Borrowed Hearts

by Rick DeMarinis

  “You run a right ship, Charlie,” she said. “But I don’t know if I can deal with all this.” She lit a cigarette and blew smoke out one side of her mouth, away from the food. “We drank a bit last night.” She sipped her coffee, but did not touch the food.

  While she smoked cigarettes and drank coffee, I ate. Her breasts were large and slung low. I made myself see them through the fabric of her uniform, the dark pink areolae, the abrupt nipples.

  She shoved her plate across the table. “Here,” she said. “You’re a growing boy. You’ve got room for this.” When she yawned, the low breasts rose, straining the buttons of her tunic.

  I walked her to the bus stop on East 14th Street. She worked at the Alameda Naval Air Station. She said she was two hours late. “Not that it matters,” she added. “Nobody but the fanatics are going to report on time today. Ask your folks.”

  We waited together for the bus. She sat like a man, her legs stretched out in front of her, crossed at the ankles, her arms resting on the back of the bench. A cigarette dangled from her full lips. “I’m from Iowa, Charlie,” she said. She stared into the distance as if she could see cornfields. “Christ. Iowa. If they think I’m coming back to Dubuque after working in the Bay Area for two years, they’ve got another think coming. This is paradise, for my money.”

  The bus came. We stood up together. She straightened her uniform and crushed her cigarette out on the pavement. She shook my hand. “You’re a solid citizen, Chas,” she said. She pulled me close and hugged me, her chest pillowing my face.

  On my way home I bought a twenty-five-pound block of ice from Mr. Salas, who ran the ice dispenser. Mr. Salas didn’t speak English, but he was in a joyful mood. He cupped his hands in front of him, then threw them upward. “Boom!” he said, shaping the air between us into a mushroom cloud. I smiled because he expected me to, and he patted and tousled my hair.

  It was the job I hated most—carrying a block of ice home. Mr. Salas had tied twine around it so that I could carry it, but the twine cut into my fingers and I had to set the block down on the sidewalk every so often, and its awkward weight made the muscles in my arms bum. Now that the war was over, we would be able to get a refrigerator. The atom bomb had made that possible. The first time I saw a photo of that mushroom cloud, I thought of Aladdin’s lamp and the genie that rose out of it as smoke. Because of that cloud of magical smoke, we would have all the things that were impossible to have during the war. I realized I should be thankful, and I prayed my thanks that night, just as the old woman had suggested, but my heart wasn’t in it. Mid-prayer I lost the drift and wandered into dreams of combat: P-47 Thunderbolts strafing German supply trucks, airborne troops engaged in door-to-door combat in French villages, destroyers dumping depth charges on Jap subs. When all my combat scenarios had been exhausted, I watched the lanky WAVE sit up in bed and stretch, her long breasts reaching upward. I fell asleep with the incomplete prayer on my lips and dreamed of refrigerators. I opened one of three that sat in our kitchen and took out a heavy roast. Blood from the roast splashed my feet. I didn’t have any clothes on. The WAVE said, “You’re an officer and a gentleman, kiddo.” She sat at the kitchen table sipping coffee. I asked her what time it was. “It doesn’t make any difference,” she said. “Yes it does,” I said. “No it doesn’t,” she said. “Not anymore, Chas.” The natural melancholy of her face seemed a thing apart, something that could live on, long after she was gone. I ducked away from it.

  I felt like I had been asleep for days, but when I woke up, it was only half past midnight. I got dressed and went out to the backyard. There was a short fence between our yard and the Duncans’. I hopped the fence and rapped on Darwin’s bedroom window. He opened it and I climbed in. I knew he’d be working on his radio, and he was. His room was hazy with accumulated smoke. His eyes were red. “I’m adding a two-stage RF amplifier,” he said. “It’ll triple the sensitivity.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t think of anything more boring than working on radios. “Can I get the book?” I asked. He was bent over the upside-down chassis, soldering iron probing the tangle of wires, threads of white smoke curling past his ears. He shrugged.

  I tiptoed down the hall. Darwin’s parents were asleep in their bedroom. They were both snoring—almost in harmony. I didn’t need to turn on the living-room lights. I knew exactly what shelf the book was on and where it was on that shelf. I drew it out of its place slowly with my already damp fingers. It’s familiar weight and texture excited me.

