"Remember who you are, Meena," he said.
You sat up, pulled your damp hair away from your face. He was so large, looming over you—his broad face bobbed above his wide shoulders; he held his big hands folded together into one huge fist, which he shook at you. "Remember," he said again.
"Who am I?" you asked him.
"You are my daughter," he replied. "And now you are all that I have."
It was sometime in the week after Matka's funeral that you found Libbie waiting for you when you got home from the store. She seemed to have materialized from out of nothing, from the shadows she was there. You knew that she had dropped out of Mount Mercy. Well, to be exact, she didn't drop out. To be exact, she got kicked out.
When you asked her about it—"What happened? Why?"—she just rolled her eyes. Coughed into her fist and blew on her hands. They were chapped, and the nails were chewed, bitten to the bone like a fox paw caught in a trap.
She shrugged and sniffed. "They caught us smoking on the grounds," she said. You knew that "us" meant her and Gingi Noone.
Her face, a bright white saucer, glistened; it shone mask-like in the growing dark as you stood outside in the double driveways that ran between the two yards. The hard tweak of winter was gnawing, so you had to keep moving if you wanted to stay warm.
"Fucking nuns," Libbie went on. She moled her hands down into the deep pockets of her pea coat and hunched her shoulders up to her ears. That coat of hers was a hideous old moth-eaten thing, several sizes too big for her, that she'd picked up for a couple of bucks at a thrift shop downtown. "Frigid pussies," she said, shuddering. "Frozen cunts."
You bared your teeth, grimaced, gasped at the cold air and at these words, which frankly shocked you. You wanted to think that Libbie didn't mean what she was saying, not really. You wanted to believe that Libbie was only trying to be tough, like Gingi Noone. But you also knew that Libbie was nothing like Gingi Noone. Libbie was almost eighteen then too, but she looked much younger. She was so small, thin and shivery inside her big coat. Her lips were chapped and her cheeks were bright with two twin nickels of winter's pinch. She was kicking at a stone in the driveway, and with each kick she flinched. To you just then it looked as if Libbie were feeling the blows in her own body, as if she might really only be driving her own foot into herself.
What she was saying was only half—if even that—of the real truth. Because it wasn't just the smoking. It was also the lying. It was also the swearing. It was the blasphemy and the anger, and it was the temper tantrums that she was known to throw when she wasn't given her way. The disobedience and the insubordination. It was skipping classes. And it was sneaking out of her mother's house after dark to meet her friends and hang out at the new hamburger stand on First Avenue, talking to the boys, flirting and smoking and sometimes going off with one of them in his car.
So they kicked her out. And now, no more uniforms. No more catechism and no more morning chapel and no more midday prayer.
What would Libbie do? She seemed so small and thin and pale, she might have been fading away before yours eyes.
Your own situation at school wasn't much better. Not that you were ever in any kind of trouble. That wasn't it. Not that you'd been singled out in any way. That wasn't it either.
No, you were a hopeless case, scorned by the popular girls and worse off even than the most unpopular ones. They were at least made fun of, and even felt sorry for by some, but no one even saw you, you were altogether ignored. When you moved through the stream of students in the hall the way before you would part, mindlessly, no one even seemed to be aware that you were there. You went from room to room that way, from hall to hall, from class to class. Maybe the teachers took a kind of notice, but their awareness of you was oblique, sunlight bounced off the magnifying glass of the work you did, and it caused you to blush and stammer with embarrassment at the heat of their attention, even when what was being offered was praise.
Mr. Grandon was the only one who treated you as if you might be someone who was normal. He was all smiles and jokes and friendliness. "How's it going, kiddo?" he asked, his blue eyes brilliant, white teeth gleaming, blond hair glossy. Then he nodded happily when you stammered back that it was going just fine.
Captured forever in the school yearbook at the end of that year, your face would look as plain and vague as if someone might have rubbed it out with her thumb.
