by Matt Stewart
“Nope. But it’s just the second floor.”
Esmerelda shook her head rapidly and forced a few beats of laughter. “Been half a decade since I’ve gone up that many steps. Not gonna work, toots; sorry.”
Jasper touched her shoulder and angled his head like he’d seen successful football coaches do in the movies. “Babe, give it a shot. I’m gonna be here with you, no problem. We’ll find a way.”
“No problem? You try walking up a staircase with this kind of luggage and we’ll see how you do.”
“Do the man a favor and at least try. He wants to help you.” Karen Winslow nodded from the driver’s seat.
“Ya, and I am here too.” Sven Johanssen, longshoreman and Jasper’s roommate, skipped down the stairs. He was svelte, with an angular Nordic face and shaggy white-blond hair, and spoke with a heavy Swedish accent. He stank of pickled seafood. “We help you up.”
“Forget it, it’s not happening. Mechanically, can’t be done.”
“What else are we gonna do?” Jasper asked.
Esmerelda’s face flushed, and she swung her arms like battle-axes. “I don’t know, but you better think of something!”
Karen turned off the radio and Jasper sat down on the staircase, watching as Esmerelda calmed, brushed perspiration off her cheeks, and sucked down a bottle of water. She licked her thumb and rubbed out stains on her muumuu, swatted microscopic insects, helped herself to ginger cookies from her great wool bag. Jasper, Sven, and Karen exchanged incredulous glances as she killed ten minutes wiping clean the magnetic strips on her credit cards before taking a short nap. The evening turned chilly; the babies rustled in their car seats. Unaccustomed to such prolonged silence, they started to cry.
“Well, you went and upset my grandkids. No surprise really. Heck, I’d cry if I were them.” Karen Winslow lowered herself from the driver’s seat, appearing somewhat shorter on foot than in previous encounters, Esmerelda observed, just a little. “Their mom’s a wimp.”
“Their mom has a weight problem,” Esmerelda clarified. “It’s a long story.”
“Wimp, coward, whatever. Esmerelda, you don’t even try.”
A terrible rumble rose within Esmerelda’s muumuu, somewhere between her stomach and her larynx and her butt, a sound Jasper had heard only once before, at the CopySmart flagship store when Esmerelda threw a shit-fit over a bounced check. He grabbed Sven by his rugby jersey and dragged him behind a support pillar.
“Don’t even try? I’m tired, for Chrissakes! Flattened! With these kids I never asked for!” The growl transmuted from potential to kinetic energy: her blubbery arms pushing her out of the van, slippered feet crunching gravel, tugboat body steaming forward. “What the hell do I have to prove?”
“Go for it, girl!” Karen Winslow called.
She didn’t feel the first five stairs. With momentum on her side, the next five weren’t bad either. Eleven and twelve were doable; she plowed through thirteen; fourteen was a real bitch. Fifteen: asphyxiation at hand, vision blurring, hundreds of pounds caving in on her lungs. She didn’t remember sixteen at all, and woke up drenched in sweat and leaning against the wall on a landing from heaven.
“Halfway there, sugar.” Jasper’s Miss Piggy voice oinked in her ear. “I’m with you all the way.”
“Need a snack,” she gulped. “Something to get my blood moving. Check my bag.”
Jasper fetched two chocolate bars, several pizza crusts, and a six-pack of apple juice. “OK,” she said a minute later, dropping the last juice box over the railing. “Let’s get this crap over with.”
Two hours and eleven minutes later, Esmerelda collapsed on the apartment floor.
“Yeah! Yeah!” Jasper tried to execute a celebratory multistage handshake, but Esmerelda was unresponsive.
“I really didn’t tink dat would work,” Sven acknowledged. “But she did it. Good for you, gurl.”
Esmerelda coughed feebly. A line of saliva flew across her face and landed on her eyelash.
“Don’t die yet, hon. These guys want some dinner.” Karen Winslow knelt beside her and passed over the children.
Away from the hospital’s flickering fluorescent panels, the shadows of the Winslow minivan, the honest light of incandescence fell on them. It was Esmerelda’s first good look, and she found everything about them disturbingly fragile. The girl was sleeping, soundless, a cool caramel customer, diaphanous cotton candy hair, milk chocolate pieces for fingers and toes. Beside her the boy yowled in a half dream, delivering sobbing diatribes to legions of infant Jacobin comrades.
