I got part of it made up, she said, fitting the red vest. You girls are bout the same size as mine All you girls are bout the same. She pursed her red lips and pinched the cloth together. Tell me somethin Honey. How’d I manage all these kids an no man. On television there was loud applause for the queen, whose roses were sharp and real. Her machine buzzed like an animal beside the round clock. She frowned as she pressed the button with her foot, then furled the red cloth out and pulled me to her. Her pointed white face was smudged around the eyes. I watched the pale strand of scalp in her hair. There, she said.
When I left she tucked the money in her sweater. She had pins between her teeth and lipstick gone grainy in the cracks of her mouth. I had a red swing skirt and a bumpy A on my chest. Lord, she said. You do look pretty.
Snow
THE SCHOOL opened iron gates to show its clowns and jugglers. Crowds came to watch the mutes, the senseless ones. Those lawns and high walls were not so fearsome in summer, and flags rippled from posts striped with crepe paper by the deaf. Molly’s father stood beside her holding Callie. Molly watched Laura; Laura was her mother. The crowd pressed up and Laura danced, with her light hair blowing wild about her face and the filmy dress moving to show her legs. The focus of her blind eyes didn’t change even in leaping; in those controlled jumps which could not keep her arms from rising, as though the feeling of air made her want to enter it. Afterward she stood very still. The dress blew about her thighs. Men in the back of the crowd began to hoot. But the rain came on. A wind blew up and knocked over one of the stands. The flimsy stand broke and let fly two hundred balloons; people scrambled and fell on each other to catch them. Molly saw the colors twisting. Her father stood beside her but he could not see, ever. Laura stood there listening. And the balloons went up.
The town slept and remembered wars. Especially in heat, it slept. The river shrunk in its deep bed; clay along the dried banks grew giant cracks. Every day was very long and it was 1948. Molly thought it would always be this way. Spenser, South Carolina, had two factories, a lumber mill and a training parlor for beauticians. There were three grade schools, a grammar school, a high school and a business college. And there was the School for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind where Molly’s father taught. Everywhere there were heavy trees hung with ivy that threw their long shadows out even on the hottest days. Molly and her mother took Callie to the park. In summer they bought Sno-Kones from a man with one eye and a red-striped coat. His name was Barney and Molly asked him where his eye was.
My eye? he said. Wouldn’t surprise me none if somebody had my eye in a box this minute.
He laughed loudly. Molly knew he could see. His one eye wasn’t still like her mother’s eyes, but darted back and forth like the head of a quirky bird. Molly was only glad nobody had her mother’s eyes in a box, but was suddenly afraid and clutched at her.
Mr. Parsons, Laura said. You’ve frightened her.
But he had seen it already with his one eye and was bending over Molly. Why Honey, he said. Don’t you worry. Ain’t nobody going to touch them jewels of your Mama’s. Why if they got close, their hands would turn to ice like this here.
And Molly watched him dip the crushed white into paper cones with painted clowns and balloons on them like at the fair. Then he poured blue syrup over for blueberry and red for strawberry. Callie was sitting in his stroller watching with his big eyes that caught and held but were focused far away like Mama’s. He watched Barney hold the long colored bottle up high and squirt the bright blue far down as it faded into the ice. Molly watched the color go. Her mother’s eyes were pale like ice, that cool blue smoke of hard ice. Barney would give them the cones and they’d go over on the grass and eat them, Callie falling and pushing his fat hands. The paper cones got melty and the balloons would bleed.
Molly asked her mother, These clowns can’t hear what we say, can they?
She said, Molly, all clowns aren’t deaf.
