laces, but their socks were dark. Danner knew Scouts had to have special black nylon socks with elastic garters; the garters had pleased Jean because they were old-fashioned. Billy, you will so wear them; they’re part of the uniform and I paid good money for them. Danner stared at her own feet so as not to look; her white sandals were grass-stained and knicked where she’d scuffed them. “Left, Left, Left right left” came the soft voices of the Scouts, meant to be so soft no one could hear.
Danner wiped her face with her hands. She wanted to sit in the shade but the best part of the parade was coming; she looked down the route and saw the first of the Queen’s Court floats, vast, shuddering as it moved forward. The biggest floats were constructed
over the tractors that pulled them, tractor and driver and hitch hidden in a frame of wood and chicken wire. They were hay wagons decorated in barns, the frames completely covered with crepe paper and thousands of Kleenex roses, colors arranged to make patterns or spell words: MONONGAHELA POWER, ALLEGHENY BELL. But the Queen’s Court floats were always purely white, surging constant and slow through the long parade. Hidden teenage boys watched from inside through rectangular peepholes to drive them at five miles per hour. The blockish floats were like an awkward herd of mechanical cakes tiered with girls in gowns and children in white under bowers. The first one always carried part of the Children’s Court, six-year-olds who’d participated in the crowning ceremonies on the lawn of the local college. Little girls in organdy and gloves, boys in white suits with short pants, bow ties. Danner squinted up at them against the sun—oh, it was hot up there—the warm pavement radiating heat, and they felt like giants.
Danner had been one of those children; somehow Billy hadn’t. She remembered riding in the parade: a confusion of caretaking by strangers before it began, the frothy dresses and the heat, sit just like this and don’t move. Endless slow progress of the oceanic float, the spell of continuous scattered applause while the street unwound below her. The cool, green-shaded park where she was lifted off the float by a parade marshal and fell at his feet as he released her, her legs completely without sensation. You mean you never moved once in the whole parade? His big face above her as he put her under a tree to wait for her mother, wait for her legs to come alive. The dreamy, sensual time in which she sat, immobilized, the green park dense with heavy trees and the parade fallen to wandering fragments across the dappled ground. The coldness of the shaded grass, her drowsy exhaustion, her legs tingling. She’d seen Jean walking into the park, wearing a full white skirt and sleeveless blouse—her hair was long then, pulled back in a chignon at the nape of her neck; her lipstick was red. Jean looked beautiful and anonymous, yet deeply familiar. Danner felt herself alone, unattached and content. Her mother was a familiar body moving over grass, the way sun moved and stopped abruptly at the shade of the trees.
Machine Dreams Page 17