“Marat, Marat,” Esmerelda cooed. “Settle down, love. Two days in and the world’s rattled you already.” Her index finger wiped the rugged splotch of black hair over his brow, glanced his nose, raked up his drool. Suddenly he chomped down on her pinky.
“Hot damn!” Esmerelda exclaimed, pulling her digit from his slimy toothless hole. “What was that for?”
“He’s hungry, dear,” Karen said. “Give him a boob and he’ll calm.”
“Give him a boob? I can’t even move.” But before she could muster up the energy to complain about the throbbing in her temples and the dryness of her throat, Jasper and Sven were hauling her across the apartment and shouldering her up onto the mustard-colored couch. Karen arranged the newborns on Esmerelda’s tummy and seconds later the boy was inside her muumuu, nuzzling her nipple. She fell back against the sofa, her body unplugged and eyes rolled shut, Marat’s suckling sounds bleeding to white in her cumulus mounds of unconsciousness.
SANS-CULOTTES
In the late French revolution, we observed the extremes indulged by both parties chiefly concerned in revolution—the wealthy and the poor! The rich, who, in derision, called their humble fellow-citizens by the contemptuous term of sans-culottes, provoked a reacting injustice from the populace, who, as a dreadful return for only a slight, rendered the innocent term of aristocrate a signal for plunder or slaughter!
—ISAAC DISRAELI,
Curiosities of Literature, 1835
You hear them talking of nothing but cutting, chopping off heads, not enough blood is flowing.
—Parisian lemonade vendor, speaking of the sans-culottes
Nineteen ninety-one was a war year, yellow ribbons tied to trees, flags lashed to freeway overpasses and framed in bedroom windows. Bombs and planes preempted sitcoms, followed by press conferences with stern generals in shabby briefing rooms, fireworks over the desert. A television camera fell into an Iraqi ventilation chute and went blank. Elementary school students mailed packets of Kool-Aid to soldiers stationed in Saudi Arabia; troops received standing ovations in airports.
As Operation Desert Sabre commenced, a husbandless woman went into labor at the George Washington University Medical Center, in Washington DC. Twelve hours later, as mine plows cleared a passageway between the Umm Qudayr and Al Wafrah oil fields, Marisa Taylor was still at it but screaming and pushing optimistically. Her elaborate cursing saturated the maternity ward, demanding morphine, a lawyer, experimental medical procedures, a fucking table saw, but none of it could right the hemorrhaging, tangled umbilical cord, exhausted nurses falling asleep on the job, undercooked meals, and burned-out light bulbs that were the hallmarks of her four-and-change-day disaster. She was unfortunate to hang on as long as she did—all the way to the hundredth hour, when President Bush announced a cease-fire across the Persian Gulf—establishing a bona fide delivery record that would never be broken, obstetrics’ DiMaggio streak. It ended with somnambulant acceptance, a small shudder, the boy’s lumpy head riding down a canal of blood. Turned out there was no next of kin, Taylor was a Metrobus driver from Alabama who lived alone, fifty bucks in her retirement fund, an aunt in Birmingham who wanted no part of it, her one-night stand with a prissy Parisian diplomat wholly off the books. Weeks later, when faced with a blank line above “First Name” in the baby’s Social Security registration form, an administrator with a morbid sense of humor dubbed the boy Murphy in honor of the only law that mattered in his l
ife so far.
Esmerelda and Jasper fell under a monsoon of changings, feedings, and cleanings, plus double forty-hour workweeks on Market Street, in clown shoes and Gargantuan, tired smiles and sluggish fingers entering data at mere mortal speeds. After dinner they slept like steel weights, Esmerelda snoozing upright on the sofa with the kids nestled on her belly, Jasper snoring like an unmufflered Harley on his single bed. Amid the decentralized family foursome, Sven Johanssen rose each morning at four o’clock, slipped into his overalls, and drank a cup of black coffee before riding his ten-speed to the wharves in Bayview. Those crystalline ten minutes in the morning were the quietest of the day: infants slumbering silently, Esmerelda completely incapacitated from her nightly staircase ascent, Jasper’s thunderous snores waning to occasional snorts after four hours under. Oftentimes the foghorns broke the stillness when he stepped outside, though after years of the routine he no longer noticed how the alternating bass notes created the sensation of floating, the way the soft, steady moans set him at ease. He slid to work on this serene carpet, a peaceful pedal through the Presidio’s buzzing forest and past the Marina’s shuttered bistros and boutiques, gloomy downtown monoliths, a lonely strip of warehouses and gang warfare, until he arrived at the wharves and found his hungover mates cursing the weather and listening to news radio.
