Zinnie found herself thinking of sodalities and ceremonies of First Holy Communion. The Indian people do not consider long-stemmed flowers of value, but rather vulgar and superfluous. Only the blossom will do, and they laugh out loud at Westerners who pay good money for “long-stemmed” flowers. Zinnie watched, astonished, as one old woman, the designated stem-disposer, sat in the doorway accumulating a great pile of stems to be thrown away before she passed the blossoms into the ceremonial room. It was all so pretty. Children ran up and down the stairs. Zinnie felt as though she’d stepped out of this world and into another, via coach-class flying carpet. As if she were, at least, off on vacation in a foreign country. Something fell from the ceiling onto her opened lap. She thought, alarmed, that she had been blessed, and this token was something, some small miracle, from heaven. Then she realized it was some small roach and she jumped up, barely stifling a shriek, then politely crouched back down again, this time more gingerly. The wizened old man beside her leaned over. She thought he was going to smack the bugger dead, but instead he flicked its derriere gently with a finger and mentioned to her in a singsong, slightly offhand way to, “just let the little fellow be off and on his way.”
“Yeah, sure,” Zinnie agreed, more interested now in the slender young man in shirtsleeves striding up to the offering sheet with a sharpened machete.
She moved her gun where her free hand could reach it and felt her heart quicken. Visions of Jim Jones and Guyanan suicidal maniacs flew through her imagination and she looked for the nearest way out. The pandit gazed at her and smiled sweetly. He began speaking, politely taking the time to pay special attention to the visitor and explain to her what they were doing. He was talking about goodness, but Zinnie found it hard to concentrate. She felt herself break into a sweat. The young fellow laid the knife down on the sheet. She looked around for Narayan, who had been swept away to the kitchen and was being introduced around to what looked to Zinnie like a bevy of belly dancers. She found herself reassured by her own outrage. Narayan wouldn’t be in the kitchen chatting up the girls if there were some plot afoot to capture her and hack off her digits.
Uncomfortable, she shifted her weight. Terror gave way to boredom and she thought of other things. Her ex, Freddy, and what he would say if he could see her now. He would pretend to be unimpressed, of course, but in reality—she grinned her lopsided grin to herself—he would be in the kitchen putting the make on Narayan with the rest of them. Oh, she’d always known what would please Freddy, all right. Or at least almost always. It was such a relief not to be married to him anymore, such a relief not to worry that he would come on to her partner, to the pizza man, even the mailman. She’d never forget the time she came home and found him giving the handsome utility inspector stale Lorna Doones and China tea in the good cups. There was nothing wrong with Freddy’s libido.
Zinnie let the air out slowly, through her mouth. The pandit nodded approval. She at least knew rudimentary yoga, he conceded. Zinnie was just so glad not to have to worry about who she brought home for fear of Freddy embarrassing her. She loved him, her old pal Fred, father of her child, good sport and handsome devil, but it was only now that she was free enough of him to realize what terrible damage she’d let him do her. She’d always been so busy working around his preferences, that she hardly remembered what it was she herself liked.
Narayan came back into the room and slipped himself in next to her. He leaned over. “Zinnie,” he whispered, “I’ve changed my mind. I shall return as a bird. And I shall sing to you.”
“Okay. Only I hope next time you know enough to pick a better color.” She whirled around. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I meant—”
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” he said, patting her hand. “So I shall come back as a red bird. So you will know what it is that I feel for you.”
She smiled up at him. She felt her face turn noticeably scarlet and saw the shocked understanding of the perceptive pandit. Well, the hell with him, Zinnie snorted uncharacteristically. The hell with all of them. For once in her life she was going to let herself like what and whom she liked, consequences be damned. She had earned it. Around her, the ladies sang some Indian song so intense and catchingly rhythmic that she found herself swaying with them. This wasn’t bad at all. She threw back her head, abandoned at last, and breathed in the exotic pulsating atmosphere. The song came to an end. They sang another. Mrs. Panchyli’s thin voice stunned her in the sudden silence. The woman was talking—Zinnie’s eyes opened, surprised—to her. Politely—perhaps malevolently—she inquired if she, Zinnie, had any song she would like to sing. To share with them.
