That winter after you were born your father insisted that his wife stay home with the baby until the weather warmed with the spring and when it did, then she brought you with her in to work. You were quiet and good, content to lie on your blanket in the buggy and listen to the clatter of the keys on the adding machine while your mother punched in the numbers, tallying up the accounts and keeping track of the invoices, sending out statements and paying off bills.
They say that real memory only just begins at four years old, that anything before that is no more than a concoction, a fantastic muddled dream, and maybe this is so. Nevertheless, you would have a picture of your mother in your mind, and whether it was something you remembered or whether it was something your father told you or whether it was something you'd made up is impossible to know. What you saw was your mother perched on the edge of her chair with her back straight and her feet crossed at the ankle. She was wearing a plain brown skirt that hit her legs at mid-calf and a cream-colored silk blouse with a collar that tied into a bow at her throat, held in place there by a gold and garnet brooch. Agnes's eyes swam big behind the thick lenses of her glasses, and her lips pursed thoughtfully as she wrote a careful row of numbers down a column at the edge of a customer's bill. This she folded and tucked into an envelope, moistened the flap with a flick of her tongue, then sealed it and set it on a pile, to be mailed later in the box on the corner that you'd pass on the walk back home.
The bell above the door chimed, and Josef's voice boomed as he greeted a customer who'd come in at the front of the store. The phone rang, and Agnes answered it, listened intently, then pulled out a piece of paper and a pencil and licked the lead before she carefully wrote down, in neat round letters, the order that she would pass on to her husband to fill. Overhead, the ceiling groaned, and then the door at the top of the stairs opened and Matka in her black dress was descending like a shadow, a slow-moving shape on swollen feet that hobbled up the aisle to settle on her stool behind the counter, as torpid as a toad.
Then you were older, and you were loose in your father's store, toddling up and down the narrow aisles between the towering shelves, caroming past stacked boxes of cereal and crackers, cans of vegetables and soup, racks of bread and buns. You careened, squealing, around the corner by the meat case, where heavy slabs of pink beef lay on beds of crushed ice, fresh parsley curled around the brown knots of the pork knuckles, the dimpled pale skin of the chicken breasts seemed to shiver in the cold, and you were a mere shimmer in the glassy ogle of a fish's eye. The pop machine in the corner hummed around its hoarded treasure—jewel-like bottles of ginger ale and root beer, cream soda, orangeade, grapeade, and Coke. The freezer case let out an icy sigh; the produce bins—piled high with ragged heads of lettuce, papery-skinned onions, dusty potatoes, bearded corn—shuddered at the pounding of your father's footsteps behind you. You squealed again at the hard grab of his hands—to your own ears it was a scream, part terror, part delight—as he snatched you off your feet and swung you up high over his head, swooped you around and then plopped you down on the top of the highest shelf. Where you sat, head spinning, legs dangling above the grown-ups' heads, including your father's—his pink scalp shone, Agnes's hairpins glinted, Matka lifted her chin and her big face was like a powdery moon rising over the blue-black sky of her dress. You were drawn downward by your fear, and you leaned into it, wailing. Hands outstretched, you fell into your father's open arms.
"That'll teach you, Meena," he said, as your mother whisked you away.
Or, from a place on a step halfway down the basement stairs, you were watching the play of your father's shadow as it moved, hugely, over the rugged limestone walls below. You were sitting on your hands because if he caught you sucking your thumb then he was going to thump you on the forehead with a quick hard flick of his finger that would blind you for a moment. Josef carried boxes from one side of the basement to the other. He pried open a crate of oranges with the claw of a hammer, and the nails screamed in the wood. He whistled through his teeth as he worked. He stopped and dusted his hands on his pants. He fished his pipe out of his apron pocket and packed a pinch of tobacco down with the flat of his thumb. A match flared, the fragrant smoke wafted up and swallowed him.
