Before that, on the small round table in their bedroom, in a quiet moment of the day when woman and children had all been elsewhere, a small, faded, sentimental cloth had lain flat where it had been carefully smoothed for a lamp and a book, had hung irregularly over the edge a few inches all around, its grapes and leaves and red border motionless. The lamp’s yellow burlap shade insisted on a mood of cheer; and the book had been left in an artful posture, to one side, awaiting a charmed kiss of attention that in some way was mutual and would at the same moment be felt by the woman—whose hand, a few days earlier, had left it there with a tiny unspoken hope. Had lingered over leaving it there.
She needed a moment to reach back, to touch lightly—as you might touch the leaf of a houseplant after you had watered it with generosity and helpfulness in your spirit—what had been, to make it grow in just a slightly different direction, somehow, for the sake of a morning that would come spilling light on what simply is, confirming it—it in all its unrecoverable unknowing preparations.
The stillness, the absence, the current of the days, the space in which everything that happened and everything that didn’t happen became the story. Every moment creating the next out of itself and looking back to how it had come to be, how it was filled by the four of them, how it could never disclose to them why at some hours its emptiness was filled with what it could not say.
The Vanishing Point
A young man with very bad teeth and a walleyed gaze, holding some poster boards on his lap, where they sagged on each side, and drawing on the top one with an old, chewed, blue-ink ballpoint pen.
It was a severely rectilinear highway scene: a powerful exaggerated vanishing point puckering the empty horizon, lanes of cars coming on—as yet only outlined—and lanes of big trucks going away, already finished. One after another, all alike, semitrailers with company names on them, and all the wording and perspective acutely correct. It all looked to have been drawn with a ruler, strictly and slowly, but he was doing it freehand—each stroke of his pen absolutely precise. Or rather, as imprecise as the human hand, but with an authority that could convey and even create his precision in your own eyes as you watched. The lettering he was putting on the side of the last, closest, largest trailer was as if painted by machine, and he never paused to consider proportions or angles but simply kept drawing and darkening the shapes with the cheap ink, as if rapidly tracing not drawing a faint design that was already there on the white floppy board.
This was at Chicago and State, in the subway station.
A pale woman happened to come stand near him, and watched as he worked with his intent rhythm, his head bobbing and sometimes with his dark face low to study his work closely with one eye at a time. She watched, and he noticed her and smiled a wrecked-tooth wide sort of blindman’s smile at her, and said, more than asked, “Nice work, idn’t it?” She put her right thumb up and smiled back at him, and said nothing, and he lifted the top board and showed her the finished one underneath, for an instant—another roadscape, in several colors, filled in and alive, the whole huge white board crammed with convincing and convinced detail.
“Nice work, idn’t it!” he said again, and showed her the one underneath that one. Again, thumb up, and she too smiled happily—a wholly natural acknowledgment of him, an unsurprised understanding of his talent. She didn’t act as if it seemed strange to her that he was sitting on a worn drab bench on the subway platform, next to the tracks, working in the dim light while commuters and others stood around waiting impatiently for the next train. It didn’t seem to strike her as out of the usual that he was half-blind and so intensely at his work. That his work was driven, obsessively scrupulous, uninhabited, repetitive, brilliant, rhythmical, depthless, spiritless, useless.
“Nice work, idn’t it!” he said to her each time, and he showed her—and me, because I too was standing there—six or eight more drawings: the hundred-and-eight-story tower, the skyline along Michigan Avenue, the traffic in the streets, not a single person. The long lines were perfectly smooth and straight but when you looked at them more closely you saw that they zigged with freehand force across the board in short spurts. And her thumb went up to each in turn, and she smiled and each time she did, he said, “Nice work, idn’t it!”
“I do nice work!” he said. “I did all these, and not a single mistake! Nice work!” he was saying as the train came in like sandpaper, hissing and braking. She walked away toward it without saying goodbye, and he looked at me, then. “Nice work, idn’t it!” he said, as cheerfully as a man could ever say it.
“It’s beautiful!” I said. The doors of the train opened a few feet away, everyone was crowding inside, and I stepped in, the great force in him still holding me, and with part of myself I wished it would win—for my sake, not his—but I had gotten in, the last passenger, “It’s nice work!” he said to me, smiling, nodding, and the doors slid shut and immediately the train jerked and began to roll out of the station and away.
