I look over the edge, I could shimmy down the ferris wheel bars with all the light bulbs attached and get back down to the ground where it’s safe, where the zeppoli vats filled with hot grease cook dough, and people on church steps sit eating pizza and gyros. I could go down there and be with them, but instead I am standing up in the ferris wheel car and the man down below wearing one heavy-duty work glove and pulling the ferris wheel lever is yelling at me to sit the fuck back down and then people on all the other cars are yelling at me to sit back down and Rena and Bonnie are pulling me down by my arms until I am down on the dirty metal floor of the car by Rena and Bonnie’s sandaled feet. I see that the silver polish Bonnie used to paint her toenails contains sparkles and they really are beautiful and look like millions of stars, more than I’ve ever seen in a city night sky.
I grow one tit first. My mother thinks it might be a cyst so she takes me to the free clinic where there are no private rooms, and in front of all the sniveling, runny-nosed poor children a doctor unzips my pants and pulls down my panties to check if the hairs of puberty have started to grow, which they haven’t. So the doctor’s miffed and tells my mother we should keep an eye on my tit, and for me to come back if the other tit doesn’t start to sprout soon.
Rena’s already got tits bigger than handballs. Boys at the beach come up to us and stand tall, shading our sun, and stare down at her tits, making comments, telling her she is fine, so fine. We talk as if the boys aren’t there and then we go jump in the ocean and curl up and hold onto our ankles and feel the roll of the waves breaking over us. We stay like that for what could be hours, just lifting our heads up occasionally to breathe, and then returning back under the water. When we go to sleep at night we feel like we’re still being rocked and swayed by the waves.
My father’s slut is flat. Her bra size is A ad infinitum. My one tit is already bigger than either one of hers. She looks like an old mother monkey in the wild who breast-fed for years and now she’s all dried up and all that protrudes are her two monstrous nipples that look like they’ve slipped halfway down to her belly. I know because my father has pictures of his slut nude framed around their apartment. I think my father loves her because she is so flat, because she’s narrow at the hips and looks like a boy from behind with her short blond hair, and then she turns around and you realize from her face that she’s a woman, and it’s a surprise and I bet that’s why he loves her.
We are the five little tomatoes and how they rotted in the heat of their loft, their mother mashed peel and seed sitting in her chair naked, smoking, watching Sunday war movies, Iwo Jima, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and the only breeze in the whole house is from me saying, “Kwai, Kwai, Kwai,” over and over again because it makes a breeze come out of my mouth when I say it and I think me saying it is keeping me cool. The cats lie panting, their pink little tongues out and their eyes closed to near-slits. The sun beats down through the skylight in a large slanted rectangle, fading the cheap masonite boards that form our warped floor. We don’t pass through that rectangle for fear we’ll collapse from the heat so we sideline it on our way to the bathroom and there we blast the cold water from the shower and jump in and jump out and still dripping wet and naked we go back to our chairs and watch the ropy jungle neck sweaty tin canteen war world of the tropics on TV.
“What’s that?” my mother says. It’s just us, just our sweat collecting at the backs of our knees and dripping in a tapping rhythm to the ground.
“I thought it was code,” my mother says. “I thought someone was trying to send me a message.”
During the weekdays we’ve got Jesús who runs the freight elevator for the businesses on the floors beneath our loft. The Ouija board said it was he who stole my mother’s ruby ring with the diamonds all around it, but my mother doesn’t believe it.
“Merde, not Jesús,” she says.
On our birthdays Jesús sings us “Feliz Cumpleaños” while we ride down in the elevator. He even gets Jochen, our German artist neighbor who rides down with us, to say “Happy Birthday” in German. “Alles Gute zum Geburtstag!” he says in a throaty loud voice that doesn’t sound happy at all, but more like he’s with the Third Reich, commanding us to march in a line and head for the showers. Then Jesús hands out a birthday present, a package of Funny Bones we eat on the way to school. But on Friday afternoons Jesús takes out his teeth and drinks rum and he does not hear the buzzer on the elevator and he does not come down and we pry apart the elevator door to make a crack so we can yell up the shaft, “Jesús, Jesús, Jesús!” Sometimes we have to walk up the steep five flights of dark stairs because Jesús never hears us.
John will not change. He says it’s his corner and the other hot dog men can go to hell. They all want him to change and rotate and take turns at a different corner each day. He says his corner is the best corner and they all know it, but he was here long before they were, long before they even knew what a hot dog was, while they were still in their goddamn countries sucking at their mother’s tits.
“I own this corner,” he says to me. I think John is losing more teeth.
“Are you losing more teeth?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says and he sits down next to me on the curb because he can and because it’s early morning and not lunch time yet. He puts his arm around me and lets his fingers come down and feel my tit and my nipple gets hard and I stand up and say, “John, how about a Hershey?” and he gets me one from where he keeps his spongy buns and I walk off and turn around saying so long and go into the park, but there is no one in it, only people passing through it taking shortcuts to work. There are no musicians playing music or pushers around whispering “tooeys, tooeys” in my ear.