Or, you nuzzled next to him in the frozen dawn. The wool of his coat scratched your cheek and the cold leather of the truck's front seat was warmed by the bare backs of your legs under your skirt. Hot air blew out of the vents into your face; it lifted your hair. Icicles whiskered the trees; branches bent and broke under the dead weight of the piled snow. Yours was the only vehicle moving on the street, and all around you the city of Linwood looked abandoned, asleep. Josef gripped the wheel with both gloved hands. He cursed as he turned a corner and the car skidded, corrected, then crawled on, over the leaden river, past the frozen stares of the frowning statues of the saints on Bohemie Bridge.
Or, you were sitting on the kitchen floor in a buttery pool of warm sunlight. The breeze from a fan stirred your mother's hair, which was strewn across the yellow linoleum, where Agnes Krejci lay on her back with her hands out-flung, palms up, fingers softly curled. One leg was straight; the other was bent. Her skirt was hiked up to reveal the lacy hem of her slip against a varicose tangle of blue veins on the low inside of her thigh. Her eyes behind her glasses were open, unblinking, and her plain features now seemed delicate and fragile, beautiful even. You were tracing the outline of your mother's face with a fingertip—from temple to jaw, chin to lips, nose to brow—skin as cold and flawless as the polished porcelain at the bottom of the bathtub, as smooth and pale as the softened wax of the Christmas candles in church.
An angry wasp buzzed in a raised window, trapped somewhere, between glass and screen.
It was 1955, and you were four years old. You had been cranky all morning and unusually willful, and your mother had been complaining—she had a headache, she was sleepy, it was so hot and muggy she felt strangled, she couldn't concentrate, the light from the lamp on the desk, dim as it was, hurt her eyes. Annoyed, Josef sent his wife home to put you down for a nap.
He closed the store at seven o'clock that night, as always—took the cash out of the drawer and put it in the safe behind the counter, swept the floor and turned off the lights, and as Matka plodded up the stairs to her apartment overhead, he locked the doors, front and back, then drove home to the house on Otis Road. He brought the evening paper in off the porch. This was his favorite time of day. He was expecting the smell of his dinner cooking, the sound of polka music playing on the radio, the sight of his little girl toddling toward him, the feel of his wife's lips nipping a quick kiss at his chin. But not tonight. Silence, stillness, shadows instead. Puzzled, he slapped the paper against his leg and called out as he passed through the front room—"Agnes?"—then the dining room—"Meena?"—then the swinging door—"Hello?"—and finally into the kitchen, where Agnes was sprawled on the floor and you lay curled against her.
It was an aneurysm, a subarachnoid hemorrhage that burst within her skull; it flooded her brain with blood, she fell, and in that instant Agnes Krejci was dead. By the time Josef came home that evening, she had been dead for hours, probably all afternoon, the doctor said.
You were only four years old. Why weren't you crying when your father found you? What did you think had happened?
Had you seen your mother fall? Or maybe you'd only heard the sound—the gasp of sudden pain, a hand scrabbling for support against the tiled countertop as vision dimmed—and then you turned to see your mother's knees buckle and her body fold toward the floor.
What look on Agnes's face, of astonishment, of puzzlement, of fear? Did she know? Did she call out to her baby? "Meena!" Her thick glasses, one lens shattered. A sheen of spittle at the corner of her mouth. Such a terrible stillness; the world in long, silent pause.
And then did you call out to her? "Mama!" Crab crawl on all fours to her side? "Mama?" No answer. Agnes didn't blink or breathe or stir.
How long then, before you would begin to u
nderstand that your mother was gone for good?
When you asked Matka where your mother was, the old woman answered, "Your mother is an angel. Your mother is a star. She's everywhere and nowhere." Then pointing a finger straight at you: "She is right here." You could peer at Agnes Krejci's face in that old photograph on your father's dresser and then find it again, a shadow in hiding there behind the clear features of your own girl's face in the mirror.
