by Maria Flook
The women watched Carol to see if she took offense.
Leslie looked back at Iris and told her, “He says I’m dried up.”
Iris said, “That’s not bad. That’s almost got manners.”
“No, honey. He says I’m as dry as a bone. That’s different.” Leslie leaned forward. “Like a desiccated morsel. Like a freeze-dried breakfast berry.”
Iris blinked but she kept her eye-to-eye with Leslie.
“After the change,” Leslie said, “I got sore as hell. I started to tear. I was bleeding. I had to avoid Roy until I healed. Then it would happen again the next time.”
Iris remembered the sign outside the front door: “Nothing Is Permanent But Change.” She didn’t think this was the reference Leslie was making.
A resident told Leslie, “You need a patch.”
“What’s the point? Estrogen isn’t the issue. Why rebuild a bridge between warring nations,” another woman said.
“For your own sake. A patch is good for your general health, your heart, your posture—”
“He really call you that? Freeze-dried—”
“—breakfast berry.”
The residents looked at the floor in a stunned meditation on the simile.
Iris understood, at last, that the women were discussing the mysterious, unpredictable humidity of the female zone. Maurice often remarked on this bloom of moisture when he tested her interest with just a little talk, his fingers prowling her neckline, his lips sucking her collar bone, until he started biting the caps of her shoulders.
These women were discussing a time line Iris had not yet imagined, nor would she ever need to. She stood up and went over to the coffee urn. Suddenly, the women started shrieking. Each one screamed by her lonesome, as if cued, until they had all joined in.
A common brown bat had squeezed through a cellar floor grate before their eyes. It found itself in the tight, crowded room. It dipped from one corner to the other, circling the crouched women, eliciting individual shrieks. It flew out the parlor door. The group ran after it to see that it didn’t enter their own rooms. It flew up the stairwell, where it became trapped in the second-floor hallway. It pumped its wings, a ratcheting, erratic W. It turned up and down in the confined space without touching lintel, doorpost, or ceiling. The bat’s expert maneuvering seemed proof of its mysterious gifts. Its weightless reversals in flight were an attraction to the women; and yet, their attraction only heightened their repulsion.
Two of the residents were truly frightened and together had wrapped themselves in the full-length drapes, winding the fabric tight until they looked like a shivering cigar. Others locked themselves in their rooms and called out their nervous inquiries through the hinges. Iris climbed the stairs to her room and was laughing in her doorway. When the bat flew past her she tried to whack it down with a foam slipper.
It escaped past Iris and flew into her tiny room. It was clinging to the rolled window shade above the baby’s crib. Iris wheeled the crib away and Carol stepped up to the window to remove the child-guard screening. She pushed down the window sash to release the bat, but it clung to the rolled vinyl. Carol saw its diminutive rib cage heaving as it breathed through its tiny nostrils. The bat didn’t escape into the sunlight but flew back into the hallway. By the time they followed it out of Iris’s room, it was out of sight.
“It’s gone,” Carol announced. The women protested. The evidence was inconclusive; they claimed they could not rest until they had seen it banished or had its actual carcass as proof. For another half-hour they sorted through the throw pillows, opened all the cupboards, knocked the tin wastebaskets, and carefully jimmied open bureau drawers. The flying rodent had vanished. Iris wasn’t alarmed and she borrowed nail polish from an Irish girl in order to paint not only her fingernails, but the tiny gray wafers of her toenails. The glowing red polish had an artificial cherry scent. She told the girl who gave her the polish, “This is the first time in ages.”
“Yeah. We forget we have toes.”
Iris agreed. She had neglected these extremities, letting her nails blanch and chip, ignoring her cuticles until a thin membrane grew over the half moons on all her fingers. Having long fingernails didn’t advance the diapering routine and interfered with other services she was constantly required to do for Terrell, whose own fingernails were difficult to clip. She had to nibble his fingertips to remove their ragged ends.