No Matter What Has Happened This May
I love the little row of life along the low rusted garden-wire fence that divides my small city backyard from my neighbor’s. The wild unruly rose, I hacked like a weed last spring; then it shot quick running lengths of vine in every direction and shuddered into a thickness of blown blossoms—the kind you can’t cut and take in because they fall apart. The violets, just beautiful weeds. Then there are yellow-green horseradish leaves—they rose as fast as dandelions in today’s rain and then sun. And the oregano and mint are coming back, too—you can’t discourage them. Last year’s dry raspberry canes are leaning, caught in the thorns of the new, at the corner. And beyond them, the mostly gone magnolia in the widow’s yard, behind ours, the white petals on the ground in a circle like a crocheted bedspread thrown down around the black trunk.
I went out to see what the end of the day was like, away from everything for a minute, and again a few drops of rain were falling. I touched the ground, just to feel the wet of it against my palm; and the old side of the house, too. In the quiet, I saw two robins bringing weeds and twigs to a nesting place hidden in the new leaves at the stumpy top of a trimmed limb of the buckeye. How little they need—weeds and some time—to build with.
In a month I may find a new one not yet fully fledged, lost from the nest, and I may put it on the highest limb I can reach, but not high enough to escape harm’s way, I imagine, when the harm is the shock within it after its disastrous fall, and it may be dead before morning. That’s happened before. But these robins were just now building, and one came with a full beak and paused a moment on a lower branch and cocked its head and looked upward and shifted its feet and then leapt up and disappeared into the buckeye leaves, as the single drops of rain were gently shaking them one by one, here and there. Nearby somewhere, singing, a cricket.
I was getting wet but I felt held outside because I could hear, from inside our house, a woman and small child—wife and daughter—laughing in the bathtub together, their laughter not meant for me but brought out to me like a gift by the damp still air. I could see that like the rain and the robins and the weeds and roses and raspberry canes they too were working and building. I’m not going to mention now any harm or hurt they have suffered. No winter or summer pain, no wounded persons or trees, no small figures fallen. I wiped the wet and dirt off my palms and I picked up again the glass of wine I had carried out with me. I rejoiced. There was no way not to, with the sound of that laughter and whispering in the last light of a day we had lived.
Money
The three children are eating lunch in the kitchen on a summer weekday when a man comes to the latched screen side door and knocks and they hear him ask their mother if she has anything that needs fixing or carrying or any yardwork he can do. They chew their sandwiches a little dreamily as she says, with her back straight and her voice carefully polite, No thank you, I’m sorry, and the man goes away. Who was that, Mama? they say. No one, she says.
They are sitting down to dinner but they have
to wait because the doorbell rings and their father looks out the small round window in the old brown front door and then opens it and they see a thin young boy with a strong voice who begins to tell about a Sales Program he’s completing for a Scholarship to be Supervisor, and he holds up a smudged, worn, tattered little booklet. The children do not perceive his novice guile and ineradicable hope. Their father says, No thank you, Sorry but I can’t help you out this time, Good luck. The boy goes away. The children start to eat and don’t ask anything, because the boy was just a boy, but when their father sits down again he acts irritated and hasty.
Once, a glassy-eyed heavy girl who almost seems asleep as she stands under the front porch light on a warm night in autumn and offers for sale some little hand towels stitched by the blind people at the Lighthouse for the Blind and all three children, hiding just a little in the folds of their mother’s full skirt, listen to the girl’s high voice and their mother says, Well, I bought some the last time, but I can’t do it this time.
She buys the children school supplies and food, she pays the two boys for mowing the yard together and weeding her flower beds. She gets a new sewing machine for her birthday from the children’s father, and she buys new fabric and thread and patterns and makes dresses for the girls. Saving money. She patches the boy’s cousin’s hand-me-down shirts and jeans. She tells each of the children to put a dime or quarter from their allowance into the collection plate at church, and once a month she puts in a little sealed white envelope, and the ushers move slowly along the ends of the pews weaving the baskets through the congregation as the organist plays a long piece of music.
Look at it all—whisk brooms, magazine subscriptions, anything you need hauled away, Little League raffle tickets, chocolate candy, can I do any yardwork again and again, hairbrushes, Christmas cards, do you need help with your ironing one time, and more—they all came calling at the front door while the children were sometimes eating, sometimes playing. Their faces would soften with a kind of comfort in the authority of mother or father, with a kind of wonder at the needy callers.