“Oh, okay.” Zinnie moved her shoulders irresistibly and went accommodatingly right into the first and only song she could think of. As she sang, the man of the house concluded the ceremony with a thwack of the machete on a brown coconut. White creamy milk splattered over the sheet and those nearest the pandit broke out in wide grins.
Out on the street an Italian mechanic, retired and under his Pontiac, bunked his head on the rusty end tailpipe when he heard, like a chorus of seraphim, the house full of Indians singing along to the second refrain of the song “Danny Boy.”
Claire stood at Anthony’s Fisher-Price easel and painted her photographs with soft watercolors. The children sat near her at the table, doing their homework. Anthony crayoned a Thanksgiving turkey orange and purple and black. Since Mrs. Dixon’s escape, she would not let them out of her sight. She’d pick them up from school and they would remain in her view until bedtime. During the night she would wake up and walk through the hallway to check on them three and four times. It was a nightmare, but even this nightmare, day after day, took on a grim pattern of nonchalant routine. Anthony’s birthday, usually a major event, was celebrated quietly within the family. After all, nobody knew where Mrs. Dixon had gone. Probably halfway to Peoria, the police concluded, after painstakingly searching the area. Still, they had plastered her face all over the news for three days. The publicity was sure to provide a lead somewhere.
Swamiji and Narayan had postponed their trip to Berkeley for a while. There seemed to be no great urgency for the moment, and their minds, Swamiji said, would anyway be back here in the province of Queens. Johnny had helped them lug the rest of their stuff up to Mrs. Kinkaid’s old sewing room, and there they remained, nestled near the still unpruned branches of the backyard trees. Sometimes, when he fancied he smelled danger, Swamiji would bring his mat and blanket back downstairs and sleep like a guard dog behind the front door. No one minded, but he was difficult to wake up. When Johnny came in at all hours, he had the devil of a time moving Swamiji’s body aside to peek in. Still, Johnny was grateful. His old local precinct, the 102, kept an eye on the place—but God knew they already had enough to do.
Breaking into Claire’s thoughts, the back door jiggled and opened and Swamiji came in with Mary. They had been to the Key Food store. Swamiji and Mary got along like a house afire and shared the shopping. Oh, they would sit up together late at night, page after colorful page of coupons spread out before them. Armed with their scissors, they would attack the week’s clipping. All well and good, but—Claire scratched her head when she opened the almost full fridge and freezer in the cellar—when would they eat all this stuff? Mary and Swamiji spent so much money saving money it was as if they were going for broke. What feverish dedication drove the two of them? And where would it end? Who was going to drink all those bottles of guava fruit drink? She supposed they could have a big party and certify it with rum. Or vodka. And what about those jars of apple sauce? Wouldn’t apple sauce go bad? Not at these cool temperatures down here in the cellar, her mother and Swamiji had rushed to assure her, pleased with themselves and urgent to be gone on the next expedition. Well, one thing was for sure: she wouldn’t have to buy any more Comet for the rest of her life. Or Scott toilet paper either.
Claire plodded through the harrowing towers of products in her mind as she watched them come in with their ne
xt contribution.
“Ma, what did you do?”
“Wait till you see.” Swamiji was a-dither with excitement. He rubbed his hands, a sorcerer above a big brown bag. Oh, dear, worried Claire. America had finally gotten to him. Beaming, he and Mary unloaded five-pound tins of coffee onto the table. “Coffee?!” pooh-poohed the children, appalled at the waste of a perfectly good trip to the supermarket. “Where are the Chips Ahoy?”
“They weren’t on sale,” Swamiji explained and Michaelaen and Anthony, annoyed, returned to their own lives. What good were adults, after all, when they had every chance to buy good stuff and then didn’t?
