"Slide over," he said, his voice low, tight.
He got into the car, ducking under the roof, bumping up against Meena's ankle and her calf with the clumsy weight of his hard, heavy shoes, and she startled away from him, struggling across the wide front seat, her feet tangling up with his, her purse caught under her hip. She was fumbling clumsily with the keys, rolling them through her fingers because she couldn't tell which was which, and when she finally did find what she thought might be the right one, then she couldn't get it to fit into the ignition, but she knew she had to do it so she kept poking it and poking, scraping her knuckles and bruising her palm.
Later she will realize she must have been screaming, too. There seemed to be a lot of noise.
Finally Joe reached over and wrested the keys from her, jabbed the right one into the ignition, turning it so at last the engine came to life, with a disturbing roar because she was already pressing her foot down hard on the gas.
Joe sat beside her, deflated, with his head back and his eyes closed, one hand holding the scarf to his face and the other hanging uselessly, loose between his knees. And at that moment the truth flashed through Meena like a cold hard light: this man was her father, her invincible dad, the indestructible Josef Krejci, and now just look at him. He was hurt and he was helpless, and that put him at her mercy, didn't it?
And with that thought there was a coldness that came over her, a serenity that replaced the whirling panic and settled down upon her like a numbing blanket of snow. Or was it a kind of a stillness that rose up from someplace deep within until she was frozen over from the inside out, hardened her into something as smooth and solid-seeming as ice?
Meena turned around farther, aware even then that he wasn't going to go and see a doctor, certain that he wouldn't allow her to take him to the hospital and that he was unlikely to ask for or accept any other kind of outside help, either. He was ninety-eight years old. He couldn't live forever, could he?
She followed the parkway into downtown—deserted at that hour on an early Friday evening—and then crossed back over Bohemie Bridge into a shanty neighborhood that called itself Nowhere, an eyesore at western edge of Wellington Heights. The trees beyond the windows on either side of the car were dark forms that flipped past, bunched together like a mob that might be swarming toward her, reaching out to tap the windows, craning for a glimpse inside. She turned left onto Old River Road, with its deep ditches that dropped off toward the rabble of the trees on one side and toward the river on the other, and then she turned again, onto Otis Road where she lived with her father in the house where she'd grown up, and the headlights swept the serene blank face of the modest stone structure as she pulled the car up into the drive and rocked to a hard stop around back near the kitchen door.
And just as Meena had known it, Joe was not going to have anything to do with anything remotely medical. He wouldn't let her take him to the hospital, and when she begged him to let her call the doctor he refused and told her she was overreacting. Insisted that it was nothing serious—he'd just lost his footing that was all. No big deal. And then he went into the bathroom and was sick.
Soon Meena will be blaming herself for what happened. She will think she should have known it wasn't the mayonnaise in the tartar sauce at Larks that was bad, as her father kept insisting. He is such an old man and his face has paled, his skin is so cold to her touch and now his eyes seem to be losing focus. She helps him to his bed. He sits there at the edge of the mattress for a moment to collect himself, with his hands out flat on either side of him for balance. His breathing is shallow, labored even. She sees him wince and wonders whether he might be in pain, but she's afraid to ask. She knows that is not something he would want his daughter to know about. He refuses both her sympathy and her concern; he rejects her love as if he doesn't need it. Never did. He takes a deep breath and toes off his loafers, one by one.
"I'm okay," he says, not because he wants to reassure either his daughter or himself, but because he wants her to go away and leave him alone. Still, she bends over him, patting gently at the raw scraped skin of his cheek with a cold washcloth, but he flinches at her touch and snarls and turns his head away so now there really is nothing left for her to do but respect his wishes and step back.
He brings his legs around and lies down, fully clothed, on the bed. He licks his lips. His blue eyes gleam and stare and then seem to gather some of their focus again, and Meena understands that he has something he wants to say to her, so she leans in close again.
She watches as he struggles to speak. She leans closer still, cooperating. She holds her breath. She listens hard.
