by Chamber Four
Nikolai Vassilievich awakens from his slumber, at the mention of the creatures he knew so well. But Lubov Gavrilovna has had enough of my phonemic system.
“Out! Out with her!” she yells. “Expel her from the university!”
Nikolai Vassilievich’s string bag tilts on the side and the carrots all tumble down in a fan of “i’s, /i:/” as in “Shit Street.”
“Come on, let’s buy the little fool some chocolate,” Andrey says. He is not upset. So much the better. Didn’t he tell me a thousand times that honest studying is not worth the hassle? At last I can do something useful. Now that he has become a market dealer himself, I can take his place at the counter beside Nikolai Vassilievich. There is so much to sell, so many millions to earn. Andrey himself has not needed to come to the State Examination. He sent the rector a hundred pairs of socks, which are enough for a ‘satisfactory,’ and not even Lubov Gavrilovna could do anything about it.
* * * *
With no haste, already in possession of the intellectually unobliging diploma in English Phililogy with honours, Tanya picks up the receiver. She hears an unfamiliar male voice on the line. “Could I speak to Miss Tatyana Prokopenko, please? There is a matter of some importance that I would like to discuss with her.”
The humiliating events of the recent past surge into Tatyana’s head.
“You fucking bastard, go to hell, you hear me? You go to hell with your fucking offers and I don’t want anything. Fuck you!”
She hangs up with a bang, and, when the telephone rings again, lets her eager mother answer the call.
“Tanya, a nice gentleman has just told me that he was sorry you don’t want to work in Kiev, for the Travel Star. He said you must be snowed up with job offers to curse him as you did.”
Tanya picks up the telephone and throws it against the wall. The machine is smashed to smithereens. Tanya utters The Cry of Cries, louder than any of her final duet chords. The cry is drowned in the Whirlpool of Tears. She leaves the house in her night gown and slippers. She runs to the United Hostels. Alyosha can’t believe his fortune. He jumps to his feet, throws the half-finished cigarette out of the window, lifts her solid weight as if it were a feather and hauls her onto the iron bed.
“Not before we marry,” Tanya says, pushing him away with a firm hand.
If her goddess dumped her, she has now to take the remnants of her once promising fate by the horns.
* * * *
In Donetsk United Hospitals, men are neither allowed into delivery room nor can they visit the mother at the Obstetrics, so the babies are shown to fathers through ward windows. Alyosha, like every young father, appears daily for a 2-minute display of the son. It is, however, difficult to define Tanya as an ordinary mother, at least as seen from the point of view of the hospital staff. No less than twenty times in five days Tanya spent in hospital the perplexed nurses have been accepting flowers and cards from sundry men. The contents of the cards stuck in the bouquets does not vary in a single word. Each of them says, “Tanya—Thank you for the son!”
I am at the United Hospitals, too, nothing serious, just family planning. Andrey says that they will serve me a chicken wing when I wake up. He has paid for that.
I am sprawled like a starfish and there is a needle in my arm bend. One doctor is behind my head and one is between my knees.
“Why is she still twitching? That dose should have put her under by now!”
“Ah, what the hell. Just get on with it.”
My limbs are washed by the green tide, my mind crumbles like stardust and flows down into my stomach. Zazzy, zaftig, zing, zigzag. The alphabet is over now. My loins are full of the final spice. “Well-done,” says Ursa Major. “You have deserved your prize.”
I hear his topaz breath, I feel the swing of his cloak. He wraps me into its folds and off we start, away from Donetsk, away from everything united, up into the vernal equinox. He is holding me tight, my Angle, my Saxon, my Jute.
The Girl In The Glass
by Valerie O’Riordan
from PANK
They held the mermaid auditions in the aquarium bathroom, made the girls stick their faces underwater in the sinks and hold their breath. Shona lasted the longest. I heard her say when she surfaced that the room was sparkled with black dots. One of the other girls had gotten sick on the floor. I mopped it up as Shona shook the water from her hair.
