Devils in the Sugar Shop

by Timothy Schaffert

  Plum

  After her boilermaker with Tucker, still buzzing from his tender scrutiny, Plum agreed to go with Peach to the dreaded Sugar Shop party. The snow had begun to fall even more heavily, and it no longer melted when it hit the slush on the sidewalk and dirty red brick of the street, giving the city a sparkle. Plum continued to picture Tucker, how he had watched her just sitting there talking, her posture bad in a pew at Mr. Toad, her lips wet with whiskey and beer.

  “Tucker wants me to road-trip down I-80 to Aurora with him,” Plum told Peach. “There’s a museum dedicated to this photographer he’s interested in ripping off creatively, a guy named Edgerton, invented flash photography, took those pictures of the bullet burning across the playing card? And of a bullet going through an apple?”

  Peach had clearly already lost interest in Plum’s crush. At Delice, Peach obsessed at the counter of sweets, leaving fingerprints on the glass as she evaluated the inventive tarts and artfully iced madeleines. Peach said they needed something impeccable and expensive because Ashley’s get-togethers were so precious. “At one of the erotica-writing workshops, she put out coconut prawns, for god’s sake,” Peach said. She ran her fingertip softly across the glass over a seafoam-green cake with pink fleur-de-lis, as if touching the naked hip of a lover. “And she had that British bubbly that comes in the little bottles, Baby Sham, that she must have had flown in.” Peach told the counter girl she’d take the pistachio ganache.

  As they walked down the street, Peach carrying the pink cake box by its twine, Plum slowed her pace, tagging along. She always loved a late-season snow, how the air seemed to muffle the city’s engines and boilers while heightening all the smaller sound, the clatter of heels on pavement, a whirling dervish of jazz spinning out from a bar’s doorway. She heard a woman across the street cough softly into a glove and a tiny dog barking in an upstairs apartment.

  Nights like this reminded Plum of New York, where she’d lived for six months fresh out of college. As Plum followed Peach now, she looked into the eyes of the people she passed, people on their way to bars and restaurants, their breath in clouds in the streetlamp light, thick snowflakes casting shadows on their faces. Plum missed the way you could walk past a stranger in New York, lock eyes for only a millisecond, and lose yourself in a vision of romance. Every day, just walking to and from work, you filled your life with delicious missed opportunities.

  So maybe that was why Plum’s mood darkened then, she reasoned later, why she did the rather mad thing that she did. Maybe she was cranky from considering the myth of Midwestern pleasantness, how everyone in Omaha, even in the Old Market, the only part of town where people got out of their cars and walked a block or two, kept deeply to themselves. In New York, so much that was private was public—you lived your life on sidewalks and in mass transport and in front of open windows that looked into other open windows. But in Omaha, you stayed inside even when you were outside.

  Or maybe what made her do what she did was seeing Peach in her white secondhand mink and head scarf, in her $200 boots, swinging that pink cake box at her side, looking like the epitome of her own generation’s That Girl. Peach looked years younger than Plum just then, though she was only minutes newer. Plum, in her dowdy coat with its sofa-like floral print and broken buttons and fake-silk lining that had been ripped since college, despite anything Tucker might have said or noticed, had been born a matronly aunt, a Pat Nixon, her hair collected in an undoable bun, her best dresses only rags bought for nickels and dimes at rummage sales. Even up in Mom’s uterus, Peach had probably been the most stylish girl in the room, dreamily rubbing her veiny paunch and fluttering her see-through eyelids. Peach was why Plum had run away to New York—Plum had wanted to be the most interesting twin for once.

  Here’s the rotten thing she ended up doing: when they stepped up to the locked door to the stairs to Ashley Allyson’s condo, about fifteen minutes too early for the party, after Peach pressed the buzzer and Ashley said “Yes?” through the crackling speaker, Plum piped up, quite loudly, her mouth right at the rusted brass intercom plate, with “I’m having an affair with your husband.” Peach then looked at Plum with the most genuine expression of shock that Plum had ever seen cross her sister’s face, making it all almost worth it. Maybe that was why Plum did it. To tattle, like old times.