"Be at peace, Meena," he says.
She starts to respond, but he raises a hand to stop her.
"Remember." He closes his eyes.
"What? Remember what?"
"Remember..." He pauses. "Who..."
She doesn't know what he means. What is he trying to say? Who is it he wants her to remember?"
He swallows. He raises a hand and points a finger at her.
"You."
She shakes her head.
"Are."
Is that it? Are these to be his last words to her? It seems important that she get it right. She really does want so much to understand. She really does want to still believe that this man, her father, knows infinitely more than she does or ever will, about the world, about himself, and about her. He is so old. And she's always been a good girl. She's always respected him, even when he didn't deserve respect. She is his only daughter. She is a motherless child. She wants to behave herself and do as she's told because she still believes that her obedience to him will be rewarded, that it will redeem her, someday.
But he does not elaborate, he doesn't wait for her to answer, and now it seems that Josef Krejci has nothing more to say. He waves her away. He licks his lips, then sinks back into the pillows again, and settles down into the privacy of his own unknowable inwardness, miles away from here, worlds away from his daughter. His eyes are closed. His hands are folded on his chest. His breathing slows, and his body is still: he is asleep.
Meena is left reeling with confusion. What did he mean? Is she supposed to know?
This isn't the first time she's heard this: "Remember who you are." It's one of the things that her grandmother, Matka, said often when Meena was a girl growing up. Sometimes it seemed to mean one thing, and other times another. Maybe she was in danger of forgetting herself? Or, of overstepping her place? Maybe she hadn't been giving herself enough credit, maybe that was it.
And then the old woman was likely to go on to ask, as if it were a test—sitting back, her arms folded against her breasts: "Well, Meena, who is it that you are then?"
Her answer, whispered, choked: "I am myself?"
The old woman's hand waving, dismissing this: "Yes, yes, of course you are. But," louder then, "WHO ARE YOU?"
What could she say? Blushing furiously, her pulse pounding in her ears, with confusion, embarrassment, shame. "I am Meena Krejci?"
And with this would come the sunrise of Matka's warm smile, creeping up into her face as her cheeks filled out and pinkened and her dark eyes went bright with light. She leaned toward Meena, smelling of ferment and vegetables, and touched her thumb to the little girl's cheek. She nodded her big head, sat back again, sipped her tea, looked off as if lost in thought. Then, she turned to Meena again, and her look was slyer now, conspiratorial, as if they shared a secret of some kind between them. "Ano," Matka said. "Yes."
She leaves her father sleeping. She turns off the lamp and slips out of the room, pulling the door quietly closed. She creeps down the darkened hallway to her own bedroom at its other end and sits for a while in the chair by the window, watching the summer twilight dwindle into night. When finally it's fully dark, she rouses herself, gets up and crosses the hall to her own bathroom, where the pieces of her lingerie, sheer flesh-colored stockings and lacy bras, a rubbery girdle and bright white underpants, waft ghostly on the clothes hooks and to
wel bars.
Meena slips out of her shoes. She pulls off the torn pantyhose and steps out of the blood-stained green dress. She leaves the light off. She stands naked at the sink, her body soft and white and shapeless, and brushes her teeth, washes her face, runs a comb through her wild hair without once looking up to eye the hint of her own reflection in the mirror. A cotton nightgown hangs from a hook on the back of the door and this she lifts and slips on over her head. Pads barefoot to her bed and pulls the blanket back and gets in. The springs creak with her shifting weight until she has settled and lies still.
The window at the far side of the room is open and beyond the screen she can see the tangle of trees that she knows to be the woods that climb the hill behind the house, toward the park. The night is full of familiar sounds that Meena hears without hearing them: crickets, an owl, a dog, a car trolling slowly up the street, pausing at the top before shifting gears and moving on.