Their father left for work every day early, and came home for dinner, and almost always went again on Saturday. In his car. Their mother drove them places in her car. She opened a savings account for each child and into each put the first five dollars. The children felt proud to see their names in the passbooks. They wanted to know when they could take the money out, but they were told they had to save their money, not spend it.
In that long ago time they felt a kind of pleasure in these mysteries, to know that there were things you would understand later when you grew up and had your own house and while your own children were eating their dinner and making too much unwanted noise just as you had done, the doorbell would ring or there would come a knock-knock, the familiar surprise of it, who would it be, and someone would be holding a little worn book or a bundle of dishtowels or once an old man, but maybe he only looked so old, with his pale ragged beard, came with bunches of carnations, white, red, and pink. They didn’t see, but look at him now as he walks slowly away still holding in both arms all his flowers.
Julius Johnson, 1995
The extraordinary night had ended, young Sharon Judith Ann (he loved her having three first names) had gone back into her house, and at five a.m. on Thursday young Julius Johnson, high-school senior, track and field, slipped back into his. His parents and his older sister were none the wiser, although they would have been astonished to know what had happened to their Julius, of whom they would never have predicted such triumph (as he felt it), or falling into sin (as they would have judged it). He lay down in his clothes and could not sleep, and an hour later, when his father, who rose before all others and showered, shaved and put on his work clothes and beat-up boots before the rest of the family even woke, called out Julius’s name, Julius feigned a sleepy reply, behind his closed bedroom door, he feigned dressing quickly and he pulled the bedspread down and mussed the bed to make it look right. He never made his bed and his mother had given up on that long ago, and would make his bed after she got home from work. He heard his father call his sister’s name. She was always almost late to her new job. He heard the usual sounds of morning in the house, but now he noticed them almost one by one, and he smelled the browned-butter scent of frying eggs. In a state of wonder and doubt, he entered the kitchen and sat down at the everyday table which seemed to him strange and incomprehensible, and he ate the eggs over easy and toast and bacon which his father had as always occupied himself with making, even on this incredible, unprecedented day, while Julius’s sister, whom his father also served, was still in her nightgown, her head bent down, her hair unmanageable and her eyes presumably still closed against the unfair light of day. She ate in silence, even on this day! And Julius’s mother with silent reverence immersed herself in preparing her own ritual coffee precisely as she wished it (even on this day!), although repeatedly she glanced at Julius, and seemed to catch his eye. But she said nothing. She too was a woman. Sharon Judith Ann was a woman. In his mind, Julius saw Sharon Judith Ann’s extraordinary living creatureliness, her simple and stupefying nakedness. Julius’s mother went on with her coffee-making and then her slow coffee-sipping, and lingered to communicate wordlessly to Julius an indulgent, protective, uninformed blessing. Then, answering the demands of her unswerving routine, by which she made life endurable in the face of meaninglessness and pillaging merciless time itself, she bore her coffee away to her bedroom where she would carefully dress for work, while Julius’s father, after himself cleaning the kitchen in his quick efficient way, would matter-of-factly leave in his own car for the nowadays half-empty parking lot at the plant. Even on this day. Julius’s mother, who had the good car, would soon be waiting impatiently for his sister to finish getting ready, and would quarrel with her as they walked out, and his sister would say very little, and the mother and daughter would enter the outer day of their crappy jobs, their disappointments and small triumphs, the satisfactions of being away from each other and the need to be with each other.
Carrying a stuffed CD case and his old player, and some tattered notebooks and leaden textbooks in his high-school backpack, Julius was unable to say anything about himself to any of these blood kin with whom he had lived all his life. His friend would arrive soon in his beat-up car and drive them both to school. After school, Julius would pick up a javelin and ask himself what in the world it was, and would throw it not nearly as far as usual. Uncannily, offering her morning motto to him, Julius’s mother had said, “Do what’s right,” and had smiled sadly at him, and then hugged him, and left, and a few minutes later the mute sister listlessly put her arms around Julius’s shoulders and to his surprise kissed him on the cheek. Julius’s sister, too, a woman.