Libbie led the way, and you followed her around the back of the house to the Foreverland bomb shelter, where she shouldered the heavy steel door open, and when you hesitated Libbie took you by the hand and dragged you inside, where it was even colder and dark as death besides. She lit a match and held it to a camping lantern hooked to a chain that hung from the ceiling overhead. You could see now that Libbie had made a small private place for herself here. It was an encampment, with hanging fabrics that hid all the junk that had been pushed into piles against the cinderblock walls. In the center of the room, where the cots used to be, she'd unfolded a pair of lawn chairs next to a cracked plastic parson's table with a blue crocheted placemat on it. She'd plugged a space heater and a small television set into a thick black extension cord that ran out under the red steel door and across the grass to the garage.
"What do you think, Meena?" she asked. "Pretty homey, huh?" Her smile gleamed just like her dad's.
She flopped down onto a chair and gestured for you to take the other. She offered a cigarette, and when you declined, lit one for herself. The pea coat swam around her.
You were surrounded by boxes of old clothes, old shoes, suitcases and picture frames, broken appliances, rakes and brooms, lawnmowers, furniture, lamps. A lifetime's accumulation of extra and unnecessary stuff. Libbie, looking around and recalling the cots and the blankets and the cans of soup and vegetables, scoffed now at the idea that there might have been a place of safety here, in a world that would have otherwise, and for other reasons, been destroyed.
Because her mother was crazy, she said. Rolled the cone of ash at the end of her cigarette, raised an eyebrow, smirked: "Certifiable." And her father was even worse, he was a fool, flirting with anything in a skirt, even Gingi Noone.
She shook her head, then smirked. "Even you, Meena, for Christ's sake."
The dog was deaf and blind and arthritic; the cat was dead and so was old Mrs. Bickel, for that matter. Matka, too. John was away at school in California, off into his own life there. He didn't even come home for holidays anymore. Even poor old Leo Spivak had been drafted and shipped off to Vietnam, where he was flying helicopters, where he'd probably get blown to bits.
Libbie was feeling sorry for herself now, and who could blame her? The stuffed animals and dolls and childhood toys that once cluttered her bedroom had been packed into boxes that she'd dragged downstairs, out the back door and across the grass to this place, the bomb shelter, where they were piled up with everything else unidentifiable and forgotten that had accumulated there.
Her entire life seemed to be falling to pieces, and if something didn't happen soon, well, she did not believe that she could take it anymore.
She lit a second cigarette off the embers of the first.
"I was really sorry to hear about your grandmother," she said, blowing smoke. Then paused, thoughtfully. "Remember those crazy stories she used to tell us?" Grinning, shaking her head, tapping her ashes on the floor.
You nodded. "Yes, sure."
Later you would listen to Libbie swear that Matka's ghost still haunted the rooms of the apartment over the store. And couldn't you just about see the old woman sitting right there the same as she always had, in her chair by the window, watching the street, waiting for something to happen—but what? Soaking her feet in Epsom salts dissolved in a bowl of warm water, knitting, sewing, working away at something, one thing or another, with her knobbed fingers and her bolted joints, while she talked and talked, telling you a story of some kind: the Golem, the bears, the goblins, the pilgrim, the forest, the river, the mushrooms, the mud. Her hairpins glint
ing in the sunlight, her teeth sharp and white in the broad moon of her face, and a sheer bright buoyant glimmer of tears afloat there in the corners of her eyes.
"Once upon a time..."
Now Libbie was asking, "Remember how we used to pretend to be each other? How we lied about our names? How we were a pair of princesses, mistakenly switched at birth? I was you and you were me?"
Yes, you remembered that, too.
"Well now…," Libbie went on, thoughtfully, "…now I wish I really could be you."
The lawn chair creaked beneath her as she shifted and brought her arms around to hug herself. You peered through the dim light, through the gray whorl of cigarette smoke to study your friend's beautiful pale face.
"Me?"
Libbie sat up, excited now, and intent. "Yes. You."
And you knew then that of course Libbie had no idea at all who you were. Something she'd invented maybe, but surely not yourself.
