by Peter Orner
A half hour later, she reached and turned the light on. She got up and sat on the other bed, held her stomach in her hands. Popper squinted, blue spots in his eyes.
“Bumpy’s keeping me up again.”
“What do you think of the name Ottla? She was Kafka’s favorite sister.”
“It’s like she doesn’t want me to sleep.”
“She died in a camp.”
“Who?”
“Ottla. Get high?”
“You want her to have six toes?”
“Read? I think she likes it. More Herzog?”
“Enough with Saul Bellow. He’s a blowhard, all his characters are blowhards, and they all sound like him.”
“I’ll disregard the blasphemy because of your condition. Chekhov?”
“Fine.”
He got the book out of his bag and started a story. It was about a famous professor who, needing to escape the treachery and rigor of St. Petersburg, goes to the country estate of an old friend. The country estate of an old friend whose wife he happens to love.
As Popper finished the first paragraph, he looked up. Kat was lying on her back, arms folded across Bumpy, her bare feet sticking out across the abyss between the beds. He stretched his own bare feet to meet hers, but she recoiled.
“The water stain looks like Idaho,” she said. “See the panhandle?”
“Where?”
“In the corner. Aren’t you going to go on?”
The old friend drags the professor around the estate to show him what’s new in the greenhouses. The professor fidgets. All he wants is a minute alone with Mayra. The problem is that every time he is able to sneak a private word, Mayra wonders out loud, “Don’t you find me terribly dull? Wouldn’t you rather be with your friend?”
Now, Miss Mayra, there’s something I absolutely must—
“Hey, Popper.”
“Yeah?”
“Your feet. I’m asphyxiating. Wash them, will you?”
“Now?”
“After.”
The drama continued to not unfold. The professor listens to his old friend describe the new species he’s collected. The old friend has long clung to the belief that the professor is the single person in the whole of Russia who can appreciate his passion for rare flora and fauna.
Sudden good fortune! The old friend is called away to the village. Something having to do with a drunken peasant wreaking havoc with someone else’s mule. Oh, my dear professor, I am so sorry, this will only take a bit. And the agitators want land reform! Ha! The door closes. The professor and Mayra alone at last. Again she protests, “Don’t you find me so terribly boring?”
The professor lays it on the table.
Mayra swoons and nearly faints in the arms of the dazed professor, for whom the feel of her flesh, of her pink and naked arms, is enough to—
“All right, wash.”
“What about the consummation?”
“There isn’t going to be any.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Mayra’s going to be loyal to her husband, even though he’s a dolt, and the professor’s going to be loyal to his old friend, even though he wants to murder him. Can’t you see what’s coming? They’re all weak. Every character in the story is weak willed except for maybe the housemaid and the gardener. Maids and gardeners are always strong in Russian literature. Maybe you’ve got a fungus. My father used to have that. He kept some kind of powder in his shoe.”
Popper went to the bathroom and closed the door. He examined his face in the mirror, in the murked yellow light. He unwrapped a little white bar of soap and stuck his foot in the sink, scrubbed. He took it out and dried it and stuck the other foot in the sink, when a couple next door began going at it in the shower. The sink shook. They were like a ramming snowplow. She—Mayra?—began roaring. Full-mouthed roars with an erotic gurgle in her mouth. Yes! My God. Yes. Jesus Christ. Yes. Mary, Mother of God. Yes. Yes!
Popper considered quickly jerking off. Then, deciding this was in bad taste, he finished his other foot. He noticed that the two water glasses wore little white hats with perforated edges. A nice touch. He filled one up with water and put the hat back, brought the glass out to Kat.
“Water?”
“Thanks.”
“You like the little hat?”
“I do.”
“How’s it going?”
“She forgot Joseph.”
“Ralph says the only problem with atheism is that you have no one to yell to when you’re in the throes. Want me to go on with the story?”
“Okay.”