Her routine was two minutes long. She wriggled and twisted, flicked her tail fin and somersaulted through the shoals of fish as the tourists nudged one another. The guides hustled them away afterwards so they wouldn’t see the mermaid lunge for the top of the tank and gasp for air. The girls couldn’t get out of the tank alone; their legs were fettered by the fins, and the porters had to haul them out. I used to push forward to get to Shona’s side—I’d grab her arm and heave and feel the thump of her heart jolting through my skin.
I’d stand outside the girls’ locker room and listen to her getting changed. The wet slurp of the tail peeling away from her legs, her curses as she pounded her feet against the floor to restore the blood flow. I’d sneak in later and jimmy open her locker, gather up the sequined fabric and push it into my face. The smell of her sweat, the tiny hairs gathered against the damp satin. I’d think of her as the bus carried me home, and I’d feel comfortable.
Just before Christmas she looked at me as I pulled her out of the tank. She smiled. I nearly lost my grip. I swayed and the light in the room dipped. I clung onto her and my fingers dug into her arm. She came up to me after she’d changed and pulled up her sleeve. Five purple blotches where we’d touched. I reached out to feel and she pulled her arm away, shy.
The next day, the day of the Christmas party, I was waiting. I sat on the bench beside the lockers and hugged myself, rocked back and forth. I heard the shuffling hop as she made her way down the corridor, hobbled by the costume, and my heart drubbed. Fucking fins, I heard her mumble. Her tail slapped against the tiles as she turned and crashed into me. She gasped as I hugged her tight. Her skin was beaded with droplets of cold water and her bikini top pressed against my chest. She was speaking but it was muffled. I stroked her head with my free hand. They said this worked on dolphins. We dropped to the floor and I reached down and ran my hands along her scaly tail. It writhed and beat against the wall, and I shuddered. She pulled her face away and screamed, and I told her to shush, to hold her breath. Two minutes, I whispered. I ripped a gash in the satin and stuck my hand inside her thrashing tail.
They asked me to leave after that. I got a new job, in the park, skimming rubbish off the surface of the lake, stopping kids throwing rocks at the ducks. I stare into the water and think of Shona’s slippery limbs. I watch for her amongst the paddle-boat tourists and the day-trippers. I know she’ll turn up. I wait by the water and hold my breath. I count to sixty, and again, and I watch the black sparkles dance.
Peacocks
by L.E. Miller
from Ascent
We had values. We had Le Creuset pots. We had fold-out couches in our living rooms, where we slept with our husbands at night. Beside these couches, we had books stacked on the floor: Modern Library editions of Kafka and James Joyce and George Sand. Beneath these high-minded selections, we had Lorna Doone and Anne of Green Gables, touchstones from a time when reading in bed was our guiltiest pleasure.
We had blue jeans long before other women wore them. We had degrees in literature and anthropology and biology, hard-won in night classes at City College. We had aspirations but did not yet have careers. We had cookbooks with French recipes that confounded us. For a few years, we tried to muddle through until we gave up on the fancy dinners our children despised and turned back to the roasted meats of our childhoods.
And we all had children: two or three apiece, whose strollers we tucked beneath the stairways in our buildings.
* * * *
We were individuals, of course, but we seemed so much alike, I still speak of us today in the plural. Each of u
s had endured bookish, lonely childhoods in the outer boroughs; we had been the pride and bane of our immigrant parents’ lives. When we found one another along the broad avenues of what, growing up, we had reverentially called “The City,” we recognized one another as landsmen, all of us dark-haired women who carried the inflections of our parents’ Yiddish in our speech. Our cramped apartments were fine with us; we would never in a million years live in some bourgeois outpost in Long Island, and the only way we’d return to Brooklyn was in a coffin. We called ourselves The Quorum. We called ourselves the Collective Unconscious of the Upper West Side.