When I pass by my sister Jody’s room on my way to the bathroom in the middle of the night I can hear her pet mice squeaking and scuttling in their shavings and my sister snoring and our dog sleeping on the end of her bed, whining, her long dog nails scraping at the wall as she moves her legs and tries to run in her sleep. Maybe she’s dreaming of saving one of us from a burning building or from where we lay frozen under snow from an avalanche.
Fuck, what a dog! I stop on my way back from the bathroom in the middle of the night and go into my sister’s room and hug the dog while my sister still snores and the mice still scuttle and the dog wakes and licks my face and noses my ears and I go back to bed with her saliva on my cheeks, wiping it off with my rosebud pajama sleeve.
“What are the chances of that?” my father says, showing me a handful of change he took out of his pocket the other night onto his mantel and a quarter stood up perfectly balanced on the other coins without falling over.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“A billion to one?” he says.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Amazing,” my father says and says he won’t touch the coin pile now. He asks how long I think that quarter will stay up there if he doesn’t take it down or his slut doesn’t take it down and I tell him I don’t know. And I’m thinking it’s a lot of change and if it doesn’t fall down, I’ll take it down myself and tell him it fell on its own.
One day I walk to the A & P and it’s torn down and in its place is the E & B. Who’s ever heard of the E & B? Polly and Tom are gone and I wonder where they went, what happens to grocery store saints? The E & B is filled with young workers, but Polly and Tom are old, who will hire them now? I miss the loose-wired buzzer that would shock me when I rang for the butcher in the meat department to come out so I could tell him I wanted a meatloaf mix. There’s no buzzer or butcher at the E & B, everything is already out in the cases, the parsley sprigs smashed under the plastic wrap that covers the already prepared meatloaf mix. I miss the discount at the checkout line I would get from Polly or Tom. I miss the stale fucking chocolate bunny rabbit handouts.
The phone rings and it’s our grandmother and in French she starts talking to me even though I don’t speak French and I tell her, “I don’t speak French,” but she keeps talking anyway. But it�
�s not to me that she’s talking, it’s to her dog, Bambi, and I think in French she’s asking Bambi if he wants another cookie, but I’m not sure. I hand the phone to my mother and I say, “It’s Ma Mère,” and my mother shakes her head and waves her hands and stomps her feet and mouths, “no, no, no” because she doesn’t want to take the phone call, but I drop the phone in my mother’s lap and my mother glares at me and then picks up the phone and says, “Cherie?”
Ma Mère comes over for dinner and gets so drunk my brother has to carry her down the stairs and call a cab and send her back to her hotel uptown by the park where she lives. While they’re waiting for the cab, my brother’s got to hold her from behind, his arms wrapped around her chest like she’s choking and he’s saving her life.
My sisters and I visit her uptown where she takes us to the Puffing Billy and we eat steak and she puts it on her tab and looks at my chest and tells me I’m turning into Gina Lollobrigida and then she tells my sisters they’re fat and how did they get so fat and she will pay them a dollar for every kilo they lose. We say we don’t know kilos, and then she says a dollar for every pound and my sisters say they’d rather be buried in a piano than be bought into losing weight. I point out the spots on her hands and tell her they’re so brown, almost black, and I ask her if she’s part black, part negress, and she shudders and tells me she is no such thing.
Jody tells her our brother is dating a black woman and she says no he’s not, and we say yes he is and her name is Toffee and she says no it’s not, you are lying to me, you are always making fun of me, but we tell her this time it’s true, how we’ve all met Toffee and we like her, and we tell her the story Toffee told us of the time she was taking out the garbage in her apartment building and she opened the door to the incinerator chute and instead of throwing out her bag of garbage, she threw out her pocketbook by mistake, with everything in it, including her house keys and she had nowhere to go and how she walked down the streets, still holding onto the garbage, hugging it.
Ma Mère asks us how our father is and we tell her we don’t see him much and she says we should, he’s our father after all. She doesn’t listen when we tell her it’s not our fault we don’t see him much and instead she tells us he was a good father. She tells us how when we were babies he was always unfastening our diapers our mother had just fastened because he thought she put them on too tight and he was afraid we could barely breathe or that our blood couldn’t flow.
“I remember a trip to Central Park,” she says. “He let you all ride the carousel, but he wanted to ride too, all of you together, so he chose one horse to ride, and the rest of you, you all rode on top of him. I don’t know how he did it. One of you was sitting on his shoulders, the other hanging off his back, another seated behind him and one in front. The ticket taker didn’t want to let him do it, but your father insisted it would work. He promised nothing would happen to you all and nothing did happen. Other fathers were looking at him that day. They were probably wishing they themselves could have been fathers as good as yours. Your mother shouldn’t have left him,” she says.
“He left her,” we say.
After dinner we go upstairs and take her to her room that’s just big enough for a bed and a table and a dresser with her liquor bottles on it. Bambi runs in circles when he sees us and then he starts to hump our legs and we kick him off and our grandmother says he’s just saying hello and she gives him roast beef she ordered for him especially at the restaurant and adds ice to his water bowl. There’s no closet in her small hotel room and when I use her bathroom the shower rod is hung with all her clothes and shriveled nylon stockings whose heels are black with dirt that won’t wash out after having been worn so many times.