  I cleared a spot on Darwin’s bed, and the book fell open to the well-visited pages on Human Reproduction. Even though I had seen those illustrations a hundred times, the sexual architecture of human beings retained its power over me. The scrupulously detailed perineum, the seat of mystery, the dark valley between the columnar cliffs of the thighs, always made me catch my breath. In the same way, years later, the Grand Canyon would make me dizzy with the belief that surprise and whim ruled the visible world.

  The clicking of my throat exasperated Darwin. He unplugged his soldering iron and sat on the bed next to me. “Why don’t you look at something else for a change?” he said.

  “What for?” I asked.

  He took the book and thumbed through it. “The side view of the skull looks like Africa,” he said, holding up a red, white, and blue illustration. “The mandible goes from the Congo River to Cape Town. The parietal bones are the Sahara desert.” He turned pages. “The heart looks like Africa, too,” he said. “The bulge of the left atrium looks like Egypt.”

  Darwin could be as boring as his radios. I grabbed the book away from him. It fell open to the posterior view of the external genitalia of the female. We studied the layers of complexity in silence.

  “It looks like a church,” I said.

  Darwin often boasted about being an atheist, but his parents were religious. He hit me on the shoulder. I dropped the book and it walloped the floor. We held our breaths, but the harmonious snoring from his parents’ bedroom didn’t pause. “You want to see Vicki Zebard?” I said.

  He shrugged. “Sure,” he said indifferently, as if I’d asked him if he wanted to go to Hayward.

  The Zebards lived on the last street of the development. The field behind their house was staked for a hundred new homes. With commando stealth, we crept up to the dark house. “Maybe it’s too late,” I said, my cowardice beginning to assert itself.

  “It doesn’t matter what time it is, stupid,” Darwin said.

  I knew that, of course. All we had to do was tap on her window. It made no difference that it was nearly 2 a.m. I groped in the dirt for a small stone. I heard my blood billow past my ears. I was breathing hard but not hard enough to keep up with my accelerating heart. I felt dizzy. Darwin took the stone from me. He lobbed it against Vicki’s window. The light came on after the third stone almost cracked the pane. The blind rose slowly, and there was Vicki Zebard. She peered out at us. She held a hand up to her eyes, as if to shade them from the dark. Then she yawned, or pretended to yawn. She sat down on her bed and lit a cigarette, legs crossed, nightgown hiked up to her thighs. She seemed oblivious of us, lost in her own thoughts. We hopped around in the dirt below her window without making a sound. “Do it, do it,” Darwin hissed. She enjoyed torturing us. Finally she stood up. She raised her nightgown over her head, very slowly, in one-inch increments. Vicki had just turned thirteen. She was a heavy girl no one really liked. She walked to school alone, and she was always alone on the playground, unless someone wanted to torment her a little. She picked up her cigarette and paced back and forth in front of the window, her large, flaccid breasts opulent in the dull light from her bed lamp. To enhance the idea that she was unconscious of us, she talked to herself. She poked a finger into her cheek thoughtfully, as if stumped about something. She’d cock her head to the left and then to the right. Her public hair was dark and powerful, fully adult, rising almost to her navel. Darwin was still hopping silently, but I was partially paralyzed. When she pulled down her shade, Darw
in jumped on me. We rolled around in the dirt for a while, in a kind of celebration. Then we had a footrace home, Darwin beating me by a full block.

  The darkened neighborhood seemed strange to me. Did I actually live here? Did anyone actually live here? Bats flitted around the streetlights, eating millers. How strange the world was, how beautiful. I didn’t feel so bad about the war being over. But I wondered, what’s going to happen next, and could I bear to wait for it?

  “Pudenda!” Darwin yelled.

  “Mammaries!” I responded.

  “Infrapubic ramus!” Darwin screamed.

  “Sphincter ani externus!” I yodeled.

  Like medieval monks gone berserk, we screamed the Latin names of the lower anatomy until lights began to come on in the dark little houses.