Libbie was talking so fast now that it was hard for you to keep up, difficult to follow the train of her thought. She was talking about a boyfriend, how much she loved him. And you were lucky, weren't you, not to be loving anybody? Wasn't it all so much simpler that way?
"You can't imagine what it's like, to want someone this much. To feel that you are only half a person, you are nobody, without him. Without him, you might as well be dead."
Libbie sighed, then sat up, stomped out her cigarette and lit yet another.
"I wake up in the morning and the first thing I can think of is his face," she said. The phone would ring... and there it was, his voice, a deep thrill to hear. She was up until all hours of the night, in her room, talking to him. Sometimes she fell asleep that way, listening to him murmuring to her.
She made a face. "Sickening, isn't it?"
When you were young, you used to laugh about love. You used to think it was something sappy and ridiculous, slightly disgusting, something googlely-eyed and crazy, having to do with sweat and saliva and Deep Eddie yanking at his Thing. "Pee You," Libbie would say, if she caught her parents kissing. "Cooties!" she'd exclaim.
"Who is he?" you asked. "What's his name?"
Libbie shook her head. "You don't know him. He's older. And he's not from around here."
Oh, but he was beautiful, she went on. If you could call a man beautiful. And amazingly smart. He knew about everything. Absolutely everything.
"Where did you meet him? When?"
"Last summer. Here. He just showed up one night."
Libbie had been sitting outside on the front steps, smoking and listening to the crickets and complaining about the heat and the mosquitoes. She'd flicked her cigarette off, watched it bounce and spark against the sidewalk, and at that same moment the street lamp snapped on to reveal the shape of a boy outlined against the darker tangle of the boxwood hedge that rimmed the side yard.
How long had he been standing there?
He said something that made Libbie laugh, and right away she liked him. She liked the way his eyes were green and his hair was red, and he had a crooked thin half-smile that made him seem as if he knew something she didn't know, and that he thought it was funny. He took her hand and held it up to the light, comparing hers childish and pale to his freckled and raw-boned.
But he was not really a boy—he was a young man, four years older than Libbie, the same age as her brother. He worked at the used bookstore down on 4th Street, near the railroad tracks, and maybe he was also dealing dope.
He had a car, too—a yellow Mercury, with a black convertible top that he put down so they could cool off a little, let the wind blow through their hair. Mess things up some. They cruised up and down First Avenue and then he took her up to Twinkle Hill and they parked there under the trees with the whole of Linwood spread out below them like this great big glittery gift, theirs for the taking if they wanted it. If they knew how to take it.
They listened to the radio. Sly and the Family Stone. Simon and Garfunkel. In a white room with no curtains... C'mon baby, light my fire... Don't you need somebody to love? They smoked cigarettes. They smoked a joint. He talked and she listened—revolution, the man, the pigs, anarchy, peace. Policemen in Chicago. Soldiers in Vietnam. Tear gas and billy clubs, napalm and body bags. When he finally stopped to kiss her, well, that was all it took.
Libbie Grandon was in love.
She went on: some day she was going to marry him, but for now they only wanted to live together, if only they had a place of their own.
And so: "What will your father do with Matka's apartment?" Libbie was asking you now. "I mean, do you think maybe he'd be interested in renting it out? To me?"
Faye Grandon was outside in her yard planting pansies along the edges of her front walk in the first warm days of spring. She squatted in the dirt, wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. She stood, arched her back, raised a hand to her face, cupped one palm across her forehead to shade her eyes from the sun. She was wearing yellow shorts and blue rubber flip flops. She'd painted her toenails the color of tomatoes.
Across the driveway, on the other side of the hedge Josef Krejci—the grocer, a big old Bohemie in a flowered shirt, brown shorts, thick belt, socks and leather sandals—stood near the hedge. He was puffing on his pipe and looking thoughtfully up through his own smoke into the sky.