The professor and Mayra’s lips are about to meet. The front door flings open. Dmitri, old friend, back so soon from the village?
And Popper stood on the bed and read the last couple of pages, outshouting the couple next door. Kat squeezed a pillow over her ears and laughed.
The professor departs in a noisy horse-and-buggy flourish, Dmitri and Mayra shouting, Don’t forget your country friends! Don’t forget your country friends!
And when it was over, the professor safely on the road back to Petersburg, their neighbors, as if on cue, moved out of the shower to the bed for a more traditional wall-slapping motel romp. But this time Mayra’s shouting had died down and been replaced by a keening that sounded like a dog who’s been waiting for you to come home all day, so joyful her noises became agony.
“Before she was faking.”
“Yeah.”
“Not anymore.”
“No.”
Kat stood up and went to the window and looked out at the parking lot through the veins of ice. She put her hand flat against the glass.
“What are you thinking?”
“Why do you ask me that?”
“Because I want to know.”
“You never want to know.”
“Tell me.”
She kept her hand against the glass, but turned to face him. He still wished he could describe it, her face. How her eyes always seemed slightly hidden until she laughed.
“This place.”
“Why are you whispering?”
“I was thinking about this place.”
“The Comfort Inn?”
“I’m thinking how I might drive by this place someday and point to it and tell somebody—nobody in particular—‘Before I knew you, I stayed there once. See it? That place that looks like they built it in thirteen seconds? It’s a part of my life.’ And that person will nod but not really be interested, but say, ‘Really? You stayed there, huh?’ Then that person will ask me if I’m hungry, because at that point that person will be hungry and not in the mood for any stories.”
August 13, 1945
We’re under strict orders not to mention recent events—Suffice it to say that all the officers met in the captain’s stateroom and split a quart of whiskey into nine drinks—the captain proposed a toast—“to eternal peace!”—We were amazed to learn over the radio that so many people in the States wanted war to continue over what appears to be a mere quibble over words—whether or not the emperor keeps his title or whatnot—What’s the matter with those people? We out here know what a drubbing the Japs have taken—Not without loss to us—But if this should prove to be a Jap trick, which hardly seems within the realm of reason, nothing will stop us from wiping them off the face of the earth—
THE COMFORT INN
It’s not my hormones.”
“What are you saying, then?”
That motel room, the wet heat, Kat’s hand melting the window.
“Don’t ask me what I’m thinking if you don’t want to know.”
“I don’t get it.”
“This isn’t anything new.”
“It’s that fucking Hansel in your program.”
“Hans. It’s not Hans. I said it’s nobody in particular. I wasn’t sure, Popper. From before the baby—from before any idea of any baby—and you know it. Don’t pretend this is out of nowhere with your selective—”
“You weren’t sure?
”
He looked at the terrible, perfect, unstained carpet. Popper had the feeling—not for the first time—that his life was largely made up of overheard dialogue from the other side of somebody else’s wall. It made him think of listening to his parents in the kitchen. Not what they said to each other, never what they said, but the indifference with which they said it, and the indifference of the kitchen.
“All right, I slept with Lindy Schwartz.”
“What?”
“I said I slept with Lindy Schwartz.”
“You did? The bitch. When?”
“Senior year. When you were in Cincinnati for your aunt’s funeral. And your friend in your program, the one from Paraguay with the little glasses—every time I see her, I want to climb across the table.”
“Sofia Galeano?”
“That’s right. And also—”
“Popper, stop confessing.”
“Fuck you.”
“I’m trying to be kind. Don’t try and stop me from being decent. There must be a way to do this—”
“Hansel and Gretel. And what? He gets my little piggy, too?”
“I’m not talking about anybody else. Don’t you see it would be easier to explain if there was? Chekhov doesn’t need any easy devices.”
“Chekhov?”
She took her hand off the glass and looked at her palm, then pressed it into her stomach.
“Nobody’s getting your piggy.”