  The next day was the hottest day of the year. I sold out early and came home, my change apron bulging with silver. I went to my room and stacked and counted my gross earnings, then subtracted my profit. I rolled the nickels, dimes, and quarters into paper wrappers. Dan Sneed was in Emeryville and wouldn’t be back for several hours to restock my pushcart. I had an afternoon to kill. My mother was still working at Kaiser, but now that the war was over, there was no need for Liberty ships. She expected her layoff notice any day now. Then she’d be a normal housewife again, she said. The world was going to be normal again. I didn’t remember what normal was since I was only five or six when the war began to change everything.

  The elation I felt the night before didn’t have staying power. I made a pitcher of Kool-Aid and filled it with chopped ice. I carried the pitcher and a glass out to the garage. I picked up the skeletal wings and the half-finished fuselage of the B-25 and crushed them into a soft wad of balsa wood and tissue paper. Then I started one of the Olsons and breathed exhaust fumes until my depression was gradually replaced by a brain-spinning giddiness.

  Darwin came over, attracted by the screaming Olson. “Let’s go swimming!” he yelled.

  I took one last lung-sweetening breath of burned gas and pulled the spark-plug wire loose. “Okay,” I said.

  “Not the Plunge, though,” Darwin said. “The bay.”

  The Hayward Plunge in hot weather was like a greenhouse. It sapped your energy. After swimming across the pool a few times you felt dead. You felt like you were sweating even under water. And afterward you felt waterlogged.

  We walked to San Leandro Bay. It was a place forbidden to swimmers because raw sewage from south Oakland and San Leandro was pumped directly into the water. Parents tried to keep their kids away from all swimming areas in that big polio year of 1945, believing that the virus was carried and spread by water. San Leandro Bay was especially feared. But the fear of parents was an abstract thing, an irrelevancy, like the rusted BB-pocked signs that warned against trespass or dumping, or commanded, “No Swimming.”

  The beach was lumpy with seaweed and garbage. Broken bottles gleamed in the oily sand. Small waves lapped at a mossy mattress someone had tried to launch. None of this seemed ugly or inappropriate to us. It was San Leandro Bay.

  There was no one else around, so we stripped. Darwin sprinted into the half-hearted waves screaming. I followed him. The water was warm and thick, like soup. It stank, but it was not like the eye-burning chlorine stink of the Plunge. I loved swimming here, in salt water, because you could not sink. The heavy water made you buoyant and you felt you would stay afloat even if you dozed off.

  Darwin was floating on his back, his small erection periscoping the brown water. “Penile distension,” he yelled.

  “Corpus spongiosum!” I screamed, sending up a periscope of my own.

  We swam for hours, then walked home sunburned, salt-crusted, and weak. I sat on a curb next to an idling delivery van and breathed its exhaust. Darwin sat next to me. He wasn’t a habitual sniffer of exhaust fumes like me, but he didn’t mind them. School would begin in three weeks. Darwin had already graduated from Stonehurst elementary school and was attending junior high, and he hated it. He looked like a fifth-grader. The big eighthand ninth-graders picked on him mercilessly. I hated the idea of going back to Stonehurst, even though I’d be a sixth-grader, loaded with seniority. I had squandered summer. And now that the war was over, school was bound to be more boring than ever.

  The last Saturday before school started, Darwin and I went to Emeryville, where the Oakland baseball stadium was, to watch the Oaks play the hated San Francisco Seals. We bought tickets for the right-field bleachers, the cheapest seats in the park. We wanted to be out there in right, where the left-handed sluggers would hit their homers. I brought two gloves—one for Darwin—anticipating free baseballs.

  It was a dull game for seven innings. The Oaks hadn’t hit a ball out of the infield. My personal hero, Les Scarsella, the aging slugger who had hit.300 for the Boston Braves back in 1940, had struck out once and had popped out to shortstop. He was closing in on another forty-home-run season, so my hopes were high. Gene Bearden, ace of the Oakland pitching staff, had held the Seals to four hits and one run, a line-drive homer by their powerful first baseman, Ferris Fain. Then, in the bottom of the seventh, Scarsella slapped at a three-and-oh pitch and drove it over the center-field scoreboard, with Wally Westlake on second. Darwin and I went crazy, pounding each other with our gloves and screaming out the Latin names for the sexual apparatus. In the top of the ninth, though, Ferris Fain, with Hugh Luby on first, caught a hanging curveball and drove it deep to right. It was a line drive all the way, still climbing as it passed over our heads and out of the park. We’d been calling him names at the top of our lungs—mons pubis! ductus deferens! labium majoram!—and, as if he’d heard and understood and wanted sweet revenge, he straightened out Bearden’s sloppy curveball and laced it into the streets of Emeryville.