  And like old times, Peach began to giggle at their badness. Wide-eyed, she grabbed Plum’s wrist to pull her from the doorway, out onto the sidewalk, and around a corner. But Peach had stopped giggling by the time they reached the alley. “Why did you do that to me?” Peach asked. “What if she recognized your voice? We sound alike.”

  Plum, digging for a cigarette in her sister’s mink pocket, rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, don’t throw a clot,” a medical phrase she’d been anxious to use ever since she’d heard it from Mickey the other night. Mickey was a phlebotomist. “The speakers don’t work in these old buildings. They just crackle and spit noise. Ashley probably just heard . . . you know, maybe . . .‘I’m blaving an athpair with your shlusband.’” Peach didn’t seem at all amused by Plum’s jokiness.

  “A great lesson that I learned today, watching that couple pass by Mermaids Singing earlier?” Peach said. “A person can probably beat another person in the street, and people can witness it, and no one will do anything about it.”

  “So hit me already,” Plum said, lighting two cigarettes, then perching one on Peach’s pouting lip. “We haven’t had a good knock-down, drag-out since we were kids.”

  “Yeah, and remember what it was about?” Peach said. “You raped my Malibu Barbie with a pair of cuticle scissors, you sicko. We should’ve all known then.”

  Peach started pulling off her mink and her scarf.

  “You’re really going to slug me?” Plum said.

  “No,” Peach said, pushing the coat and cake box into Plum’s arms. “If Ashley looked out her window and saw my coat and scarf, she’ll know. So I have to go back there. Alone. And pretend I haven’t rung up yet.” The cigarette between her lips, Peach ran both hands through her hair, fluffing.

  “Probably better give me the boots too,” Plum said.

  Peach looked down at Plum’s orthopedic-like shoes. “Why do you have to dress like a clubfoot?” she asked. They traded, then Peach walked back toward the street. “I have to get out of here,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to think we’re together.”

  Plum put on Peach’s mink, her boots, her scarf, and she sat on the pavement to pick pieces off the cake and eat it. The snow kept falling, each flake preserved for a moment on a hair of the mink before collapsing into a droplet of water. Plum was so happy to not be going to the party.

  Plum called Mickey on her cell phone. “Come meet me at the shop when you’re done with work,” she told him. “It’s snowing, but there are people walking around still. Maybe I’ll sell a book or two. And bring me some mulligatawny.”

  “I thought you were going to that magic dildo party,” Mickey said.

  “I did something mean to my sister,” she said. She stood and headed toward La Buvette to grab a bottle of sauvignon blanc, swinging the cake box by its twine. “I want you to take me to New York, Mickey. Let’s get a suite at the Algonquin. Get orchestra seats at some awful musical.”

  “Or a Tennessee Williams revival starring an old movie star,” Mickey said.

  “I’ve probably told you a million times about the guy with the snake,” Plum said. She was feeling particularly charmed by her husband this evening, though he was only a faint, clicking electronic sound on her crappy cell. And when he told her he didn’t recall any story about a guy with a snake, she was charmed all the more because he was lying to be kind. He’d endured all her New York stories over and over. She told him she’d tell him later, and she made Mary, the waitress at La Buvette, say hello in the cell as she rang up the wine. “Hello, gorgeous,” Mary said to Mickey, then smacked her lips to make a kissing noise. At that moment, Plum saw no reason not to love her own life.

&nbs
p; In Park Slope, Brooklyn, on her way from the subway to her job as a nanny for the children of a cruel and unusual New Yorker cartoonist, the young Plum had walked slowly, adoring the brownstones that reminded her, with their wine-colored brick and black roofs and narrow chimneys and dormer windows, of illustrations you might find in an old edition of Peter Pan. “Poisonous,” she had thought she’d heard a man say as they’d passed each other on the sidewalk. She’d glanced back to see that the man, muscular and tall, in a sleeveless T-shirt and pale fedora, had a snake wrapped around his neck and through his arms, draped like a feather boa on a stripper. Had he really said “poisonous”? Was there a Brooklyn law that required full disclosure when out walking your snake?

