by Jim Grimsley
Monday afternoon Miss Sophia put Clarence to sleep for the week, got herself out of bed and made a pot of strong coffee with chicory, took a long hot bath, did her makeup, and dressed for work. She had only two brassieres to hold up what was left of her flaps of skin that had been breasts, but she wore a bra every day, even at home. To remind herself who she was. Who she was supposed to be. Miss Sophia Dodd Carter. Widow of Clarence Dodd Carter, a soldier who died in World War II. With this in mind and her breasts in place, she headed off to work.
Mac was lazing against the counter with his hair slicked back greasy, the unhealthy yellowish jowls hanging off his face. He grinned like a dog with a bone and asked, “Miss Sophia, were you up to anything interesting this weekend?”
This took her up short, because he rarely spoke to her in such a way that she would have to answer. His mind might be set on wickedness, she thought. “You’re getting to look old, Mr. Mac,” she said, and walked past him to her closet.
“Well, you can kiss my ass, too,” Mac said, and sauntered back to his office.
Newell giggled and said, “Good evening Miss Sophia. I’m always so glad to see you come in, it means I don’t have to be here all by myself in this big store.”
“You don’t do enough business for two people on nights,” Mac hollered from the office.
“We would if you would stay open on Sundays and get rid of some of them titty machines,” Newell hollered back.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That place down on Decatur Street stays busy all night, and they’re open all day Sunday, and there’s no women in those movies.”
Miss Sophia had to agree. The titty movies just didn’t do as well in this part of the French Quarter, you had to face it. Those booths stayed too clean to be earning any money.
After a moment came Mac’s voice out of the office. “What I ought to do is tear out that back partition and put more machines into the storeroom. We ain’t storing fucking shit in there anyway.”
Silence for a moment. One of the clip-clop tourist wagons passing in the street.
“Well,” Newell said, “why don’t you?”
She could hear the change when he said the words. Could hear the wheel turn in Mr. Mac’s head.
The next few days one of the regular black clouds passed over her and engulfed her, and she paid hardly any attention to anything except getting from one moment to the next. She felt the cloud settle over her in the early morning when she was thirsty for liquor and sleep refused to come. The emptiness of the apartment was hollow at that hour, had a ringing to it that echoed through her. Her own apparition in the mirror had a dead look, an old man’s face, bald at the top, hair chopped off and uneven, damp like chicken feathers to be plucked, his tits of skin, his bony shoulders, the scars from surgery on his hips and knees. She sat on the couch and stared at her hands till dawn. She went walking and walked most of the day, one street and another, restless. But when she stopped, when her mind went looking for something to do, it settled on a wish that she could go home with a bottle of vodka and lie in the bed curled around it; a wish that she could drown in a lake of vodka. She kept moving through the day and refused to drink a drop except water, not even a sweet drink of soda or Barq’s root beer, because sugar would make her crave liquor that much more. She walked in and out of her neighborhood around Bunny Friendly Park, and then she walked into the Fauborg Marigny and up and down those streets, and then along Esplanade and down Ramparts and through the old Fauborg St. Marie to Lee Circle and down St. Charles Avenue and then into the Irish Channel through the Garden District, and then back up Magazine Street and into the French Quarter again, where she went to work early at the bookstore.
She cleaned in the storeroom, moving all the empty and half-empty boxes and breaking them down. The hard work was what she needed now when only a hard job would take her mind off the feeling that she was beginning to sink into quicksand. She moved all the boxes far to the back wall and mopped the floor and even in that blank, hollow place, she knew she had begun to do this for a reason.
But the cloud around her got thicker, and for the next few days, she moved by force of will from one place to another doing what she knew she had to do, but without thinking of anything or anybody, without thinking at all if she could help it.
A voice insinuated itself in her head at those times, unending streams of words she had heard before. What is there? What do I have? What can there be? What do I do now? What now? And then what now? I don’t think I can stand this I have to stand it. And now? I would like to stand here perfectly still where I am without moving even a hair, still like that, and have this voice go away, but what is there that I can do? Why do I go on? Except I can’t think of anything else to do. It will go on like this, nobody here with me. Why did it turn out like this? No way to stop the words except to keep the body moving, to work, or to walk the streets.