  The weak end of the lineup came up in the bottom of the ninth and the game ended on three dribbling ground balls, all to Hugh Luby, the Seals’ great second baseman.

  We rode the bus home depressed. We both felt a little queasy from all the hot dogs we’d eaten. Darwin looked more sallow than usual. A glaze of sweat made his face shine. He complained of a sore neck. “I’m going to puke,” he said.

  “Wait till you get home,” I said.

  He stepped between two parked cars and vomited. Hearing someone vomit always made me want to vomit, too, and so I kept walking until I couldn’t hear him. When he caught up to me, he said, “I don’t feel so hot.”

  “It was all those hot dogs,” I said.

  “No, I think it’s the flu.”

  We walked the rest of the way without talking. When I opened the front door of our house, I heard arguing. There was a man I didn’t know sitting at the kitchen table. He was short and nearly bald, but he had thick, muscular wrists and forearms. His forearms were tattooed with American flags. He was sipping from a bottle of beer. Mother and this man had been drinking for a while. “I’m going to celebrate!” Mother said, smiling viciously at Dan.

  “Celebrate what?” Dan said. “Unemployment?”

  “Look here,” said the man at the table. “I don’t think I want to get into this.”

  “Shut up, Weldon,” Mother said. “You’re an invited guest. I’m going to make you supper. I invited Weldon for supper. He was laid off today, too. I don’t see why he can’t have supper. We’re going to enjoy ourselves.”

  “Looks like you’ve already been enjoying yourself,” Dan said. Dan, still in his whites, had just returned form his Piedmont route.

  Mother threw a dishrag at him. It hit the window, then draped itself over the curtain rod. Dan lit a cigarette and blew smoke thoughtfully at the seated man. Then he saw me in the doorway. “I need to look at your books, Charlie,” he said. “You’re running short. What are you doing, giving away ice cream?”

  I hadn’t told him about my VJ Day disaster yet. I shrugged and went to my room. He followed me. “I think you owe me thirty dollars, Charlie,” he said. I had a mason jar full of dollar bills and another one full of change on a shelf in my closet.
I took the bills down and counted out the money I owed him. He took the bills and stuffed them into his wallet. But that wasn’t the end of it. He looked at me for a while, studying my face. “Stay put,” he said. He went out. When he came back he had his Vacutex. “I told you a thousand times to use a washcloth on your face. You can’t be meeting the public with blackheads all over your face. Blackheads and ice cream don’t mix.” He’d ordered the Vacutex from an ad he saw in Popular Science. It was a syringe that sucked blackheads into it. I hated the thing. It was painful and it didn’t work.

  Dan pushed me into my chair. He cupped the back of my head in his left hand and applied the Vacutex to my face. The tip of the Vacutex was hollow. He pressed it on a blackhead, then drew back on the syringe. Supposedly the black-head was lifted out of my face and sucked into the body of the syringe. It didn’t work, but Dan Sneed believed in it anyway. He believed that if he pushed it harder into my face, the blackhead would eventually loosen its grip When he gave up, my blackheads were haloed with bright red circles.

  I washed my face in cold water, then went out to the kitchen to see if Mother was really going to make supper. She was sitting on Weldon’s lap. Dan Sneed was leaning against the sink counter, looking forlorn. “We’re going to San Francisco,” Mother said. “We’re going to the Top of the Mark to celebrate. Vaughn Monroe is playing there.” She gave Weldon a sloppy kiss. Weldon turned bright red and tried to show Dan Sneed a “no harm done” smile, but Dan was staring at the wallpaper.

  I went back to my room and took a few dollars out of my money jar. There was an Abbott and Costello movie playing at the Del Mar Theater in San Leandro. I went next door to see if Darwin was feeling good enough to go with me, but his mother said he was running a temperature. She looked at me suspiciously, as if I had something to do with Darwin’s illness. “Did you boys go swimming in the bay?” she asked. She was a huge woman, tall and thick.