  If the young, lost Plum on that cloudy day, with all its beauty and poison, had been able to look ahead, to see herself now, unlocking Mermaids Singing and turning on the lights, to see her own miles of books (how far would they reach, she wondered, laid end to end?), she would have been relieved, maybe even impressed. And the young Plum would have whispered a warning of her own as she passed her older self: Don’t mess with the dwarf.

  And she wouldn’t. She’d have an evening with Mickey in the empty shop, eating Indian and drinking wine, listening to Erik Satie and reading aloud the dirty parts of Little Birds. She’d keep Tucker tucked away at Mr. Toad, in her memory, telling her about Russian methods of elongating the limbs. Maybe she’d allow herself to picture the two of them, just for fantasy’s sake, not at Mr. Toad but in a bed somewhere, her tracing a finger along the illustrations on his skin as he told her about how Jacques Cousteau had befriended Harold Edgerton, the father of flash photography, whose invention had allowed Cousteau to take pictures underwater. “Cousteau was supposed to attend the opening of the museum in Aurora,” Tucker would say, and she’d lean in closer to hear his soft Southern voice and to touch the shark swimming in the small of his back, “but he was too old and sick to make the trip from the sea to the middle of Nebraska, probably the most landlocked place on earth.”

  Peyton

  When she heard Ashley’s yelp, helpless and shocked, echo in the stairwell, and the sound of her body thump-thump-thumping down the steps, Peyton morbidly imagined herself motherless for the rest of her life. She let all the arguments that had kept her miffed at Ashley for years become nothing at all, and she suddenly knew only the deepest of love for her mother, and her heart ached for the poor dead thing already.

  But by the time Peyton reached the top of the stairs in the hallway of the apartment building, Ashley was back up on her feet, brushing dirt from her black cocktail dress, only a little wobbly on a broken heel, a splotchy line of bright-red carpet burn down the side of her face from the threadbare rug covering the steps.

  “Mom?” Peyton said.

  “That could’ve been a lot worse, couldn’t it?” Ashley said, her voice shivering. She fluttered her fingers in the air, signifying flight into the ether. “Ouch,” she said then, touching her wrist here and there, locating the pain.

  “I dropped all my classes,” Peyton said, wanting to confess everything and to be forgiven. Her heart still beat crazily, and she felt a hot-rollered curl begin to droop in the sudden sweat of her forehead. “I dropped out. I’m working at a coffee shop.”

  “Did you hear? The intercom?” Ashley asked.

  I’m having an affair with your husband. It had piped up and in through the intercom without a crack of static, Peyton’s mother standing beside the door stunned still, her one finger frozen at the intercom button, the plate of crudités in her other hand listing slowly, sending a few shrimp spilling. None of the Sugar Shop party guests had arrived yet, only Ashley’s tipsy gal pals from La Buvette, who were too loud in the kitchen to hear anything, uncorking wine and listening to Rufus Wainwright wail at top volume.

  Peyton and her posse of orgy-crashers, having selected their ratty formals from the thrift shop, had gone back to the loft to gussy up, glittering their cheeks and over-glossing their puckers in Lee’s bedroom, wanting to look ridiculously glam when they confronted Peyton’s father among the swingers. Peyton had gone to the living room to get the sewing kit from a sideboard drawer and had sat on the sofa to restitch a crocheted rose to the bottom of her tea-length. Sad old roses, in various stages of wilt, ran in a row all along the hem.

  I’m having an affair with your husband. “Who is this?” Ashley had said into the intercom. “What? Who?” Then, in a mildly brazen act Peyton admired, Ashley had buzzed the confessor up. She’d opened the front door to listen for footsteps, then walked into the hallway.

  “I guess I just lost my footing,” Ashley said, sitting down on a step, picking up a shrimp from the floor to pop into her mouth. Peyton walked down to sit next to her, grabbing a few stray shrimp along the way.

  “Shouldn’t you go put something on that?” Peyton asked, nodding toward the scrape up and down the side of Ashley’s face.

  “I will,” she said.

  They both just sat there, eating the shrimp off the floor, staring at the wall in front of them, shivering from a draft. “No one should ever have to hear their mother fall down the stairs,” Peyton said.