At five o’clock, the children’s stereo wailing began. Esmerelda pulled up her shirt and let the kids hook in, while Jasper dressed in the dark and got started on Esmerelda’s morning hotcakes. After breakfast came burping and diaper replacement, the onerous dressing process, pained pleas to the infants for silence which proved successful only on the rare mornings that Jasper dug up the wherewithal to sing lullabies in his simple Spartan voice. At six the team moved downstairs, Esmerelda more confident heading down the juggernaut than up it, the children pausing their noisemaking to observe the spectacle, Jasper spotting her all the way. They piled into the special services van, wheeled across the city, and were spat out, with walker, at their respective places of business on Market Street at ten minutes to seven.
While Esmerelda Gargantuaned into position, Jasper slung the kids onto the sidewalk and knelt beside them, his eyes dancing mischievously. “Here’s the deal,” he said. “We got half an hour before I gotta get to work. You guys got any ideas on how to kill thirty minutes?”
“BA-WAH!” Marat cried as Robespierre applauded rowdily.
“That again?” Jasper asked coyly. “Well, I’ll see what I can do.” But there was only one activity in which Jasper ever indulged his children during the father-children bonding period from 6:50 to 7:20 AM, and a wild ride up and down the sidewalk in his wheelbarrow was it.
He fastened a pair of pillows to the wheelbarrow with duct tape and strapped the kids onto the pillows with bungee cords. With a weary yell he pushed off, slowly shoving the maroon hauler up Market Street’s gentle grade. After a quarter block, he took a turn around a fire hydrant, swerved back onto the sidewalk, spun in three tight circles, jogged backward ten steps, took a corner fast through packs of pedestrians, wove a few figure eights around manhole covers, then gently rolled six stairs down into the Muni station and suddenly yanked back up, whooping like a tickled horse. He picked up speed as he got warmed up, pinning the kids on their backs, turning them sideways, on occasion flipping them upside down. Even with the homemade baby straps it looked really dicey, and the posse of street people encamped by the Muni station’s steam grate clucked their disapproval.
But the children’s faces ran pink in the wind, the urban slalom confirming Jasper’s position as the all-time leader in pointless glee and coolness.
Esmerelda monitored the gyroscopic revelry through Copy-Smart’s storefront window, fixated on the dearth of legitimate safety devices and hollering at Jasper to slow down. Her nervousness prevented her from eating, and the unusual sight of Esmerelda forgoing a prework snack put the rest of the office on edge too. Everyone loosened up after business began, preoccupied by customers and reassured by the babies’ return to their mother’s belly and a fresh breakfast burrito on the Gargantuan’s foldable tray, though Esmerelda’s relief soon turned to resignation as she remembered how she had to deal with these annoying kids all day, and for many years thereafter. But so long as they kept out of elbow range, Esmerelda could get through her shift, and while she didn’t particularly enjoy their presence, Slippy Sanders was in love.
“See that?” her boss told her just after the twins’ second birthday, pointing at the long but quickly moving queue. Swarming secretaries conversed with Robespierre and Marat in various baby languages; snapped photos; inquired about their haircut preferences, immunization records, bowel movements, and reading proficiency; and distributed candy and toys from their purses. Many reminisced over the days when their own children were small enough to fit in their laps, and though their stories were usually murderously boring, those teary-eyed administrative assistants left the best tips and made sure to come back to the CopySmart flagship store for all their paper-based needs.
“These kids are a gold mine,” Slippy added. “Gonna get any more?”
“I’d rather cover myself in honey and wrestle a bear,” Esmerelda snarled.
“I’m buying a playpen for the shop,” he countered. “They’re not babies anymore, and besides, you’ve earned it.”
“Oh no you don’t—my kids aren’t going to be your puppies in the window. This is no zoo; they stay here with me.”
“Suit yourself. But they’re getting bigger, and you’re getting smaller. The math isn’t hard to figure out.”