She might have been cut loose from any mooring, she might have been floating, she might have been a speck of dust spinning in a world of infinite inky empty space. As if the rest of the world had dissipated and disappeared, until, with dawn it would be recreated and take on its shape, its pieces coming back together to form the whole, then settling hardened and firm and solid again, each into its proper place.
Sunrise cracks through the curtains with one thin beam of hot white light that falls across Meena's face and ought to awaken her, but it doesn't, not right away. She is dreaming—something about water, something about floating, something about a sound that seems to be coming to her from somewhere else. A ball bouncing on the sidewalk, maybe, or a body rolling down a staircase. Shoes tumbling in a dryer. The thump and thud of her father going about the daily business of opening up his grocery store. She seems to hear him coughing, his morning hack and spit. Maybe he is moving boxes from one side of the room to another, but what for? Maybe he is stacking cans upon a shelf: soup, meat, vegetables, juice, and what else? Meena thinks she can see him clearly, in his apron, his white shirt shining, his heavy shoes, his wide bright tie. His sleeves rolled up and a bracelet of rubber bands pinching at the skin of his wrist. A smell of pipe smoke clinging to him, his skin, his hair, his clothes. He will be opening up the safe behind the counter; he will be putting the drawer into the register; he will be counting out the cash inside and, licking his pencil, making careful note of how much of this money he has to call his own.
He seems to guess that she's been watching him, and he looks up so sharply that her first instinct is to duck away and hide, but instead she wakes and the dream is quickly gone. Forgotten and replaced by thoughts of how much she has to do today. Household chores that Meena tackles every Saturday—grocery shopping, laundry, housecleaning, and maybe in the afternoon there will be time for some work in the garden, which needs attention, weeding and picking. The zucchinis will soon be too big to be any good anymore, and the tomatoes are in danger of over-ripening: maybe she will make a spaghetti sauce for supper tonight, use the lettuce and cucumbers for a salad...
And now Meena remembers.
Dinner at Larks. How Josef stumbled getting out of the car, how he fell outside the theater, how he was sick when they got home.
She sits up, holds her breath, listens hard, hears nothing.
And after she has put on her bathrobe, after she's used the toilet and brushed her teeth and splashed water on her face, then, she will go down the hall and check on him, then, she will see that he is still there on the bed, then, she will understand that he hasn't moved since she closed the door on him last night, that he has not been sleeping, that he is dead.
Meena Krejci stands here in her father's bedroom, holding herself just as still as she can, hardly daring to breathe, as she listens with some reassurance to the pounding steady strength of her own blood surging in her veins. Her legs seem to her to be as sturdy and thick as two posts rising up side by side out of the deep dark grain of the hardwood floor. Her bare feet look heavy and square planted there, firmly rooted in the bright splash of early morning sunlight that comes tumbling in through the opened window and onto the elaborate geography of her father's bed. That cold stillness that settled over her in the car outside the movie theater last night hasn't yet thawed but lingers still, and it keeps her solid and steady and numb.
She can't take her eyes off him: he doesn't look real, he doesn't look like himself. His skin seems to sag—as if he might be made of wax and has softened slightly—and it's lost its pinkish glow. The scrape on his cheek gleams. His eyes are as blue as ever, though: they gaze up at the ceiling, wide with belief.
When a sob begins to hitch in Meena's throat, she swallows it back, shakes her head, knows that if she were to cry right now it would be less for the loss of her father than for what she has come to clearly see has been the steady slow trickle of her own smaller self—what she used to want, what she thought she had, the girl she can remember that she had been at one time, a long time ago—and of her own life bleeding away from her, unstaunched.
There are so many things that Meena needs to do now, and she has no idea where to start, who should she call first? An ambulance? A doctor? The police? It seems too late for that, but too soon to be contacting the mortuary and making funeral arrangements either. There has long been a place reserved for Josef Krejci out at the Bohemie Cemetery, Meena knows, between his parents and his wife.