The faces in a crowd were the most soothing to her, the faces along Bourbon Street on a night of good weather, and this was September now, the heat still intense, but the evenings beginning to cool. She walked along the street from Canal to Dumaine, then turned and walked back, and while she was in the bright lights with the noise around her, while the faces of people passed in front of her, eyes looking into hers for a moment, each face registering some change because of her, because of her appearance, her clothes, her face, her makeup, her wig; the motion acted on her like doses of a sedative, and it was easier for her to breathe. She walked in the crowds till the wee hours and finally went to Café du Monde, where there were always people, too.
If she slept at all she slept during the daylight, refusing to lie in her bed, where the voice in her head became most intense; she lay on the couch with a pillow for her head. Sleeping some.
She endured the weekdays, but the weekend was hard, because she would not drink while she was in a cloud like this, for fear it would end like the last time, when she ended up in Charity Hospital babbling the DTs away. Strapped to her bed, with nurses pointing to her, telling one another that this was the one with the penis and the breasts. That’s right, both. One of them twenty-four-hour girls from the French Quarter, probably used to work at them female impersonator places. She would lie in the hospital pretending not to hear. If Miss Sophia had not walked out of that place, there was no telling what the evil nurses would have done. Worth any price not to go back there. Worth even the nagging discomfort of refusing to drink.
She took the bus to City Park and took the rest of the Saturday to walk back to the French Quarter from there. On Canal Street the crowd began to thicken, and people noticed her again, and she felt the first stirring of herself, certain it was good to be Miss Sophia because everybody recognized her. She was the crazy lady they all knew.
Clarence could never have survived. Clarence and Miss Sophia both knew that.
One day the next week, she went to work and heard hammering in the back, in the storeroom. She followed the sound and saw Lafayette’s cousin Leon, who said, “Hey, Miss Sophia.” She dipped her head, and figured he was here to put in the new movie booths that Newell had wanted, and when she had the thought she realized that the cloud must be lifting, because it mattered to her that Leon was here, and she went up to him and said, “Mr. Mac paying you pretty good, I bet.”
“Mr. Mac, he all right. But he cheap.”
“Gerald Ford is the president,” Miss Sophia announced.
“I reckon he is.” Leon gave her a look of mild surprise.
“That’s what they ask the crazy people in Charity. Did you know that? What is the day of the week? And this is Wednesday, I bet. And they ask you what is the name of the president of the United States and that would be Gerald Ford.”
Leon laughed, mellow and quiet. “I guess you could pass the test, Miss Sophia.”
“I know I ain’t crazy,” she said to him and to herself, as she went to work.
Cleaning was good work, she could see the result right away. Mr. M
ac needed the Hoover run in his office, and she plugged it in and pushed it across the carpet and pulled out the chairs and vacuumed behind them, and when she was done the carpet was clean again. She dusted the glass tops of the counters and washed the fronts with Schwegmann’s brand glass cleaner. She emptied the overflowing trash cans in the store and upstairs where the girls worked, but no higher than that. Everywhere she went, she made things better by making them cleaner, and she could see the result and felt good. “I ain’t crazy,” she said to herself, looking at the store late in the evening when everything was clean and the customers were all lined up to get change for the movie booths, and there was a gang of the hunk types reading Newell’s billboard for the movies, and in the back was Leon working on the expansion, working after his regular job and on the cheap, the way Mr. Mac liked it.
When Leon was finished, the bookstore would be bigger, would be a movie parlor, a maze of movie booths, filled with more men, who would resemble the people in the movies; the future was like a room to her, and she was standing at the doorway studying what she had not yet reached to touch. The movie booths would bring more people, and Newell would stand at the cash register and make change for them all. Miss Sophia observed Newell’s pale arms, nice shape, his shoulders under the T-shirt, and she felt warm toward him and cleaned the station behind him especially well.