Our children played in a bleak little playground near the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. We invaded the place with our sand toys and tricycles, the bags we packed with apples and breadsticks. While we pushed our children on the swings, we talked about Carl Jung, whom we understood in a handful of telegraphed phrases, and Ingmar Bergman, whose films played downtown and which we desperately wanted to see. On the grounds of the Cathedral, several peacocks wandered freely. Sometimes, we took our children over to see them, although the great birds frightened us with their manic darting, their unholy screaming and reputation for viciousness. The hens were a dull gray, nothing much to look at, but the males were magnificent. I think we wished to see ourselves in them: rare and graced, transcendent in their vaguely shabby setting.
* * * *
It was during this time of strollers and failed cassoulets that Rebecca Redl moved into the building where I lived with my husband and our two boys. I first saw her sitting on the stairs, reading a book. Instinctively, she shifted her body while men in brown uniforms lifted chairs and bookcases up and over her head. At first glimpse, I took her for a girl of twelve or thirteen, because at that age, I, too, would have read through the apocalypse. Her hair fell to her shoulders, black as obsidian. My first impulse was to touch it, the way it shined. Although the shirt she wore was so big and loose it nearly swallowed her whole, her loveliness had a sleek economy, as it is with certain lucky girls before their bodies assume an adult’s heft and gravity.
A few steps below, a little girl with the same dark hair smoothed and re-smoothed her skirt over her knees.
On the second-floor landing, a man smoked a cigarette and gave curt direction to the men who carried the furniture up the stairs. This man was tall and lean and had cropped silvery hair. Later, I would learn that he was her husband, his name was Eric Redl, and he was a professor of philosophy at Barnard, some ten blocks north. I don’t remember how I came to know these things. Rebecca and I never exchanged such information about our lives.
The little girl buried her face in her hands when I introduced myself, and Rebecca, with some reluctance, it seemed, told me her own and her daughter’s name. I asked Rebecca what she was reading, and she held up a thick hardcover. Buddenbrooks. I hadn’t read Buddenbrooks, but I told her I had loved the hundred and twenty pages of The Magic Mountain I had managed to complete while my sons napped.
“I wouldn’t say I ‘love’ this book,” she replied in a way that foreclosed further discussion. Nonetheless, I was willing to look the other way. I felt generous then. I had a husband whom I both loved and respected; I had two healthy, vigorous boys; I enjoyed the company of like-minded women. I told Rebecca about us, how we met at the little playground near the Cathedral every morning, and how her daughter would have instant friends.
“Instant friends,” Rebecca echoed, and I heard in the blankness of her voice the simple-mindedness of my presumption.
Later, I made soup for her, my mother’s vegetable bean. The day after I delivered it, she left the pot outside my door, scrubbed clean and without any sort of note inside.
* * * *
I was surprised, then, when Rebecca showed up with her daughter at the playground a few days later. The little girl, whose name was Vera, wandered over to the edge of the sandbox. Clutching her doll, she watched the other children dig.
In a manner of speaking, Rebecca became part of our group, but she held herself above it, like someone who refuses to join the party and demonstrates her refusal further by waiting outside the room on a wooden chair. The two of them would arrive late in the morning, Rebecca wearing a man’s shirt and Vera a perfect little dress. Rebecca would nudge her daughter to go play, but Vera stood to the side with her doll while her mother read on the bench. Sometimes, one of us prompted our children to give her a turn with a tricycle or shovel, but whenever she was offered, Vera just shook her head and gnawed on her doll’s arm.
It crossed my mind that Vera might be mentally retarded, and I told myself that would be a terrible thing, a tragic thing, for a clearly intellectual woman like Rebecca. But one day, Vera approached as I was unpacking my boys’ snack. Her eyes widened as she watched me hand out Fig Newtons and pour juice from the Thermos. She stared while Joel and Peter devoured their food in thirty seconds flat. Over on the bench, Rebecca turned a page in her book. I handed Vera a cookie, and she wolfed it down. I thought nothing of it. We mothers fed and comforted one another’s children all the time. I handed Vera a second cookie, which also disappeared in the wink of an eye.