They’d walk back later, having stayed by the duck pond for hours because Callie loved to be near the water. Laura would walk down to the edge of the pond. She made a sound so much like the low murmurings of the ducks that they’d get confused and swim close. Callie would sit absolutely still. Molly put him in the stroller to leave and he’d turn his head to hear the ducks until she’d pushed him to the top of the hill. Molly told him the ducks were still there, they were always there. Her mother’s stick reached out in front, thin whisk back and forth. Laura felt for the curbs and stones and she pushed the stroller one-handed. Molly walked holding to the other side. Near dusk; how the heavy dark-leaved trees hung over them and the stroller’s wheels creaked uneven on brick sidewalks up Spenser Hill. They would talk, walking till they got to the house. Molly knew her father had lemonade in the tall glass pitcher on the blue table. Her mother would say, Randal, you’re home so soon? and he’d answer, No, Laura, you’re late. Oh Randal, not again, and she would touch him like she did, her pale hands behind his head.
Once when they were downtown, Laura spoke to Molly and she didn’t answer. Standing by the stroller as always, Molly didn’t answer and waited to see what would happen. Laura felt with her hand but Molly knelt below it, hearing the edge in her mother’s voice and ashamed now but afraid. Laura said, Molly? in different directions and screamed finally, Molly! Albers, from the bookstore, was behind them.
He said to her quietly, Mrs. Collier, here’s Molly.
Molly, don’t joke with me, she said. And as soon as he had passed, she leaned close, murmuring. But it wasn’t a joke, was it.
At night Molly’s father came to talk to her. Callie was asleep in the other bed, his thumb jammed in his mouth. Muted light from the streetlamp swam through the windows. She could see the tiny frenzied swarming of insects in ellipses around the yellow globe. Light fell blue on Callie’s face; his cheeks were gone in the shadows. That night all her father said to her was, Molly, no one can always take care of you.
Then he told the story of the dancing princess who lifted up her bed at night to go down the silver steps.
But what did she do down there?
She danced, he said, like your mother at the fair. And wore out all her slippers.
Up and down the block they heard footsteps on the sidewalks. Still it was not night. Doors shut their private sounds. Cars purred a muffled chugging as they slowed for the turn, then growled deep as they picked up speed. Her father told the story all the way through, and by the end Molly wasn’t listening anymore; only watched his big shape and his hands in the air that fell and stayed in her hair. His lips moved in his still face, and the dark came.
Molly, Molly, he thought as she sank in her rocking sleep. He was himself a light sleeper, waking from dreams several times a night to hear the house settle around him. It made him wonder that his daughter should draw shut like Lazarus, and no sound would wake her until she swam up alone from where she had been. He wondered how she dreamed. He sat on her bed with his hand in her hair trying to hear her dreams.
When Randal first began teaching Braille, the young wife of one of his students asked him how a blind person dreams. Randal told her that the sounds and voices have their own shapes and varied thicknesses. Almost like colors, infinite shades of silver. Randal realized then that his sight in dreams was that of his childhood; blurred moving shapes with a light or emptiness behind them. In dreams he could still almost see the fingers on a hand, the beautiful separated films that moved differently and by themselves.
When he was seven he’d had measles and diphtheria. His burning eyes were bandaged. He saw nothing. He practiced remembering how the fingers looked, how they moved in and out and touched and laced their translucence into a ball. When the bandages came away, it was all black. Slowly there was lighter gray, and lighter. In a year he could watch the glimmered blur of bodies running (the violent smacking bat, boys’ voices in sweet rising fold Get him out! Get him out! feet thudding close and gone), but not again the lovely fingers. The lovely—
Randal? Laura’s
quiet voice was by the door. What are you doing in there so long?
I thought you were asleep, he said. He knew she saw no shapes. Just the black. When they married, her aunt in Washington said now she would never get well (Married to a blind man my God. I did what I could she wants to ruin her life I wash my hands of it).
You know I can’t sleep until you come to bed, said Laura. She heard sadness in his voice, more slow distance than pain, as if he struggled patiently in a closet. She never questioned his sadness. She heard his broad hands smooth Molly’s bedclothes and then the lifting of his weight as the bed shifted its layers.