  “You’re sweet,” Ashley said.

  “I just can’t believe I’m at the age where I have to start thinking realistically about my parents dying.”

  “Peyton, I’m only thirty-nine.”

  “No, I know, I know,” Peyton said. “I know. But you know what I mean. Years from now, hopefully, you’ll be dead. . . . I mean, I’m not hoping you’ll be dead, but hopefully it’s years from now, and Lee and me, we’ll be orphans, kind of. And it won’t be like when I was a kid and I used to fantasize about becoming an orphan. I mean, no offense, but I used to kind of picture you and Dad killed in a car accident or something . . . well, not picture it, you know, but I fantasized about everyone fussing over me, and I wanted everybody’s attention and sympathy, and then maybe Lee and I would run away and live on our own, and I’d be like Lee’s mom, and he’d have to rely on me for everything. But it was all just make-believe. And now, suddenly, now that I’m kind of on my own, I can’t stand the idea of losing you. Or of you and Dad breaking up. Or of anything changing at all. I can’t bear to think about it for a second.”

  “Would you rather I’d died when you were ten?”

  “Oh, Mom,” Peyton said, rolling her eyes. “You don’t know. I could go years before you do.”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say to your mother,” Ashley said.

  “Forget it,” Peyton said, exhausted, blaming her father for so many things, for her crummy apartment, its fridge that only kept things dangerously at the edge of cool, the shower that only drizzled a low-pressure mist, leaving her dirty-blond hair a grimy shade of dishwater brown. That morning, wearing an old Go Big Red T-shirt, faded to pink, she’d stood at the window with her third cup of coffee, recalling her father’s stupid enthusiasm. “It’s got character!” he’d said when he’d moved her in in the fall, practically doing cartwheels over the hot-water radiators and scratching paint off the woodwork with his thumbnail. “This place would be gorgeous with a little fixing-upping,” he’d said, “but for god’s sake don’t do any fixing-upping, or the landlord will raise the hell out of the rent on you.” Peyton had then dragged him into the kitchen to witness the sputtering brownness of the water before it ran clear. “Trust me,” he told her, “you’ll be sick with nostalgia for this place someday. You’ll think of this apartment and your little ol’ heart’ll just melt. You’ll give anything to be standing again at that window, drinking coffee just to keep warm.”

  Men who want to provide a good life for their children don’t work for alternative weeklies, she’d considered saying, noticing the years of dust on the blades of the ceiling fan. They don’t let their wives sit around writing literary novels about wives that sit around writing literary novels.

  This morning, at her window, having read her dad’s tawdry mis-sent e-mail full of true tales of adultery and group sex, all she’d
been able to think about was confronting her father and pointing out to him her every unhappiness.

  “I’m just saying,” she told her mother now, “we aren’t as young as we used to be.”

  Her mother said, “I never was as young as I used to be.”

  “I’m just so furious,” Peyton said. “I just want to gut the bastard. Orphan myself. He’s so . . . base.”

  “Who?” Ashley asked, alarmed. “Your father? Do you know something, Peyton? What has he told you?”

  “What do you mean, what has he told me?” Whenever the slightest bit cornered, Peyton went completely wildcat. It had been a childhood instinct, this turning feral in the face of confrontation, but she’d long ago learned to manipulate her spontaneity to its fullest advantage.

  “Why are you getting so snippy?” Ashley asked.

  “Why are you drilling me for information?” Peyton said, standing up to pace across the small landing, wringing her hands like a philanderer. Peyton had just assumed her mother knew about her father’s affair. Peyton had grown up in a family of writers, naked confessors—nothing was ever left unexpressed. “Do you know where your husband is tonight?” Peyton asked.

  “The movies, I think,” Ashley said. “A reviewer’s screening, I think.”

  From the wasp waist of her dress, Peyton took a slip of paper. “He’s here,” she said, handing Ashley the address of the swingers’ party. “It’s an orgy.” She didn’t want to be the one to tell her mother about the other woman, but she couldn’t resist punishing them both, at least a tad.