Esmerelda shook her head at the backhanded compliment—I’m getting smaller?—and realized that her muumuu had been a bit drafty lately, her shoes a little loose, her thirty-two-stair-and-eight-dip commute slightly less taxing. Maybe she had lost a few. Anyway, her children were growing quickly, that was undeniable, and the two of them did combine for an awful lot of weight and surface area.
She relented, with the caveat that the playpen could not be placed anywhere near the window and had to be accompanied by a DO NOT FEED CHILDREN sign. Within the first week the secretaries were making the pilgrimage to CopySmart three or four times a day, notating the children’s food intake, observing their naptimes, floating theories about their life callings. A pot of coffee was installed, and the CopySmart flagship store became a break destination, with support staff overflowing onto the sidewalk and jostling for the best kiddie view, often running off a few hundred unnecessary copies to justify their loitering. Business, Slippy Sanders reported, was booming, and Esmerelda’s wages soared too.
Jasper Winslow tried to take advantage of the captive audience. “Free food! Who wants it?” he called, waving bunches of coupons at the secretaries. “Discounts here, pizza and beer. Why roll the dice with full price? You’re better off with half off.” Though most of the secretaries were on permanent dieting kicks or apprehensive of street promotions, some accepted his coupons, and a few even used them. Even so, Jasper’s cash cow was shrinking to naught amid a flurry of efficiently processed photocopy transactions.
“Mama,” he told Karen Winslow over morning grilled-onion-and-cheese sandwiches at the Tip Top Diner, “I’m losing it. No more 10 percent, barely even 5. Esmerelda’s eating less, though I can’t blame her. I sure did like having the money though.”
“Wake up, son. The woman’s playing you like a harpsichord. Doesn’t pay rent and gets the kids all day. Before you know it, she’ll get child support too. Better lock her up before she does you in. You gonna eat that?” Jasper passed over his crusts. “I’ll take them home for your sister, God bless her. Now why couldn’t you find yourself a nice girl like her to knock up, someone who wouldn’t ever string you along like this?”
The seeds were planted for a horrible misinterpretation, an error that Karen Winslow never would have made when she was younger, but her children were all grown up, and she sometimes made the mistake of treating them their age. Still, the relevant bit got through too, and that n
ight, after Marat and Robespierre fell asleep curled against Esmerelda’s belly, Jasper came out from the bedroom and took a seat on the sofa, much closer to her than permitted when she was fully awake, nearly touching.
“Baby, marry me.”
Esmerelda turned her head toward the weight on the couch. Jasper wore a yolk-yellow tie and powder-blue jacket with his overalls; his face was clamped shut, hands clasped and hanging between his shivering legs. Her eyes burned from a pungent cologne—paprika and formaldehyde teased with sweat. “You’re a sweetheart, Jasper,” she murmured, “really, you are. But I’m just not the marrying type. Come on, you don’t want me around, ruining your life.”
“Honey, you’ve been living here for two years now, and my life’s better than ever.” He almost mentioned the exception of the recent drop in coupon usage but managed to stifle it.
“Come on man, don’t fool with me. You don’t even have a ring.”
“That’s not true either.” He reached into his front overall pocket and took out a ring with a shiny diamond in it, biggest one he could find at the pawnshop.
Esmerelda fell blue-faced and quiet, then touched a chubby finger to the stone’s tip and ran it down the gold band’s cool contours, circling over the sticky patch where the price tag had been recently peeled off. “Jasper. I never—”
“There’s a lot you haven’t expected from me. Food, shelter, and love, for starters, and I got all that in boxes. Now what’s it going to be? Marry me, and I’ll make all your days bright as this here ring.” He wagged the prize in front of her, scattering the spectrum over Esmerelda’s nose.
Esmerelda felt something hard form in her intestines and imagined how much her day-to-day life would change if she signed on, hardly anything, it was just a piece of paper for legal affairs and inheritances, an outdated convention, didn’t matter to her. Jasper worked hard and took care of her, he was great with the kids, he cooked or provided heavily discounted food, washed the clothes and ironed them, even did windows; it was like getting a babysitter and butler for free. She imagined the glitter rock installed on her hand, filtering white light, a movie theater marquee announcing her preciousness. Right here in front of her, worth a couple grand easy.