“These cookies are my favorite kind,” she piped in a voice as pretty as a bell. Then she skipped away, back toward her mother.
“I gave your daughter two Fig Newtons,” I told Rebecca at the bench, when I saw her fold down a page to mark her place.
“Oh.” She glanced up in my general direction.
“I hope that’s all right. I know people feel differently about sugar and so on.”
Rebecca laughed sharply. “I have no opinion about sugar.”
Vera looked down and raked her fingers through her doll’s hair.
“I wasn’t sure what to do...she just seemed so hungry.”
“She had breakfast at nine.”
“I just know that some days, my boys get hungry every hour....”
When Rebecca blinked, I noticed, because her gaze had been perfectly steady until then. With that blink, I knew, she’d put her essential self out of reach.
But I pressed on, with a dogged insistence on good will, at which I both marvel and cringe today. “What are you reading?”
“La Nausée.”
It took a moment for the information to compute. “I admire your powers of concentration. Most days, I wouldn’t trust myself to get through a fashion magazine.”
Rebecca stood up. “You’ve been very nice, but I think it’s best to be honest. I am not interested in friendship.” Her voice was neutral, not unkind.
“Fair enough,” I said, as lightly as I could manage. I walked back to the sandbox and called my sons out for lunch.
* * * *
“I want to be friends with you,” my husband said when I rehashed the exchange that night, after the boys had gone to bed.
“I know, I know, but it’s just so rude. I mean, what did I do? Gave her kid a couple of cookies. The crime of the century.”
“At least she was direct.”
“You’re no help.”
“Like I said, I like you.” Harry pulled me toward him.
* * * *
It was a temptation I couldn’t resist: letting drop a few sideways comments to the others while she read on the bench in the park. La Nausée! Why couldn’t she just say it in English? Dresses her daughter up in fancy clothes but can’t be bothered to bring a snack. Why do some people even have children? Even today I wonder: why was I so undone by this woman’s refusal to count me as one of her own?
One memory I’d almost forgotten but seems important now to recount: once, at the park, I heard Rebecca singing softly while Vera danced around her, swooping and twirling like a top. When I moved closer, I recognized it, the same wordless, minor-key melody my mother used to sing to me. Rebecca met my gaze, soft and open for just a moment, until she turned away and closed her arm around her daughter.
* * * *
It was fall, then winter. The weather and a spate of colds kept me and my sons away from
the park. The colds turned into croup, and I spent several nights with each of them outside the steaming shower and many days trying to keep them occupied in our small rooms. By this time, Rebecca and I exchanged only brief nods when we passed in the hallway. Often it was easier to feign absorption in the mail or my grocery bags and pretend I never saw her at all.
One day, Eric Redl appeared at my door, dressed for work and carrying a briefcase. It was a Tuesday morning, nine-thirty, and already my living room looked like a shipwreck. Vera stood beside him, clutching his arm. When I stepped toward them, she sidled closer to her father, as if she’d climb inside his body if she could.
“Would you mind?” Eric asked. “I have to teach a class at ten, but I’ll be back after that.”
“Of course.” I reached for Vera’s hand, but she pulled away. She wore a mismatched skirt and sweater. Her chin was streaked with jam.
Eric leaned toward me. “Rebecca’s gone,” he whispered.
“Gone? Where did she go?”
“Apparently Paris.”
“Paris?”
“That’s what it said in her note.”
She took off for Paris without so much as looking back... Already, I’d begun composing the story I’d tell the others, but then I saw Eric kneel down and rest his hands on Vera’s shoulders. I caught the terror in his eyes. “I’ll be back in one hour. The big hand will make one circle around the clock. Not too long, right?” He spoke quickly, as if he could build with his words a fort no grief could enter. But children always know. Vera clung to him and sobbed. Even Joel and Peter came over to stare with alarmed curiosity.
* * * *