He straightened and walked to her. She leaned against him heavily, felt him solid under the robe. Smelling him, she pressed her face where the cloth opened on his chest; touched her mouth to the skin and the fine hair. When she was sixteen, he had taught her to read with her fingers and make love. He had given something up to her and she kept it for him.
I’ve made some tea, it’ll help you sleep, she said. Did you talk to Molly?
I didn’t, much. I don’t think she’ll do it again.
Randal felt Laura’s small hard shoulders. It seemed to him that she was made of light, that she would float out of his heaviness on the earth, in this town and this house. He felt her pull away.
I forgot the spoons, she said. She went to the kitchen. He heard her long thin feet on the bare floor, the opening drawers, the inanimate silver talking its clatter. In their room the windows were open. The lace curtains dipped in and out, catching on the rosebushes. She had turned down the bed on his side. He knew she had lain there beside the neat triangle of sheet, waiting for him.
Randal, she said, did I tell you they’re building a merry-go-round in the park? With a calliope and horses ordered from New York. Mr. Parsons told us about it. Won’t Molly love it.
Laura handed him the steaming cup and her hand brushing his was cool next to the heat.
When she was sleeping and he woke at night, there was nothing. There was the house aching. There was the street and the plants moving by the window. At night the magnolias drifted their fleshy scent; he lay and sweat. He felt his son sleep blond and floating in another room that was gone that was oh far gone. His son drifted, a son asleep, born in a worsening trouble. He heard Molly weeping into her hands, Molly a grown woman and her heavy black hair in her face. He pulled Laura close to him and her scent washed over him like slow water. He held her sleeping body and was alone until the panic passed.
It was raining. He gradually heard and lay listening (his feet on cold steps and the milk wagon creaking, early morning, wheel’s groan, hooves on wet stones and yes the musky steaming smell, Randal get back inside You’ll catch your death No you can’t touch, but he pulled and ran, the man bundled him, lifted him, And the horse, big, its long hard velvet head). Laura moved breathless and naked to shut the windows.
The curtains are soaked, she said, I didn’t hear it raining.
She stood by the window in the watery air, smelling the warm asphalt cool. When she was a child she had seen rain. She remembered it fell in a slanted color. Pearls and ash falling. Rain came from far off to contain everything. You could see it coming. It rained those weeks in the hospital when they operated on her head. They said it was the tail end of a hurricane, named for her because she was the littlest girl on the ward (I’m not little I’m eight and I can read Ivanhoe. No one said anything. She knew she couldn’t read it anymore). Later they asked her to remember. Remember all about it; her mother, the man, the car. Nothing there. For six years, Laura sat in her aunt’s house. A sequence of paid widows read aloud to her. Her aunt read the Old Testament.
Your mother, she said, was my sister born in innocence and consumed by her own soul. You are the innocent fruit of her repetitious sin. As we sow, so shall we reap.
Laura sewed; rapidly, constantly, perfectly: long afternoons by a window open even in winter. Unconscious of her finger’s penance on a raised design in linen, she heard and smelled the street. When Laura was fourteen, her aunt became afraid of her. She ordered that Laura’s hair be cut; she sent her to the school. In two years, Randal came.
Randal heard Laura’s fingers stroke the polished windowsill. Rain continued, round. Those years ago her belly was globed and tight with a hollow floating. He remembered the long night of first labor … long, long. How she held her breath and spent it, blowing air like an animal adapted to ocean. Then it was over; he heard her fingers on the baby’s face. Raining on the sheathed head, first memorizing, then just looking again and again. And he touched her forehead, which always had a peculiar heat to it when she was happy.
When Callie’s nose bled, the rocking chairs got blurry. Their shiny arms rippled and ran over themselves. He was five. They bought him glasses and Molly went to school. Molly went to school, putting her face in front of him where she knew he could see, saying Callie, Callie, don’t untie the string. She had told him about the string no one could see. She said it kept his feet on the ground. She rubbed his back with her hand and took her book away.