Mac walked through the retail floor swearing about the goddamn building code the goddamn city a bunch of goddamn morons with their fucking heads in their goddamn mama’s asses, do this shit and do that shit, fill this the fuck out, some stupid goddamn prick and his fucking piece of paper, the fuck he would, the absolute fuck, and he knew who to call about it, too, by the living fucking God. He stalked into his office fumbling with the cellophane on a pack of cigarettes, closing the door, still mumbling beyond it.
With Mac in the shop late at night and Newell tending the cash register, slick as a snake on his feet, and a lot of people in the store, all warm and comfortable, Miss Sophia realized Newell had cranked up the music, somebody singing about he’s the greatest dancer, the disco beat. She shook her head for the noise. She headed up the steps to collect the garbage, shuffling along the plank floor of the upstairs gallery dragging her plastic sack.
Emptying the garbage upstairs, she always had the sense of herself as floating above the ground, as if the house were in no way intervening to support her and she herself were doing the levitating, holding the bag aloft as well, emptying the wastecan from the pink-painted lavatory, installed into one of the old Creole cabinets for the use of the patrons to refresh themselves on the way out of the house. On the wall of the lavatory a forlorn flamingo, fading pink, as if it had stood outside on some radioactive lawn, its color baking slowly out of it. At night Miss Sophia was only supposed to pull the trash upstairs. Tonight she polished the sink fittings with a dry cotton towel and left off only when the faucet and taps were gleaming. When she was done, she closed the door of the bathroom, locked it, hiked up her dress, pulled down her drawers, and sat on the toilet, feeling that useless flap of flesh between her fingers, the part she had to aim and point, looking vacantly upward as the piss ran out. She could watch herself in the mirror perched on the toilet in an ungainly pose, one arm reaching between her legs. The sight made her feel distant from herself, sliding backward.
She had to work, she dragged the garbage downstairs, started to dust the magazine racks, kept at it even after Newell closed the store. “Are you going to be here all night?” he asked, when he was ready to go, and she acted as if she had not heard anything, went on lifting the magazines off the shelves and dusting behind.
She cleaned till the wee morning and went home, lay on the bed, and stared at the ceiling till daylight, then dozed in the haze.
She was old and everything hurt, old, and nothing felt right half the time, and more than half the time as time went on. In her head ran a jangling of memories and nerves, a vision of a man she had been in love with long ago, though if she stopped to consider the face she realized that it was her own face she was in love with, the face she allowed to appear when she was drunk and would sometimes still allow herself to see; and the name that she said over and over again in her head was her own, Clarence Dodd; he was not some long-lost lover, he was herself, she was sure of it.
She sat straight up in the bed about two in the afternoon, hot and sticky, even in October. Her skin was clammy, the cotton nightgown clinging. She had slept in a wig again and it sat crooked on her head. She could feel it but there was no mirror to show her the fool she looked.
This would get bad unless she found some magic to perform. If she could focus herself on something, like a spell. So that night, at work, she went to work, and what caught her eye was Newell.
He had dressed better than ever, as if he were ready for an occasion of some sort. Had he, too, picked up the wave of the future that was flowing toward them both? The tight, black T-shirt hugged across the nice plates of his chest, and his arms had thickened some, he had put some meat on his bones. He was wearing blue jeans, only they were black, a style she had never seen before, and his ass sat up high on his legs like it wanted to talk. So Miss Sophia talked to it all night under her breath, mutterings and sounds and words all night, and she noted the sheen on Newell’s hair, the gloss on his skin, and she was hardly the only one noticing, because all the big burly men and the little girly men in line to get change were elbowing one another and pointing to Newell and cutting their eyes at one another; and furthermore the news was going around the store that there would soon be more movie booths in the back, more places where the hunks could join up with the studs and have sex with one another in packs and clusters, and this thought, along with all the magazine covers, and the counters full of clean, shining plastic and leather and metal toys, all this had everyone in a jolly spirit. In the middle of all this, Miss Sophia went to the leather goods counter and got out a leather dog collar with big silver spikes around it, and she took it to Newell and put it around his neck and he giggled, counting out somebody’s change, saying, “Miss Sophia, what in the world?”
