Devils in the Sugar Shop

by Timothy Schaffert

  “So, spill your guts,” Peach said. “What, for god’s sake, have you done, as if I’d believe you?”

  Plum looked at her watch, though she knew what time it was. “This afternoon,” she said, “I’m meeting him for boilermakers at Mr. Toad. So if he seduces me, I’ll be too busy and too emotionally destroyed to go to your stupid Sugar Shop party. He’s a photographer, and his name is Tucker.”

  “Plum Tuckered,” Peach said, with a sigh of boredom. “How perf.”

  Plum had met Tucker at a gallery show of his work. Tucker, only nineteen and an Oxford, Mississippian, had been born a tallish dwarf and had been through experimental treatments and surgeries as a child to stretch his limbs. He’d been accepted into the Bemis Center’s esteemed artist’s residency program in Omaha on the basis of a series of nude self-portraits. At his show last week, art patrons had drunk wine and moseyed, dispassionately studying the four-foot-by-four-foot photos of a teenaged ex-dwarf showing off his scars and knobbed knees and head-to-toe tattoos.

  “He really wouldn’t have had to have the surgery,” Plum’s husband, Mickey, had muttered in her ear as they’d stood looking at a portrait in which Tucker cradled in his arms a leg brace he’d worn during his treatment, a cage-like apparatus with a touch of the torture chamber about it. “I mean, look at his wang. Even if you’re only three feet tall, if your dink hangs mid-thigh you’ll get through life just fine. This guy would never have had a Napoleon complex. He could’ve just skittered through life on a couple of squatty little legs, happy as a clam, confident in his manlihood.”

  Plum realized she was laughing while looking right at that dink of Tucker’s, then covered her mouth and looked around to see if anyone noticed. It was then that she made direct eye contact with Tucker himself. Though it wasn’t in Plum’s nature to approach artists at gallery shows, she saw no choice. “Oh, your photos are incredible,” she said, stepping toward Tucker with her hand out, so overenthusiastic she made her own stomach turn. “They’re just so vibrant,” she said, grasping, “really, just, so, so multi-dimensional, and, and . . .”

  “Very brave,” Mickey said, stepping up to her side.

  “Oh, so brave, so brave,” Plum said.

  “You work at Mermaids Singing,” Tucker said in a voice so soft, so Southern, she had to lean forward and look at his lips (thick and pink) as he repeated himself.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “I mean, yeah, it’s my store. I own it.”

  “It’s the best place I’ve been to in Omaha so far,” he said. His smile was so disarmingly pretty and wide that her own smile, turning shy, wilted away in its presence. “Even better than the champagne on tap at the Homy Inn. I’ve only been in your shop once, though.” However did I miss a tall, misshapen dwarf with a tattoo of a frothing-mouthed dragon snorting up the side of his neck? Plum wondered. “I snagged a bargain-bin copy of a collection of stories by Ann Beattie. I can’t get enough of it.”

  Plum couldn’t speak, despite the fact that she adored Ann Beattie, which was why the collection was marked down to a buck. She wanted someone to buy it and love it and lose himself in it, to go cocktailing with its summer partygoers, to sit in an Adirondack chair and study all the false fronts of the crumbling marriages.

  Plum told Peach all this, then said, “He called me this morning. Wants me to meet him at Mr. Toad for boilermakers and to bring another book for him, to swap. I thought I’d bring him that pulp novel, The Climacticon, but now I’m thinking it’s too jokey.” She tapped her fingers on her chin.

  Peach sat there a moment, squinting. “How do you stretch a midget?”

  “What?”

  “He was a midget,” Peach said, her face screwed up with incredulity, “and they stretched him.”

  “A dwarf, actually,” Plum said.

  “Oh. My. God. Why can’t you even lie like a normal person? Why do even your sexual fantasies have to be something from a David Lynch movie? If there’s a stretched midget in town, showing nude pictures of himself, then why didn’t I hear about it?”

  “For the same reason you never hear about anything,” Plum said. “You’re self-involved. The show’s still up, we’ll go see it.”

  “So let’s,” Peach said. “Now.” She held up her hands and wiggled her fingers. “Look at me, all un-self-involved, as excited as a little kid.”