Carol sent Rick to the True Value to buy some screening for the cellar windows. He spent Saturday afternoon in the alley between the two houses cutting measured oblongs from a roll of screen and tacking the mesh to the old casement windows. The cement walk was warming in the sun and he didn’t mind lying down on it to tack the mesh to the hard-to-reach moldings. The window casements had substantial dry rot and dissolved into powder where he hammered. He moved the tacks around to find solid wood.
The women had opened the upstairs windows for air and he could hear their conversations, their kids chattering. He placed his Panasonic on the concrete beside him and turned up the volume. The station he usually listened to wasn’t airing his New Wave favorites and was holding forth with “a full day of Gaye.” He tacked the screen.
The girl with the blond hair stuck her head out of a second-floor window and said, “Can you shut that fucking thing off.”
He sat up and leaned back on his hands to look up at her. She didn’t appear as beautiful in the daylight as she had looked in the street light, but she was beautiful. She sat against her windowsill, her hip jutting over the ledge, her baby in her lap.
“You putting screens on those windows?” she said.
“Just about done,” he told her, feeling his face glow. He looked down at his tools and lined them up another way. He waited to feel the heat in his face wash away before looking up again.
She was telling him, “You sure that bat is gone? You might be locking him inside instead of keeping him out.”
“I’m doing what they want.” He pointed to the office window on the first floor.
“Nobody saw that bat leave the house.”
“I guess you’ll find out.”
She chuckled.
Rick recognized the idleness in her voice. She was enjoying her respite. Lots of these girls liked talking to him in the first days after they arrived at the shelter. They’re chatty and friendly in their little oasis; then they get restless. If no one shows up to protest their absence, they think they have to turn around in their tracks. They start to miss their own surroundings and they run back home. This girl was dangling one leg out the window, swinging it back and forth, as if she was sitting on a school wall. Her baby was scrubbing his gums with a hollow plastic rattle like a tiny white barbell, teething on it.
“What’s your baby’s name?”
“Terrell. If he was a girl, you know, her name would have been Tammi.”
Rick said, “No kidding?”
“Did you see Essence? It’s all about what happened.”
He told her, “That’s a story, I bet.”
“I hate Marvin Gaye,” she told him. “I could write his epitaph. I’m just about a Motown widow myself.”
Rick shrugged.
“It couldn’t have happened soon enough for me.”
Rick didn’t punch the button on the radio and the music she loathed drifted up to Iris; it was Gaye’s famous erotic anthem: “Get up, get up, get up. Wake up, wake up, wake up.”
“I hope he rots in hell,” she said.
Rick was surprised by her voice; its natural timbre suggested a plaintive, desolate truth. He looked up to the second-floor window to somehow acknowledge it, but she was gone.
Where the girl had been lounging on the sill, dangling her leg, her baby was left by himself, hunched in a jumbled position.
Rick stood up. Terrell was centered on the ledge, crumpled over in his terry suit. The baby appeared to be a complete amateur as he practiced the seated posture, his spine still too weak, and yet he didn’t fall backwards or forwards. The baby
held the plastic toy, hitching his fist up and down until Rick heard the loose particles inside the rattle. The noisemaker, alone, appeared to be the magical counterweight which kept the baby from falling.
Rick hollered up at the window but the girl did not come back to collect the child. He wondered why the child guard had been removed in the first place. There was nothing but open space between the baby and an entire spectrum of chances and fortunes.
Rick hollered again. No one came to the open window. Then, he watched the rattle fall from the baby’s fingers and bounce off the siding. Like a white bone, it tumbled end over end, and hit the pavement.
He saw the baby tipping and Rick lifted his arms. He waited to intercept the bundle of chaos, to cushion the terry-clad icon of man’s entire mortal profile, condensed in a split second, but someone pulled it off the window sill and slammed the sash. Rick stooped over to collect the plastic rattle. His heart was thudding. His chest felt tight and he recognized the sensation of his airways pinching shut. He walked over to the apartment for his inhaler. He sat on the edge of his bed and puffed the medication.