On her knees now in the rose garden, Faye Grandon was sitting back on her heels. Her ankles were slim. She sighed. She held a pair of shears in her hand; they glinted in the sun. She wiped a wrist across her forehead again, pushed her hair back from her face, sniffed, smelled smoke.
And at the same time Josef Krejci was sniffing too. Maybe he was smelling the roses. Or was it the scent of her perfume?
She turned to look, and her blue eyes meet his green. This was an awkward moment, and at first neither of them seemed to know what to say. She smiled; he nodded. He tapped his pipe against his palm; she dug her trowel into the dirt. He lingered, rocking on his heels.
You stood at the upstairs window, keeping an eye on the two of them. Faye Grandon laughed; you listened. Josef Krejci smiled; you saw.
And then later, at dinner that night, you told him, "I think I know somebody who will rent Matka's apartment. If you're interested."
He paused to consider this. Took a bite of meat, chewed. "Who?"
"Libbie Grandon."
This puzzled him. "Libbie? Why would she want to do that?"
"She's got a boyfriend."
He snorted. This he understood. "How much?"
"I don't know. What would you want for it?"
He was thinking. Thinking and chewing. "What's it cost us?"
You were the one who kept the books and paid the bills. "Not much," you said. "About thirty dollars a month for the utilities, except in winter, then it's more. Probably something like, oh, maybe two hundred a year in taxes on it, as part of the store. That works out to a little more than five hundred a year. A little less than fifty dollars a month, maybe. Not counting the phone."
"How much will she pay?"
"Probably double that, at least. The boyfriend's got some money, I think. They both have jobs."
In the end, you settled on one hundred dollars a month, for one bedroom, a living room, a kitchen and a bath, all utilities paid, except for the phone.
And so that spring Libbie moved out of her mother's house and into Matka's empty rooms. Where your grandmother's bed used to be now there was a mattress on the floor. India print fabric throws were draped across the windows. A beaded curtain hung in the doorway. A lamp with a frosted glass shade sat on a table made from a telephone wire spool turned flat on its side and painted Day-Glo green. A battered loveseat slip-cased in blue chintz was placed against the wall, beside a bookcase made of cinderblocks and old barn planks. On the wall: a Jefferson Airplane poster, with fat white letters that billowed out around Grace Slick's cool-eyed, hair-framed face, a print of Picasso's "Guernica," an American flag, hung upside down and backwards. On the floor: tied rag rugs, ashtrays, beer cans and win
e bottles. In the air: a hanging haze of sunlight and dust, incense and smoke.
And at the door: Fox Dow knocking, standing back, waiting for Libbie Grandon to open up and let him in.
July 2006
Meena has been following the trail back down to the cabin, not paying much attention to it, only keeping her eyes on her feet skidding in the dirt and noticing the ache in her knees that jolts her with every step. It's dusk, and she's dizzy with exertion and vertigo and the hectic joy of her new freedom, here in this strange and beautiful, and vast, place.
Just moments ago, when she was standing at what felt to her to be the top of the world, gaping at the countryside spread below her—far away and small and toy-like and unreal—it seemed simple enough to just turn around and retrace her steps, come back here the same way she went, but when she emerges from the shadows of the forest she realizes she's made some mistake, although in her confusion she can't understand what it is, exactly. The place is familiar, but at the same time it's different—it's what it is and something else, too, both at once. More and less. The same and not the same. For one thing, the woodpile is much smaller. There is a bentwood rocker on the back porch and a hammock strung between a pair of trees and a stone-rimmed fire pit in the yard. And the cabin itself is askew somehow—lopsided in its very structure, it sags on its foundation, and the tarpaper roof is peeling back in places, weeds flock the porch steps, the log walls are weathered, soft and gray. But the door has been painted purple, and there are wind chimes hanging from the eaves.
So—time has passed, she thinks, while she's been away. That must be it. There's been an enchantment; months have gone by, maybe even years. Her life here must have become settled, in the meantime. All those other problems and questions and worries, somehow resolved.
The Minor Apocalypse of Meena Krejci Page 21