Dharma didn’t say anything, but she was disgusted as well. She was tired of doing homework. She wanted to go out. She wanted to go back in the garage with Michaelaen and hide out.
“Tell you what,” Mary said, taking in the whole scene, the fatigue on their faces, especially Claire’s. “You go off, Claire, and do things you haven’t had a chance to do, you know, dry cleaner’s, library, cup of coffee with a friend, and Swamiji and I will stay here and look after the children.”
Swamiji nodded amicably. They had the Sunday Times and the Newsday coupons they hadn’t even had a chance to look through yet. And the crosswords. He and Mary argued like children over who got which crossword first.
Anthony put down his black crayon. He’d been heftily darkening that turkey’s sky. He looked from Claire to the other children with long, weary lids. “Wanna watch Mr. Wodgers?” he asked them. He knew Mommy liked it when he watched Mr. Rogers. No guns, no perversions. It was his way of helping her out. He was uncanny, her son, bringing her back from the dead every time when she hadn’t even known she’d been there. Well, he knew. Such a little fellow and here he was condescending to watch his baby show for her sake, just to please her. Allay her fatigue. Oh, sure. Most of the time she wanted to kill him. He was that kind of kid. Drove you to the edge. But when she really took off and her face took on that zombie glow, he understood, always knew. And he saved her. Anthony’s compassion was a lot like someone who drove you off the edge of a cliff and then caught you with his handy net … but catch her he did. He did save her, every time.
Anyway, it wasn’t because of Anthony that Claire went mad. Not anymore. Just a year had promoted him from baby to kid. And it wasn’t Johnny either. It was herself. She was tired. And lately, the more she slept, the more she wanted to sleep. To escape the tedium of her own—what? What was it? Her faith? Yes, the truth was that she had finally got what she wanted, and she found herself clinging to it so hard that she couldn’t stand back from it and look at it and love it. She couldn’t detach, yes, that was the word, detach, because she was afraid nothing would come afterwards but death. The still everlasting embodied by the dead-as-a-doornail bird she and Anthony had seen that day last year in the yard, before any of this had begun. When they’d still been living over in South Ozone Park, where she’d hated every minute but had loved her dream of coming up here. Now here she was. She had everything she wanted, and now this monster had escaped.
It was as though her faith was only there when things were going her way, and now that they weren’t, she was desolate. Sorrowfully, she looked around at the faces of her family looking, puzzled, back at hers, and she doubted there was any life after death after all. If one had anything to do with the other. But it did. Because without the one there was no sense to the other. Mrs. Dixon escaping from Deauville had loosened the screw that held her security so tentatively tight. There was no sense to life. To death. Everything probably stopped, simply stopped. You would see your last sight and the glass of your eyes would break and then that would be all; the sparkle of pain and of hope would just stop and relax to opaqueness. Claire shuddered. Who had ever been so cruel as to perpetrate dreams of a brassy eternal? A billowy cloud to hang onto. It was too disheartening. She would take Anthony out of Holy Child. There was no sense to handing over her false hopes to him as well. Here they were paying good money just to make him mentally ill. Yes, she thought and held her elbows and sat down carefully, that was it, she was mentally ill. She had stood vigilant too long.
“Claire!”
“What? I’m sorry. What?”
Mary clicked her tongue. “I’m talking to you. For heaven’s sake!”
“Exactly,” said Claire and she laughed. A wacky, gaudy laugh that stopped everyone’s easy smiles and made them look at her, concerned.
Swamiji went over to Claire and stood behind her. He brushed the red-brown hair away from her face and stood with his cool palms pressed to her forehead. With his pinkies, one on top of the other, he made a firm impression where the third eye ought to be.
Frightened, Anthony ran to his mother. He crawled up onto her lap and sat there like a little baby. Claire came back. Mary put a cup of hot water in front of her and Dharma, a good girl really, bobbed a tea bag into it.