From inside his friend’s car, Julius looked back at the house in which he had grown up, feeling for an instant—but not acting on this feeling—that now that everyone else was gone, and he too was leaving, the house would divulge some incredible secret to him if only he would rush back inside and stand in the burned-butter-scented quiet. As the car rolled backwards down the short driveway into the street, Julius could hear the muted sound of the elderly next-door neighbor woman practicing her piano, as she often did in the early morning—a swirling music of interior dancing and dirging. Chopin, Julius’s mother had told him.
What if without telling anyone he left home forever, and the whole town? (But how could he even think that? . . . Sharon Judith Ann.) By chance, by luck, by what made no sense, by design of God or the devil, Julius could, he could, he realized, do anything—he could for example disappear—he could take his first and only flight away from the realm of blood relations, of sudden school friendships and ruptures, of hyper raptures and hammer-stunned mute grief. Julius would not look down through the malevolent treacherous air, nor back in time, but would picture in his mind again, as innumerable times he had already pictured, images of some paradise of freedom from obligation, freedom from rain and rot, freedom from time
—freedom from Fortune herself, even if She was laughing at the wheel she turned, to which everyone was bound. She too—Julius was thinking—a woman. Every minute in the air, Julius would watch his old world fall and fall away as the plane rose and rose. He would see images that he could not quite imagine now. At the end of the flight, at the end of his escape—he would return! He would return to his world to discover again what it was, and it could not but be the most changed place.
“Hey! Did you hear what I said?” his friend yelled at him. Julius slammed the creaking car door shut and the echo flew through the parking lot and seventeen streets. The two of them walked from the weather into the school. The halls were full of jostling and noise and smells of mops, dust, old metal, and armpits. Where was Sharon Judith Ann? Julius began to perceive in his extraordinariness the extraordinariness of everyone else’s ordinariness, too.
In the City
What noise on the summer street rushing with cars and crowded with people under the apartments and church that were tilting over sidewalks and shops, and inside a neighborhood corner grocer’s store a loud radio and people choosing apples and cabbages and potatoes from stacked wooden crates and wicker baskets, what noise; and others inside have gathered butter and milk and cheese and sausages and loaves of bread in their arms, candy bars and chips and Cokes, are at the counter, asking and saying things in two or three languages or silent, waiting to pay. Outside on the corner, newspapers are stacked at the feet of a man who goes out into the street to hawk them when the traffic light turns red and for a few moments the poison of the idling engines accumulates. The noisy smell of frying, too, wafts from the restaurants nearby. And past all the cars stopped or rolling slowly, inching forward, whose horns bleat up and down the echoing man-made canyons, here and there amid the roar is hidden the stillness before motion resumes and the stillness after motion has stopped, both stillnesses ceaselessly arriving and dissolving again into noise. It’s inside the store, in this man’s sudden halting before a cold package of bratwurst or bruised apples; it’s outside in that woman’s closed eyes while she’s standing at the bus stop. And a man on his way through, among all the others this one person whom we know so well, he is closer to us than a brother—he thinks he has just heard his name called out, very clearly, he turns and looks back over his shoulder. He looks across the street, peers into the open doorway of the grocer and into a garage like a neatly organized dry cave and into a dry cleaner, to find who it is amidst this din, if it is anyone, who knows him. The sound glittered like a gem discovered among pebbles in shallow clear water and it caught him abruptly and made him forget what he’d been thinking. But he doesn’t hear his name called again, no one looks familiar, he must have heard it in some other name or call, some play of sound that his mind seized mistakenly from the noise to make the similar seem the identical. Did he hear it because without any awareness of his feelings he had wanted to be called, to be summoned? It was his childhood nickname, a name for all of his being that is hidden inside his adult life, not the name anyone now calls him by, it would be a misnaming in anyone’s mouth, and he looks here and there and sees no one he might know from back then, no one he recognizes. Maybe it’s someone he can’t recognize now. Above the streets are a few faces in windows; in this one and that, someone is looking down. The late afternoon’s hot and in that window or this someone inside is moving across a darkened room. The call—but this thought can’t quite come to him—might have been from the spirit of this day and this place—this smelly intersection—and from the physical resistance of everything that is inert that human hands touch and move, and from the sweetness of those moments of good that some of the crowd will find in this hour. The call to him, from somewhere inside himself, maybe. And above everyone are the roofs with no one on them at all except for one strange creature who might have wings and who seems disappointed; turning back from the edge, where she was standing only an instant before, looking down, her call almost still echoing, and she’s about to fly away.
An Orchard in the Street Page 2