And then you were all alone in your bed in your room in your father's house, and you were supposed to be asleep but there was only darkness all around you and so you were awake, and you were alone. No movement and no sound. The door was closed and the room was dark, and you understood that there wasn't any way for you to know for sure whether the world was still out there somewhere on the other side beyond it, unchanged. It might have been worse to dare to look and see. Because, what if you were right and there was nothing? No sound, no movement, and no light. You leaned against the window sill to peer out at the deep shadows of the woods that climbed the hill toward the park behind the house, and you could just make out the tangle of the branches at the tops of the trees, against the lightening sky. The glass was cold against your cheek. You would wait for morning that way, hunched over upon yourself as if you might be aboard a boat set loose to float upon a sea of nothing.
After your mother's death, Josef brought you with him into the store every morning and all day Matka looked after you in the apartment upstairs: two bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room, and a kitchen. The ceilings all were slant.
You started school, at Arthur Elementary, in the fall when you were five years old, and it was there in Miss Temple's morning kindergarten that you first became aware of Libbie Grandon, whose family had sometime that summer moved into the house next door on Otis Road. You lived in houses set side by side, with yards and driveways in between, but such can be the closed world of early childhood that it wasn't until school started in September that you knew that Libbie was there.
Miss Temple was a beatnik. She had wavy brown hair and a mole on her chin, and she wore long dark skirts and loose silky blouses and black tights and soft leather flats. Hers was a kindergarten just like any other one. The children sat in a circle on a braided rag rug and listened to their teacher read a story or call out the alphabet or play her guitar and sing, tapping her foot upon the floor. You in a red and green plaid dress with a full skirt and puffed sleeves, smocking on the front, white socks, buckled shoes. Libbie close by, wearing brown corduroy trousers and a forest green sweater and yellow rubber boots. Or dungarees with red plaid flannel lining. A black velvet jumper with pink silk roses embroidered on the straps. Her fine blond hair was tied back with a ribbon or woven into a pair of narrow braids.
Every day just before lunchtime Miss Temple led the children in single file out to the courtyard at the front of the school, where the mothers would be sitting in their cars, parked at the curb. On days when it was raining, Matka stood on the sidewalk, planted there in her black rubber galoshes as firmly as if she were a tree that had sprouted from the pavement that morning while you were away inside the school. In one hand she held an umbrella. Her head was wrapped in a gray scarf that she'd tied into a knot under her chin. She took your hand and walked you back to Krejci's, where you would spend the rest of the day together, until it was time for the store to close up and then Josef could take you home.
Each night as you followed your father up the limestone steps up to your own dark and silent house, next door at the Grandons' it was another world altogether, a bewildering muddle of sound and sight—Mr. Grandon hammering at something in the garage; John banging a basketball against the concrete; Libbie riding a bicycle in circles around him, training wheels squeaking; Mrs. Grandon framed by a square of light at the back door, calling to the dog; Rags frantic in the side yard, barking at you and your father before you went inside.
The small stone house in Wellington Heights was in a good part of town, with long lawns and spacious homes on broad tree-lined streets that led up the hill to Ellis Park, with its woods and creek and small zoo. There was an aviary there that kept an eagle and an owl and a family of peafowl. A chicken-wired monkey house. Small animal cages, with badgers and skunks and a bobcat and a wolf behind wrought iron bars. And off to the side, apart from the rest, in a more modern concrete-walled compound of their own, a pair of black bears.
Wellington Heights formed a trapezoid, framed by Otis Road on one side, the park on another, the river on the third, and Vernon Boulevard on the fourth. Across Vernon Boulevard was an area known as Nowhere, and on the other side of the river was the Czech village that was called Bohemietown.
There was a stillness inside that solemn stone house on Otis Road. There was a darkness in the woods that climbed the hill out back and sprawled away farther, toward the park. There was you, a lonely little girl lying sleepless in her bed, listening for your father's heavy footsteps on the stairs and hearing instead the cries of the peacocks, monkey chatter, wolf howl, sometimes the bobcat's other-worldly scream. And there was Libbie Grandon, whose full name was Elizabeth Mellencamp Grandon, whose father sold houses and drove a blue convertible, whose mother played bridge and ordered groceries from your father's store, who had an older brother named John and a cocker spaniel named Rags and a tabby cat that she called Smith. Who had moved into the big green house with the flower boxes and sunny yellow trim next door at the end of the summer, when you were five.