Claire laughed, self-deprecatingly this time, not crazily. They indeed talked her into going for a walk, as Mary had suggested, or at least leaving, getting out of the house for a while. When she eventually recognized that they meant it, she decided to take the opportunity to drop off the photo of the nursery school, the Italianate Victorian, with the owner. Anyone would be happy to have such a fine portrait of one’s place. And she had colored it, too. It was the first she had done, as an experiment, because she really hadn’t cared about how it would turn out. Yes, she would drop that off and have a walk besides. She wasn’t doing any good to anyone in the state she was in. The next thing, she’d be yelling at the lot of them. They would all be better off with her gone. Her father had mentioned that there was a Second Empire Victorian over on 111th Street. She might pass by there with her camera.
“All right,” she agreed and went to hunt for a new roll of black-and-white, 3200 ASA film. Mary had set the three kids to work at the stove, Claire noticed on her way out. They were making cherry Jell-O. The smell just filled the kitchen and delighted Swamiji, who’d never before had the pleasure. Claire approved the scene. There was nothing kids loved more than playing at the stove, the most forbidden of all places. They’d be safe under Mary’s hawkeye tutelage, and happy to boot.
Outside, it was ugly weather, gray and blue, the slick streets mangled with drudgy bundles of wet yellow leaves. The tops of the trees were finally just about empty. Claire shivered cozily into her Lauren-Hutton-in-the-suburbs raincoat, yet another castoff, literally retrieved from the garbage behind Carmela’s house. “What are you doing?” Carmela had shouted at her.
“What do you think I’m doing?” she’d shouted back.
“It’s garbage,” raged Carmela.
“It’s Banana Republic.” Claire’d folded the coat cheerfully into her satchel. Anything from last year was garbage to Carmela. The only things she kept were from Bendel’s or Bergdorf’s. Carmela bought and discarded clothes by what seemed to Claire the bucketful. BORN TO SHOP read the framed bumper sticker hung in her Imelda Marcos-type closet. Stan had given the sticker to her for her car, but she wouldn’t kitsch up her fancy car. Still, there was enough of the girl from Richmond Hill in Carmela to appreciate her own decadence. All this consumeritis was all right with Claire as long as she got a chance to scrounge through it. Pride, Claire had long ago decided, had nothing to do with it. She petted the muted tan sleeve. It is worn and soft, she thought, like me, like me.
Above the woods, a white pearly streak came out over the bottom clouds. Swamiji, to her despair, would never join her in her jaunts through the forest. This was a terrible disappointment to Claire, who had always supposed they would picnic and stroll in and out of the woods together. It was, she tried to explain to him, her special place.
Yes, he’d agreed, it was a sacred place, but sacrilege had been done there and he wouldn’t set foot in such a place.
“It’s true that children were killed there,” Claire admitted, “but your presence alone would—”
He had gone, he was already walking away ahead of her. She’d caught up wi
th him. “This is a terrible place,” he’d said, shivering, pulling his cashmere shawl about himself protectively. “Your Catholic priests should go there and remove the demons ceremoniously.” She could just see herself showing up at the rectory door with this request. Somehow, she imagined it wouldn’t go over big. Then again, it might. Now with Anthony connected to the school she didn’t like to come across as the new neighborhood nut-job. (“Here she comes,” the mothers on the corner waiting for their kids to come from the school would whisper, “Bats Benedetto.”) At any rate, she would go herself, with holy water. Mary had a vast stash imported from Lourdes, kept in plastic bottles with blue (for Our Lady) caps.
I shall go, she decided finally, to the five-and-ten. A place where decisions could be made, where dreams could meander and youth be recalled. She was just enjoying the satisfaction of devastating a neatly packed curb full of leaves, when Andrew Dover fell into step alongside her. It was uncanny how all this man had to do was show up and already she was feeling foolish and defensive. Determined not to let him get at her, she flashed him one of her reasonable smiles. He could not see the jumble and confusion in her mind, could he? She had to keep reminding herself that she wasn’t transparent. He had some shoes he wanted to drop off for Dharma, he explained, and didn’t like to come when it was inconvenient for her.
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