You can’t read, she said. It’s not good for you.
And the door opened. All the cool rained air came in. He heard her feet on the sidewalk; he heard her brown shoes with their neat ties on the crisscrossed brick that was washed now. Fat dark worms writhed on the cool grit. His father said they were trying to find dirt when they rolled like that. He said they were drowning in the air.
Callie heard the cat scratching at the window and dimly saw it beyond the glass. It opened its mouth soundlessly wide and to Callie it looked like a pink hole opening in a steam. Things seemed closer than they were; things were there before he touched them. He pushed his hands through the veil that surrounded them. Then there was a hardness.
They took him to the special doctor’s and he read the pictures. There was a boat, and then two boats, and then two cowboys and a boat in the shape of a triangle. He couldn’t see the cowboys’ faces anymore, but he remembered what they looked like from before. He told how they looked. They were the same one two times, with their big eyes rolled to the side and their smiles and their hats. They looked like they were turning and something pressed them flat. He thought they were afraid of the boat coming. When he squinted he could make the boat roll over them. Then he pulled it back and they were still turning.
He could read the chart with the letters on it. But Molly said not to tell, and now she wouldn’t let him read her books. With his glasses on he could see the big letters again. He never took the glasses off. He tried to sleep with them on. Each night his father’s big hand came down and took them in the dark. The hand was big and dark and his father sang to him when he took the glasses.
I wish I was an apple. A hangin in a tree.
His father sang it very slowly, trembling his voice. The apple was in the tree. It was round and red and it had a heart. It was made of sugar. When he got to the part about the girl, his father’s voice went up and around and in; still slower, like a heavy animal moving in a snow. Callie had heard about snow.
And every time my Sweetheart passed she’d. Take a bite of me.
Now it was snowing and he and his father walked with the girl to get along home. Callie led them all home because he could see. The girl was his mother but she was not his mother. She was Cindy; Callie knew that, but the song smelled of his mother.
Get along home. Get along. Home.
His father’s voice was slower, slow and high. There was cold honey in the snow.
Get along. Home Cindy Cindy. I’ll marry you suh uhm. Time.
Apples were fallen in the snow and the honey. They went along home until they were gone.
Callie and his mother went to the movies. Molly went to school. She saw the movies on Saturdays, but not on Wednesdays. When he and his mother went. They walked down the hill on the skinny sidewalk. He held her hand and her stick tapped out in front. It tapped very lightly like the thin finger of a clock. Sometimes he heard it tapping when his mother was asleep, tapping fr
om the dark corner of the room. He heard all the clocks tapping in the velvet house. He knew the stick told them when to tap.
As they walked, his mother asked him to look up in the sky and tell her what creatures were there. A creature was like an animal but it could be people, or half girl and half horse. Creatures grew in the sky, sliding over each other. Once a cloud came down and covered the town. His mother said it was a creature of a sort, a fog; only he couldn’t see its shape because he was inside it. She said she had seen many creatures when she was a girl. The best one was a man with a big pocket in his vest. More creatures kept coming out of the pocket until the man himself came out and then there was nothing left.
There were two movie theaters in town. The finer one was actually closer. But his mother liked the smaller one that was on down Main Street close to the tracks. It was nearly empty in the afternoons except for them and the sweeping man, who moved his big flat broom around and around. The lobby floor was laid with yellow linoleum in diamond shapes. It was coming up in patches where the planked boards showed through black with fuzz. Trains went by and the big mirrors rattled on the walls. In the shadowy closeness their seats shook; he gripped the worn plush delirious with joy.
The screen was a floating square of light. Curtains swung back on rods. His mother cupped his face in the dark. Pouring out of a tiny hole the big lion opened and roared, shuddering its gold weight. With his glasses Callie could almost see the tiny eyes and the fragile underlip quivering its teeth.
Black Tickets Page 14