Just now the morning seems very still—if there is traffic outside, if there are animal sounds or the squeals of children playing or adult voices calling out, she doesn't hear them—and alone here in the house she's feeling a kind of peace, although she supposes it isn't likely to last long.
First, she takes a shower. She washes her hair and shaves her legs. When she feels the sting of soap on her skinned knees, her heart tumbles in her chest, and for that moment she can't breathe. But she leans into the water and wills herself to be calm. She will get dressed, she will eat some breakfast to fortify herself, and then she will decide what she's supposed to do next.
Meena knows that just as soon as word of what's happened gets out this house is going to start to fill as people come around, buzzing at the front door or rattling at the back. They'll bring food, they'll track in dirt, they'll want to offer their condolences, their sympathy, their prayers and support, and they'll want her to be appropriately grateful for it, too. They'll be searching her face to try to read her reaction to her loss, the sudden change in her situation that she'll have to learn to live with, maybe even be grateful for, and then, they'll go off to discuss it among themselves, later.
Meena isn't quite sure what it is she's feeling just now. Sorrow or relief, anger, guilt, or fear. It might be all of these. Or maybe it isn't anything at all.
Someone to Look After You
1951-1957
Once upon a time you were a little girl, and your name was Meena Krejci. You were born a grocer's daughter, on the coldest day of a cold winter, in January, 1951, when your father was already almost fifty and your mother was forty-two. This was too late in life for a woman to be having her first child, your grandmother told you, many times. According to Matka, Agnes Krejci should have been happy with things the way they were, she ought to have been grateful for all that she already had and not tried to add to it anything more. It was a long time before you came to understand just what the old woman meant by this, and when you asked, "But what about me?" Matka only shook her big powdery head. "Well Meena," she replied, "you were the price that was paid."
"You're just lucky you aren't a moron," Libbie Grandon would say later, touching her hair and smiling at the joke.
Your father was a large man, with big wrists and thick thumbs. His shoes were heavy on the stairs when he came up to bed at night. Matka was his mother, and she lived in the apartment rooms above the grocery store.
Krejci's was on the corner of 4th Avenue and 16th Street on the southeast side of Linwood, Iowa, in the heart of Wellington Heights. This was before there was such a thing as a supermar
ket. The store was small, a family business, and because there were a lot of Czechs in Linwood, the name was a common and familiar one, pronounced cray-chee, with the emphasis on the first syllable.
Krejci's was a popular neighborhood store, within walking distance for a lot of its customers, who came with their own carts or called in their orders to be delivered to their homes. later. The building itself wasn't much to look at—just a thick square box with green trim and white slat sides that your father paid to have repainted every year, a lit sign above the door, a long display window in the front, and a gravel parking lot out back.
Josef Krejci worked behind the counter, ringing up orders, taking cash, and making change. He had a wide smile that he saved for the ladies who came into Krejci's to shop. He was a man of dignity, and under his apron he wore a white shirt and a colorful tie. Dark pants with broad cuffs, heavy black shoes. A feather duster in his back pocket, rubber bands collected around one thick wrist, a gold watch strapped on the other. His hair was cropped so close to his skull that when his pink scalp caught the light from overhead, it shone. In his pocket he carried a thick roll of cash, bound by a rubber band, and he'd lick his thumb and uncurl a bill, then snap it with a flourish as he pulled it free.
Your mother was smaller but not in a delicate way. In the silver-framed photograph, Agnes stood next to Josef, and the top of her head was at his shoulder. She was wearing a dress with short sleeves that exposed her thickish arms. She held her hands folded in a pose under her chin; her hair was wavy and dark, her eyes deep set, her smile prim. Her hips were full and her legs were sturdy, feet planted solidly in low-heeled leather shoes.
It was Agnes's job to keep the books and look after the accounts, and she did this with precision at a desk under the stairs that led up to the apartment where Matka lived. When it was quiet in the store one could hear the old woman moving around up there; the floorboards creaked across the ceiling as she walked from room to room.
The Minor Apocalypse of Meena Krejci Page 2