“Let’s go,” I say to my sisters when I come out of the bathroom, and we leave. She’s already so drunk that she is talking to all of us in French, and we don’t know French and she is showing us a book, the only book in her room, and she is saying something in French about the book and we look at the book and I expect a book in French, but it’s To Kill a Mockingbird and she clasps it to her chest and smiles and lies back on her bed and closes her eyes.
We take the bus downtown and we’re the only ones on the bus for the first few blocks and me and my sisters lean back in our seats in the brightly lit bus and listen to the peaceful sound of our coins in the change sorter clanging and going down as we head back to our house.
Our father has grown corn. It stands in angled rows to the midday sun. His garden is small, but he walks through it as if it were a field, taking long strides, letting silk cling to his sweater sleeves, pulling down ears, shucking them and biting into them raw. When he comes to the end of the row he turns around again and walks back through. He holds empty glasses up to the sun, saying he is looking at colors that are aqua and green and violet like his mother’s eyes. He goes back to work on the Steenbeck and the image on the screen is of a soldier jumping over a log and then he rewinds and the soldier is jumping backward over the log and then forward again and then finally my father freezes the image of the soldier over the log in midair.
“That’s me,” our father says, “They needed a soldier in the film. I had boots and I bought fatigues. How about it? Would you know your father’s leg?”
Later I walk outside calling for the cat. I can see my father’s slut in their bedroom. She has come from the shower and there’s a towel in a turban on her head. With arms crossed she looks out the window and I wonder if she can see me out in the darkness where I am calling for the cat. But she is not looking down, but looking up maybe, some kind of fortune teller who can read futures in passing dark clouds.
The cat comes with a mouse hanging from her mouth. The head is all the way in her mouth and the hind part drags on the ground. The cat is purring loudly and the tail of the mouse still moves and switches back and forth. My father comes outside, swaying, almost missing a porch step and the wine in the glass he holds sloshes onto the grass. The cat runs up to him to show him her catch.
“What is it to be that mouse? To be up inside all that thrumming purr?” he says while he pets the cat on the head and she closes her eyes.
At my father’s summer place we go for walks on the beach. My father talks to the fishermen early in the morning as they pull their nets up the sand and pick through their catch. They give us their strays. A flounder and dogfish, a sea robin my father says is so ugly he can’t imagine wanting to eat it. The mornings are foggy and we can’t see the waves, we can only hear them close by us as we walk back to our car with the fish my father holds by the gills. He throws them onto the backseat where they lie on the vinyl. An occasional flop here and there as we drive back to the house. The slut eats dry toast and coffee and reads the paper in the living room. Holding the fish again by the gills, my father brings them in to show her.
“Oh, God,” she says.
Then I’m put on the train again, back to the city. The slut decided I had already stayed too long. It’s early in the morning when I get to Penn Station. I don’t take the subway home, instead I go to see John. I sit on my suitcase by his hot dog cart.
“How was your deserted island?” he says. That’s what he calls Long Island. I tell him about the cat who ate the mouse and the ugly fish, the sea robin the fishermen gave us. John sits on his milk crate and then he says come here and makes me sit on his lap and I feel his fingers going up to my tits again.
Maybe once John had blond hair but now it’s gray. He maybe once had blue eyes, but now they’re so bloodshot it’s hard to tell they’re blue at all. More people pour into the park as the day heats up. I tell John I’m going for a walk and I go into the park and the place hums with noise, the ticking of spokes on bikes whizzing by, the hum of blacks in conversation, saying, “ahh hmm, mmm hhm,” the motor of the fountain spouting water. I know how the mouse feels. Up inside all that thrumming purr.
We hear our brother violent in his room, angry. Toffee wants to leave him. He is knocking over shelves and then taking his mattress off
his bed. We hear him grunting with the effort. He is pushing his mattress through the open window, a window wide enough to fit the mattress through. We are taking turns standing on the ladder in the hallway looking over the wall of his room, which is not a full wall, just a partition that doesn’t reach the ceiling. We see the last bit of the green-and-white-striped mattress fitting through the window and then we run to the hallway window, my head and my two sisters’ heads and our mother’s head side by side hanging out the window watching the mattress fall to the street where cars have to swerve, horns blowing and people pointing up at us. We step back from the window and our mother says let’s go downstairs. Jesús is already there with the freight elevator, already knowing it was our floor the mattress came flying from.
“Don’t ask,” my mother says to Jesús as we get inside the elevator and Jesús says he will not ask and Jesús stares at the peeling paint chip concrete wall falling away from us as we descend.
In the street we are heroes. We move the mattress to the sidewalk and a few drivers backed up the whole block long cheer and clap. The mattress, though, is soiled with dog shit.
“Leave it here,” our mother says, “some bum will sleep on it.” But my sisters and I have already turned the dog shit side down facing the sidewalk and we have jumped on the mattress and are all three laying down on it with our clasped hands held behind our heads and our legs crossed at the ankles.
Here They Come Page 2