  “No,” Plum said, taking off her glasses. She put them in a dry teacup, then undid her scarf, letting down her ponytail. “I have to get to Toad.” The Climacticon definitely seemed now an immature swap for the Beattie stories, but she was too muddled, poised to head off early to her illicit afternoon boilermaker, to focus on any thoughtful, carefully considered book recommendation. So she grabbed Rosemary’s Baby, a gift she regularly made to visitors because Rosemary grew up in Omaha and even had a dream about the Orpheum, a gilded and brocaded downtown performance hall, a delightful white elephant with Art Deco accents. Plum and Tucker could raise a toast to Rosemary Woodhouse, probably the most tragically conflicted Omahan in literary history.

  Naomi

  Naomi sat with her father near the front door of a coffee shop at 11th and Jones, a draft chilling their cappuccinos. They’d come to the shop immediately after their art class, as they did every Saturday, and they compared their pastels of that day’s nude.

  The lines of Zeke’s woman were all wiggly, the red splotches up her spine rendered a soft pink, like rose petals or a row of lipsticked kisses. Naomi’s woman leaned closer to a surreal lankiness.

  “Where was your mom rushing off to?” Zeke asked, with a tone of disdain. “Usually she hangs around the loft, hoping for us to invite her along.”

  “She has a party tonight,” Naomi said.

  “Doesn’t that embarrass you at all?” Zeke asked. “A little? Her parties? Far be it from me to talk smack about your mama, but . . .”

  “You’re just jealous because she’s making piles of money.”

  Zeke ignored her, distracted by the Old Market’s rose seller strolling into the coffee shop, a man in a natty suit and tie with a basket in the crook of his arm full of single red roses wrapped in clear cellophane. “Sir!” Zeke said, much too loudly, standing to dig some money from his pocket. “A rose, please, for the prettiest girl in the room.”

  Naomi pulled her stocking cap lower on her head as everyone looked in her direction. She felt a blush warming her cheeks and working down her neck. As she’d grown up, Naomi had often been embarrassed by her father’s lack of embarrassment, and her blushing had developed into a chronic condition, rendering her incapable of concealing a single deeply felt emotion or telling the tiniest of lies. Her every insecurity glowed in her cheeks like hot-pink neon.

  Zeke was six feet two and so handsome it almost hurt to look at him, but that didn’t stop him from always swooping in for the overkill in public, from trying to win over the affection of all the wives and all the children of other men, with sticks of gum and dumb jokes, with a hand on someone’s back or on the back of someone’s hand, a swift wink, a lowered tone of voice. Years ago, he’d visited Naomi’s grade school on each and every Career Day to talk about his work as a forensics technician, romancing her classmates with the horror-show possibilities of a life in the morgue, delighting her lonely teachers, who’d giggle like idiots when he told the children to wear helmets when riding their bicycles so they wouldn’t end up on his slab too early.

  Naomi lit a cigarette when he returned to the table. He handed her the rose, and she touched its cool, soft petals to the skin of her hot cheek. “You shouldn’t let me smoke, Dad,” she said.

  “You should at least not smoke with your mittens on,” Zeke said, taking the cigarette from her for a drag. He then touched his tongue, trying to pick off a piece of mitten fuzz as he spoke. “You coul thet youthelf on fire.”

  “It’s cold in here,” Naomi said.

  “Your blood went thin in the Bahamas,” he said. “You know where I’d take you if I took you someplace? Paris, France, maybe. Or Venice, Italy.
Someplace where it didn’t matter if it rained. Someplace where it was even better if it rained. I’m not happy if you’re not happy. Always remember that, lovebug.”

  “So make me happy already,” Naomi said. “Marry Mom again.”

  It was strange to think that only hours earlier, Naomi had kicked off her sandals to run smooth sand between her toes before boarding the shuttle to the airport. In the dark of the morning, the storms having finally swept out to toss the sea, Naomi and Deedee had collected shards of broken shells. On the flight back, Naomi had run a smooth piece of blue sea glass over her wrists, soothing herself with a dreamy fantasy of opening her veins in an elegant act of suicide. Of course, she didn’t truly want to kill herself, but she was often eased by the thought of doing so, of relieving herself of every anxiety by simply slipping away.