When he came back outside an hour later, he was just in time to see a familiar procession. The blond girl was leaving the shelter with her baby, accompanied by two other women. The women had arrived by taxi and they were helping the girl put the baby’s safety seat in the cab. Rick still had the baby’s tiny white barbell and he walked over to the car. He stood beside the taxi until someone noticed him. He handed the rattle to the nearest black woman, who handed it to the next one, who then handed it to Iris. Iris put the rattle in the baby’s hand. One of the women wore the familiar Thriller T-shirt which Rick had seen everywhere that spring. Each time he saw the solitary glove, its disembodied hand modeled by all sizes and generations, the day acquired a forlorn tinge.
“Maurice is awake,” Vicki told Iris, as if this was his ultimate gesture of a reconciliation.
Iris sat down in the backseat. She held an empty S.O.S. coffee mug on her knee. She saw Rick and called to him, “Hey, kid, can you give this back to your mom?”
Rick didn’t want to be called “kid” when the girl was his own age, or younger, yet he sensed she was many dangerous miles ahead. He wanted to ask her why she had carried the cup outside in the first place, but he knew that Carol would gladly pass it on to the next one.
When he leaned into the taxi and took the mug from her hand. Iris could smell his breath, a tart medicinal odor which she found to be slightly disturbing. She recognized the scent from a previous trip to the hospital, when they gave her a drug and tested the congestion in her lungs on a Peak Flow Meter.
The taxi left the curb. The driver had tuned his radio to “a full day of Gaye,” and Iris immediately recognized the iced crooner’s sonorous murmur as he delivered his lyrics with silky pathos. This particular song had always crossed over the color line and was doing it again, tweaking her pink heart. Gaye whispered contrite, universal admissions to his female chorus, who replied in a breathy I-told-you-so singsong.
Rick was smiling at Iris, but she was riding away. The cab passed the entrance to the Stop Over Shelter and she read the sign with its foolish sentiment that seemed to openly misconstrue human failure for human promise. Such a banner was hurtfully misleading. Iris had told Carol during her intake interview, “Change. Find me something hopeful in that.”
“Embrace it as your starting place,” Carol had said, her eyes heated and luminous, as if lit by the pyres of the martyrs.
EXCHANGE STREET
They were living in Providence again after spending the summer in Wildwood, New Jersey. In Wildwood, Stephen worked on a fishing boat, a deep-sea charter named the Pied Piper. It was a bad name for a fishing boat, since it made people think of rats in the water. Families and businesses hired the boat for reunions and other celebrations when their members wanted to reaffirm their brotherhood. Occasionally, someone brought his wife along and it was a sore spot with the others. After a couple of weeks on the boat, Stephen’s burn turned deep bronze and he oiled his arms and chest every morning to enhance muscle definition.
While Stephen was on the boat, Venice worked at the Acme supermarket, which was giving double pay for inventory; then she stayed on to stock the shelves there. She’d been working an act on the boardwalk but Stephen wanted her out of that line of work. Venice agreed it was better to stock canned goods in Acme than to earn your money as a spectacle.
They both had problems at their jobs. Venice wasn’t careful with the Exacto knife when she opened cartons and she slit the boxes of cereal and crackers. Laundry soap sifted over the floor. Then she ruined crates of coffee and cigarettes and was caught when she tried to throw the damaged cartons in the Dumpster in back of the store. Stephen fared a little better in his job. He knew when to tell the captain to head in because of rough weather. He watched the clients getting queasy and they docked just in time, so that the people were seasick on shore instead of getting sick on the boat. He wouldn’t have to hose the deck and gunnels. He didn’t get along with the people who hired the charter. He was called a first mate, but they treated him like a slave. He had to fetch them cold beers, bait their lines, scale the catch, and the tips were sometimes insulting. At the end of the summer, just as the schoolkids started buying notebook paper at the Acme, Stephen and Venice left their jobs. They prowled the tourist attractions at Atlantic City before going back north.