“You need some taming,” she said, and moved away.
He was still wearing the dog collar when she looked back, the slash of dark leather across his pale neck, the shine of the spikes, and him moving with the music, yowsah yowsah yowsah, with the front door opening and men coming in from the streets, disappearing into the booths, ogling the magazines.
He had been in love with her, had he not? At one time? Or someone like him? A slender man like him, all pale and buttery so you wanted to poke things into him, a man like that had been in love with her in her youth, when she was a belle, when all the beaux lined up to court her, as the story always goes, in her mind, the line of men and her wide skirt spread out maybe on the porch swing, the porch on her house when she was a little girl, painted dark green over light gray, both colors flaking. The line of beaux stretched down the street, handsome men, clean-shaven, dimpled down to the last cheek, fresh and well-dressed and beaming at her as she sat on the porch feeling faint from all the attention, the clear blue sky overhead on a day when all her beaux had come to court her, to ask her the same question over and over again, “Do you love only me?” This would take her into the mist, thinking this way, as if she were no longer in the bookstore, and, indeed, she might no longer be there, for all she knew; she had slipped through places before, had blanked out on leaving and getting home, had blanked out a couple of days at a time, transporting herself like this. It troubled her to think that she would find herself suddenly, when she was conscious again, not standing in the bookstore but lying in her bed with the blankets pulled up over her head and the sheets moist from her sweat, the hot night, the close room, that she would suddenly find herself there alone and about to plunge into something deeper and farther away. But no, she knew she was doing her job somehow, she knew her body was, and that it was her mind detached and floating slightly above itself. She had been in love with someone very much like
Newell, and now she could not remember his name, but his face floated up in front of her at odd moments, at this moment, for instance, and blotted everything else out, and suddenly all the beaux standing in the line had the same face, and they were all Newell in the dog collar, the pale white of his throat so tender. She knew she had never been in love with Newell but with someone who looked like him, and tonight they were slipping together in some way. Or was that even true? Because she had never noticed that their faces were so much alike before. Maybe she couldn’t even remember the face, maybe there was only something about Newell that reminded her of something, maybe Miss Sophia had never been in love with anybody, or maybe it was Clarence Dodd she was thinking of, maybe Newell reminded her of Clarence Dodd a long time ago, and when she thought about that, she wanted to stop thinking, because there was no way any longer to decide.
“I want a disco ball and some good lights in here,” Newell said, to nobody in particular, and Miss Sophia was spraying glass cleaner on the counter and looking at the tender backs of his hands. “We could turn this place into something.”
“You got too goddamn many ideas,” Mac said, reaching into the cash register to do a cash pull.
“You just don’t want to make money.”
“You little shit ass. You already got me running all over the goddamn city hall trying to get a fucking building permit.” He waddled off grumbling to his office counting the stack of twenties and tens. “But I had enough of that shit, I got friends I can call.”
“It’ll be worth it, Mac,” Newell said, and Mac waved his hand at him.
Newell could bring good fortune. She had seen that light on people before, and she knew it was true. No need to try to help him, he would make his way.
She refused to go home after work but walked all night again, aware of voices and refusing to listen, the ones in the overhead who talked all the time, only sometimes she could tune out that station and sometimes like tonight she had no choice but to listen. She was getting bad again and wanted a drink. But not one dime in her pocket, smart, to leave the money at home and to walk the other direction. It was all right to have the thirst in her mouth, but if she satisfied it she would plunge into the underground, something like the bottom of the Mississippi River, something that would suck her legs like mud and drown her lungs like water. It was okay to have the thirst but not to drink. So she walked down St. Charles Avenue all the way through the mansions of the Garden District and uptown to Audubon Park, and she wandered under the live oaks from the streetcar line all the way to the river, the mighty muddy, and she was in sight of it when the first light of day started to show and she felt the vise loosen across her chest and she headed home, the long walk back to the streetcar, and then the ride to Canal Street and the change to the Desire bus.