  “Marry your mom? That’s not such a groovy idea, pruney toes,” Zeke said. “Seriously. You can’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Call me old-fashioned,” she said. “I tend to think a man should marry the mother of his child.” She broke off the bloom of the rose and tucked it into the fold of her stocking cap, near her left ear. “We used to be such a perfect family. People envied us, Dad. They did.” She took her cigarette back from Zeke and ground it out in the ashtray, the exaggerated extinguishing of it meant as a kind of exclamation point. “Did you ever even love Mom? Even for a second?”

  “What kind of person do you think I am? Of course I loved your mom. I still love your mom. She was my favorite wife.”

  “She was your only wife,” Naomi said. “So why’d you leave her if you’re so crazy about her?”

  “I’m not crazy about her,” he said. “I said I loved her. What’s not to love? Deedee’s a good girl. But we had our feet on each other’s necks.”

  “Necks,” Naomi said, rolling her eyes. “You just talk, you don’t care what you say. Is your life so much better now? Because I’ll tell you, it’s not. Your apartment is a fleabag, case you haven’t noticed. And you can’t afford to get your old coat cleaned, apparently. Look at yourself. No, don’t look at yourself.” She held up her mittened hand. “I don’t want you to see it, it’s too damn sad. I mean, Mom’s getting rich. She thinks she’ll retire when she’s fifty. But you, you’ll never be able to retire. You’ll be cutting up cadavers until you’re dead. You’re going to have to perform your own autopsy to pay for your own stupid funeral that nobody’ll even come to.”

  At this, Naomi and Zeke both began to laugh. Naomi loved it when she could amuse her father. All her life, he’d chuckled at every unfunny thing any charmless stranger had ever uttered, but at home, when he’d lived with her and her mother, he’d often been sullen, sneaking into his den after dinner to eat a float of Chunky Monkey and vodka and watch Taxi Driver compulsively. To get to sleep, even today, Naomi found herself often needing to hear through the walls the gunshots and the lush, dramatic swell of violins.

  “You don’t even want me to not smoke,” Naomi continued. “You think that by letting me smoke, you’re punishing Mom.”

  “No,” Zeke said, “but close. I like you to smoke because your mom doesn’t let you smoke, so it’s like our dirty little secret. I allow you to pursue a deadly habit, and you, in return, love me more than you love your mother.”

  “How did we all get so sick in the head?” Naomi asked. “Doesn’t it bother you that we never talk about things of importance? I want us to have meaningful conversations. I want to be able to say to my own kids someday, ‘It’s like my dad always used to say, blah blah blah.’ You know what I mean?”

  “That’s your first mistake right there,” Zeke said, “having kids. Those things will kill you quicker than cigarettes. Heh.”

  “I’m serious,” she said. “Tell me how to live my life. Go ahead, you can do it. Use your imagination.”

  “All right,” Zeke said, slowly leaning way back to rock on the chair’s back two legs like a hotshot brat in study hall. He chewed on his lip, looking off. “Okay. Here’s my advice,” he said, returning all four legs of the chair to the floor. “Ignore every piece of moral guidance your mother and I ever gave you. Politeness? Forget it. Respect?” He shook his head and turned up his nose. “Nuh-uh. Nope, the people who were raised without manners will pass you by in the real world. There’s no reward for common decency. As a matter of fact, it’s an impediment, is what it is. The rude and arrogant are the ones who will succeed. There. That’s the most meaningful advice you’ll ever receive. Commit it to memory.”

  “I have to go,” she said. She wished she hadn’t decided to ground out her mostly unsmoked cigarette as a moral judgment. She plucked it back from the ashes, dusted off the filter, and stuck it in her pocket. “I’m meeting Lee for some thrift shopping. And it will be so refreshing to be with someone who’s genuinely interested in my ideas.”

  “No one could be more interested than your dear ol’ pappy,” Zeke said. “And someday you’ll grow up and you’ll realize that. You’ll realize that I was the only one who ever really loved you, but I’ll be dead already, and you’ll be struck with horror by the way you’ve been so snotty to me. And there’ll be nothing you can do. It’ll be too late. And you’ll curl up into a ball, and you’ll cry your damn eyes out.”