Whenever Stephen was out of work he suffered an unpleasant mix of feelings. He had some anger about not working even if he himself had resigned, writing a short note to the boss, explaining that the work just wasn’t his “cup of tea.” Crewing for the Pied Piper was seasonal work, and when he was dismissed he took his freedom seriously and wasted none of it. He approached Venice three and four times a day, and when he wasn’t in that privacy with her, he was leading her somewhere else, strolling down the tide line or through the alleys behind the hotels searching for another place where it would happen again. Atlantic City was a perfect town for him. Outside the glitzy facades of the boardwalk and betting parlors, everyone minded his own business. No one talked to them except for the occasional hick who had to explain his lucky streak to passersby. There were losers everywhere, and this gave Stephen a combined sense of doom and gratitude. He wasn’t at the bottom. He was between jobs. He still had a wad of cash. After a week of roaming around, he got nervous again. He became cranky thinking about jobs. “I’d rather be digging a ditch than nothing,” he said.
Then they were back in New England. They found a furnished apartment on the fringes of College Hill, where the rents edged down near the Chinese section. Stephen liked to blend with the dispossessed; it was live and let live, and he was happy not to see all the university students nosing around. They found immediate employment, both worked days and they had the nights together.
Venice worked at Industrial National Bank, in credit card operations. Her job was in the Customer Service Department and she was on the telephone all day. She retrieved credit card statements on her computer, consulted celluloid microfiche or daily printouts. The telephone was heavy in her hand, like a clot of hot tar resting against her cheek. The tendon of her thumb became sore after pressing the receiver to her ear for eight hours, and she often had to stop to wiggle her thumb as if she was playing “Thumbelina.” Credit card customers called in to complain about their MasterCard accounts. A cardholder screamed at her about his trip to Mexico, where a hotel had submitted erroneous charges for numerous Papaya Softees and other blenderized drinks. He wasn’t paying for drinks he never had. Venice listened to the customer, but she couldn’t keep from questioning him about these Papaya Softees. What did they taste like?
Women called in to ask about charges on their statements which they couldn’t identify. The charges might be for “Fantasy Phone,” “Date Lite,” or “Miss Paula,” all dial-a-porn operations which the women’s husbands or sons had contacted. Venice liked to advise her customers to have a “family powwow.” “Bring it all out in
the open,” she told them. When her customers complained about their MasterCard errors, Venice told them to use cash instead of plastic. There was the matter of the finance charges: twenty-one percent, accrued daily from the day the charge is posted to the account, before the customer even received a statement. “With plastic you lose your dignity. It’s out the window,” she said.
Venice enjoyed finding the microfiche that had her ex-lover’s statement. It pleased her to read the list of businesses and to see just where he was putting his money. She could tell by her ex-lover’s purchases that he was certainly not someone to have second thoughts about, and the little bits of information revealed in the billing was affirming to Venice. She reported to Stephen that her ex had charged items at The Gentleman Farmer, a fancy garden-supply store for suburban types. “Shit. He’s changed his stripes, you know that? He’s scared himself completely into squaresville. He’s backed into a corner.”
They laughed about it. Sometimes her ex’s new wife would make charges at clothing stores called Ample Beauty and Added Dimensions.
“His wife can’t lose those pounds,” Venice told Stephen.
Even with these few laughs, the job in the credit card department was bad and she was always looking for something better. Stephen was at Sears, in the key center. He made keys for housewives who had had recent close calls locking themselves out of the house or locking their babies in the car. They came in to get backups, and they watched him carefully to make sure he wasn’t making a key for himself. Sometimes landlords Stephen recognized came in to get keys made. They said, “Are you still in town? Didn’t you ever graduate from the university? You’re at Sears?” When he wasn’t making keys, he was in kitchen appliances; sometimes they even made him sweep something up. Stephen wasn’t too happy about his position and together they looked at the Sunday paper.
There were always ads for couples in the paper. Couples were sought to run group homes and halfway houses for the retarded, for substance abusers, or for the elderly. Venice didn’t like the idea because it usually required residence in a place and the shifts were three days on, then three days off. She believed that kind of a cycle was disorienting. “You have to keep an overnight bag all the time. You have to sleep there with those kids,” she told Stephen.