“Why now, of all times—”
“Wouldn’t now be better?”
“I suffocate you.”
“That’s closer.”
1233 NORTH DAMEN
At first he thought it was the old people across the fence, but this screaming wasn’t coming from outside the apartment.
The guy at the hardware store said a glue trap is supposed to kill them more humanely, but if it were me, the guy said, and I wanted to get rid of something, I’d buy a normal trap and break its neck clean and easy.
“Give me the glue trap,” Popper said.
But it does not kill. It merely glues. The mouse eeks in terror. All night long, stuck to a pad. Popper listens, he watches the walls. You never see a room more clearly than after someone leaves it and a mouse is begging for its life in the kitchen. The pale green walls, the scattered pockmarks, the pictures she took, the pictures she left. She left his license plate collection. She left her framed Billy Bragg poster. Not just love that’s unrequited, it’s everything. And then you get glued.
All night long, the little screams. At dawn, it’s quiet. He saw what passes for the sunrise in Chicago more often in those months than any other time in his life. That unhesitant cement dawn, like pulling a sheet off a corpse. Popper goes to the kitchen and kneels beside the pad, leans in, tries to hear its breath. Can you hear a mouse breathe? The terror’s gone. But the tiny stomach still rises.
One of us has got to kill it off, Popper, Nobody says. You want me to do it?
You think I can’t? Nobody answers.
He goes outside to get a brick from under the steps. 1233 Damen, alone. Last days of February 1996.
ELLA
That part of him (a fraction) that wasn’t watching himself watch the bloody scene proceed felt the whole ordeal was less the inspiring miracle it had been touted to be and more like some science experiment gone horribly wrong. Kat thoroughly embraced the chaos. She moaned with “wild abandon” like they’d taught her to in the class. Having a baby isn’t the time to be inhibited! Having a baby is a time to roar! And before the drugs kicked in, she’d reached for him when the pain got to be too much. I curse to hell every male of every species on the entire fucking planet, hold my arms—
You want a cookie?
Hold my arms, Popper.
Ella Ottla Rubin-Popper. Born Northwestern Memorial Hospital, March 12, 1996, at 4:16 P.M. Height: tall, twenty inches. How’d that happen, parents being near-midgets? Weight: about as heavy as a small bag of groceries. Face: scrunched, folded, looks a lot like Great-grandmother Wasserkrueg, actually.
When he ran out to the nurse’s station and called Miriam, he had to put the phone down, slobbering so much he couldn’t speak.
“Oh, honey,” Miriam said. “Can you believe it? In spite of the obvious complications, you’re someone’s father now. The only father she has in this entire world is you.”
August 15, 1945
It’s over!!!!!!!!! Just five minutes ago the word came through—This afternoon we’re going to knock off early and have holiday routine, with an extra beer ration—I can only imagine how it must be at home—All our prayers have been answered—Are you happy, darling?
5643 SOUTH BLACKSTONE, APT C
He has been told that daughters are supposed to take after their fathers. This apparent evolutionary precaution was inaugurated back in Paleolithic times to ensure that Barney Rubble wouldn’t throw Bamm-Bamm against the wall of the cave. Popper looks, for hours he looks, but he can’t find his own face in Ella’s. Her mother’s face, her coffee eyes, the same small wings of nose and slight downcurve of the pointy tip, the little nodge above her chin—all her mother’s—and the way she kept her mouth closed, always, until she laughed.
She had, though, his cold hands. The doctor said poor circulation isn’t necessarily hereditary and that with proper diet and normal development—
Popper will take what he can get.
“This is my kid.”
“Who said she wasn’t?”
“Wait, Bamm-Bamm was adopted. I just remembered the episode. Fred lent Barney his entire life savings so Barney and Betty would look like qualified parents.”
“What about Pebbles?”
“No, Pebbles wasn’t adopted.”