  And Naomi, though she knew he was only going on with the endless comedy, contributing to their bickering father-daughter act, teared up a little right then, her eyes having begun to sting, her cheeks to turn hot, at the word “snotty.” She picked up a crumpled paper napkin from the table to sneak a few wipes at her cheeks as she stepped toward the door. Then Zeke was next to her. He stopped her, turned her to him. He took her head in his hands and kissed her forehead. The kiss almost made her cry more, and it was all she could do not to lean into her father for several minutes of tenderness. But she turned to leave, twisting her wrist around to toss a wave behind her.

  “Let me drive you,” he said, but she slipped out the door, shaking her head.

  Peach

  Afternoon, Plum,” a retired professor told Peach as he stepped into Mermaids Singing, brushing the snow from his herringbone coat.

  “Afternoon,” she said, pretending. Peach often found it easier to just shape-shift into her sister rather than correct those who couldn’t tell the two women apart. Peach felt quite comfortable slipping into and under Plum’s skin. Over the top of her cold, silky dress she’d pulled Plum’s itchy black sweater with flecks of red and blue woven into the wool. She ate one of the cherries from Plum’s carnival-glass bowl, a mostly flavorless out-of-season bing. She held it by the stem and nibbled around the pit, the juice turning her fingertips a nose-blood red.

  “Any sign of Birds in Tiny Cages yet?” the professor asked, and Peach had no idea. But it was something Plum would certainly know.

  “No, sir, I don’t think so,” Peach said, affecting Plum’s habit of mumbling and picking at the lint on her sleeves.

  The professor offered her a piece of candy with Japanese lettering across the pale-blue wrapper. “You can even eat the paper,” he said. “It’s made of rice.” He winked and smiled and disappeared deeper into the store. Peach popped the candy, wrapper and all, into her mouth.

  Peach hooked the wire stems of Plum’s antique reading glasses behind her ears, then poured into her cup some of Plum’s lapsang souchong gone cold in the teapot. Peach hated Plum’s charcoal-flavored tea. It reminded her of a scratch-and-sniff book they’d had as girls, in which a monkey’s fine Victorian house caught on fire. When you scratched the gray cloud, the thick smell of smoke rose from the page to tickle their noses and make them sneeze.

  Plum, a much better businesswoman than Peach, had left a list of strict instructions before leaving for her supposed fling at Mr. Toad. Peach was to post on eBay the leaning stack of books next to the computer—among them a Salvador Dali folio with an embossed gold-foil cover, a signed Daphne du Maurier, a Steinbeck with a typo—but Peach had clicked over to www.SybilThe Guru.com to read an article titled “How to Unmarry
a Married Man.”

  I used to work as a waitress in a frantic restaurant, wrote Sybil the Guru, the self-help evangelist, and always had more tables than I could handle. So I’d identify which diners seemed the most relaxed, the most content and even-tempered, and they were the ones who’d have to wait for their salads, or their drink refills, or their checks. The ones who were clearly demanding and difficult got the most attention from me, in order to keep them as quiet as those at the quiet tables. Quiet. The goal was quiet. Is it making sense, doormat? If you’re the mistress, unless you’re willing to flip your lid, and to keep your lid flipped, he’ll never leave her, now, will he?

  As if on cue, to add to the sad vaudeville that was Peach’s life, a little envelope appeared in the lower-right corner of her computer screen, opening and closing with cartoon vim and vigor, signifying new e-mail. Peach clicked on it, then tied her hair back in a ponytail with the faded polyester scarf Plum had left on the arm of the desk chair.

  To: Peach@mermaidssingingbooks.com

  From: Troy.Allyson@theomahastreet.com

  Subject: dare i eat a peach?

  my peach,

  here we are all alone some evening soon: a room with a view with a minibar and a king-size and a jacuzzi and room-service t-bones and caviar on crackers, the moonlight of the night against the rustled sheets, a couple of splits of bubbly, the flowery dress i bought you, only halfway on to begin with, all the way off, you fall flat on your back all tipsy, my kisses up the inside of your leg, the flesh of you smooth and silk against my lips, you with one hand on one breast, one finger on one nipple, the taste of you wet on my tongue, the skin of your thigh baby-smooth against my cheek, you’re opening up and my hand’s on your leg, and at the back of your knee, i’m holding you to get my tongue deep up inside, to make you make that noise that i so much like to hear, that whispery, shivery sound from the back of your throat, a sound like someone abandoned.