Josef Krejci was proud of where he lived and of his house. He'd come a long way, he said, from the cramped clapboard bungalow where he'd grown up with his widowed mother in Bohemietown across the river to there, Wellington Heights. Both his parents were first generation Czechs. But, your mother was a princess and your father was a king—that's what Matka promised.
And when you asked, "What about me?"
"You are a miracle," she said.
The park behind the house and the woods that surrounded it loomed in the dreams of your childhood as deep and dark and dangerous as the Bohemian forests that figured in the tales and legends that your grandmother conjured up on those long afternoons spent upstairs in the apartment, where you waited for and at the same time dreaded the end of the day when your father would come to collect you and take you home. Matka's warnings sang in your ears. Beware of wolves and witches, trolls and dwarves, the old woman cautioned, and said that when the long cold winters closed down over Bohemia, then the fathers there might turn to the sweet meat of their own children for survival. Loving dads would be transformed into bloodthirsty monsters, men who thrilled to the taste of babies that even after the snow had melted and the ice had thawed, when the gardens were full and the geese were fat again, still they craved that soft fresh flesh, and when they came upon a child alone...
Mrs. Grandon's worries for Libbie were far more modern and worldly and common than that. She feared drunk drivers in speeding cars, radioactive light waves from the television screen, a lightning strike that could ride the phone line into your ear and short out the circuits of your brain. Polio. Communism. The atom bomb. All of which seemed as unlikely to you as Matka's malevolent monsters did to Libbie.
Your father's stone house was halfway up the hill—the back yard rose up wild and overgrown toward the park, where you could mount the stile at the corner of the wire fence and then follow the path that twined through the trees until it opened up into a grassy clearing that was maintained by city workers at the back side of the zoo.
Or you could follow the pavement of Otis Road itself into the park, climb the cobbles to the pavilion at its top, where there was a store that sold candy and pop and snacks and ice. Behind the pavilion the land dipped down toward the crease of Ellis Creek, then rose abruptly up again to the deeper woods of Hollow Hill. From there you could see past Old River Road, across the bunched buildings of downtown Linwood and beyond, the streetlights stretching out through the neighborhoods toward the fields far away where, abruptly, they stopped—as if the city might have been a
mere island of life in an otherwise empty ocean, adrift, there seemed to be nothing but utter darkness on beyond.
The neighborhood kids are all out playing in the yards on Otis Road at dusk, and Libbie Grandon and her brother John are among them. Bike tires churn in the gravel driveways, balls are tossed from hand to hand, a back screen door slams shut, the street lamps snap on, porch lights are swarmed by a flutter of pale moths. You are standing at your window on the second floor of your father's house, and from that height you can see almost all of what goes on below you. You are above and apart and alone because your father will not allow you to join in. The world is a dangerous place, he says. And at five years old, you are still too young for it. You don't have a mother, and that means there is no one who can be counted on to look after you out there—you would be on your own.
Until there came a chilly Sunday morning in the late spring, when Libbie's mother was out working in her garden, getting it ready for summer by putting in tomato stakes, unbundling the roses, and raking away winter's debris and dead leaves. You were watching from your window, as usual. You let the glass catch your breath in a circle of fog, wiped it away with a fingertip, and peered down at Mrs. Grandon, who looked as exotic as a jungle bird out there—her body a bright splash of color against the drab background of browned grass and turned earth.
"Your mother is a princess," Matka said, and you were only five years old, but already you understood that this was just a story. It was a game you played, it was a tale you told each other, as pretend as the hand puppets that Miss Temple had at school—alive with gesture and bearing and voice at the cuffs of her sleeves when she held them out before her, but otherwise as limp and dead as a pair of old socks at the bottom of the box in the cupboard where they were kept when they weren't being used.
The Minor Apocalypse of Meena Krejci Page 3