Her stillness, her concentration. That didn’t come from either of them. Where did she get it, then? In the beginning Kat got upset because she didn’t cry enough. She was sure something was wrong. It soon became obvious that Ella was, very early, too busy paying attention to do much wailing. Miriam said that girls notice the rest of the world before boys do, and some men, well, you already know about some men, some men never do notice—
They gave rise to a watcher. Ella watched her parents with a detached but intense curiosity. It wasn’t what they did that was so fascinating; it was only that, for the moment, they were the only show in town.
The weight of her, what he missed most in the other hours was the weight of her in his hands. Kat, her hair wet from the shower, takes Ella back into her arms. When Popper came over, she took some time for herself.
And when it was time to go, Ella watched her father out of the room, out the door. The Hyde Park night, the drive back home, north on the Dan Ryan.
ELLA
Kat telling him on the phone about waking up with Ella, and he heard nothing after that, only waking up with Ella, and still holding the phone, he went to the kitchen and pressed a fork into the veins of his wrist. She sleeps like a holdup victim with her hands over her head. It’s like she’s practicing to get mugged… Popper?
HYDE PARK MORNING
Other nights he stayed over. He’d take Ella back to the couch with him and coax her to sleep until she woke up hungry again. He shoved the coffee table next to the couch so if he fell asleep and lost his grip the kid wouldn’t drop on the floor.
Here the light is different from the North Side. Something vinegar, almost sepia, about the light. Popper stands at the window and watches as the street begins to wake. The canopy of elms, their branches reaching, the row of cars, lumped one after the other, the cracked sidewalks running up and down both sides of the street like smaller, parallel streams. A man in a bowler and a camel-hair coat walks his dog while reading a novel. In front of the church across the street, there’s a for-sale sign. Call Judy Pabluca at Century 21 today! It’s a massive, feudal thing with giant iron doors, palace doors. Bang on those doors for an eternity and get no answer. Kat comes out of her room. She’s dressed. Now when she comes out of her room in the morning, she’s dressed.
/>
“She asleep?”
“Finally. I think she hates that crib.”
“Why don’t you go back to sleep?”
“I tried. I can’t. I feel berserk. Now I just need coffee.”
“The church is for sale.”
“I saw that. I wonder if the Pope knows.”
“It’s Christian Scientist.”
“Mary Baker Eddy know?”
“I’m thinking about buying it.”
“Need coffee.”
“You’re dressed. Six-thirty in the morning and you’re dressed like I’m a guest.”
“Popper, don’t.”
MIRIAM AND PHILIP
The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, that mad scramble, and Popper has driven out to Highland Park early in preparation for tomorrow’s holiday shuffle. First shift: brunch, with Miriam and Ralph and Ralph’s terrible kids. (The twins, Brad and Cindy. We aren’t identical, but we certainly think alike! Both have jobs downtown in finance. They both work out a lot and talk about it.) Second shift: Philip and Bernice, a lonelier, quieter, early dinner.
Leo’s coming in from Washington in the morning.
Miriam calls and asks, since he’s in town, if he wouldn’t mind picking her up at the train. She’s recently opened her own art gallery in Bucktown.
“If I’d known you were downtown, we could have driven together.”
“You know how much I love the train. No offense, honey.”
“Which train are you on?”
“The 5:19.”
They no longer call the train the Chicago and Northwestern. Now it is called the Metra Rail. Metra must stand for something. In the crowd, getting off the 5:19, his mother appears, and then behind her, bobbing, his father. Popper watches his father tap his mother on the shoulder. Miriam turns. He can’t see her face, but there is something about the way she throws her head back, slightly. Not the recognition of seeing an old friend after all these years. Not quite that. Yet there’s something in her posture that pauses, it seems to Popper, though he still can’t see her face, something that pauses and breathes, Oh, it’s you. Another moment before either speaks. Popper watches the two of them talk a little. Together they walk toward the car. His mother peeks in the open passenger window.