by Amity Gaige
“Opal,” Charlie asked her. “Are you all right? What are you feeling?”
She squinted. She squinted at the sun. It was so hot it was green. What was she feeling, she thought. What was she feeling? What an obscure question. What a prissy little question. What a drop in the bucket. What a pebble what a slit what a speck what a fleck of a question. What did it matter? The muscle of her mouth was now contracting around a sound in an attempt to say a word but it was such a distant obscure tiny word that it was difficult to see how the word mattered. Her father would have called the word Academic. The word describing what she felt. Any word that represented something that couldn’t be measured or sold for a dollar amount was Academic: Pain. Want. Perhaps. Sometime. Death. Chance. Love. Punishment. All of it Academic and Obscure and Quaint and Jewish. What was she feeling? What was she feeling? Why didn’t they go dig up his grave and ask him? He was just sitting there, underground, like a bum in a dark train car, fiddling with the buttons of his burial suit, going on and on and on. She could still hear him. All the time! Talking about the military-industrial complex and rats and Jews and—
“Headache,” Opal said finally, touching her temple.
“A headache,” said Charlie, leaning back with satisfaction. “You have a headache? That’s it?”
She closed her eyes, to indicate agreement.
“I’ll tell Dr. Hsu first thing Monday,” he said, and she felt his cool shadow pass in front of her. “No need for you to be having headaches. I’m sorry about that.”
He was bringing her a cup now. A cup of what? She peered inside.
“Apple juice,” he said, proudly.
Apple juice! Apple juice! What they feed children. What they feed children to make them take naps little potions little tricks drink it up. Little apples, pressed to pulp. She felt like an apple herself. Her head, in a press. Her life juice, in a cup. Urine yellow. Thick as spit. Stinking of kindergarten.
“No thank you,” she whispered.
“No?” He bent down to look in her face. “You don’t like apple juice?”
She closed her eyes again, agreeing. No, she did not like apple juice. It was around the Time of Apple Juice, in fact, the Time of Kindergarten and of Show and Tell and of Tire Swings, when her life had been taken from her. Destroyed. Dismantled! Brick by brick. Screw by screw. Bore by bore. Taken apart like a cheap tricycle. She had died then, behind the tool shed. This scent was the scent of death.
“No,” she said, turning her head away. “I don’t like it.”
“Well. that’s all right if you don’t like it,” he said, moving the juice out of her sight. He leaned forward on the table a little. “You seem to be struggling, Opal,” he said. “Are you having difficulty? It’s really hard to come out of the hospital. The first day is absolutely just the worst. It’s all right, if you are. Having difficulty.”
And then, for the first time that morning, she looked at him. Really looked at him. His face was just there across the small table. She liked his ears. They were funny. They had minds of their own. His nose was small and red around the nostrils. His blue eyes were red on the rims. He looked like a blue-eyed boy with a cold. He was like a childhood beau from a childhood she never had. Temporarily, the thought of him being her childhood beau made her cheerful, but then like a passing shadow she became morbid and hated him. She broke up with him in the childhood that she never had. She struck him on the head with a hammer and he covered his bloody face in the childhood she never had. She marched away from him leaving him to die never knowing him. And then she ran back to tend his face but he was not there because neither was the childhood. All the tire swings of the world swung empty. The black enormous force washed over her, practically sucking the breath from her lungs.
It’s all right, said her beau said his soft beau voice. However you feel is all right with me. We can just sit here quietly for a little.
She closed her eyes, and there they were again. On tire swings. Some other girl was getting raped behind the tool shed. Poor girl, she thought. And look at me, sitting here with my nice beau and not a care in the world!
“You haven’t touched your donut,” he said after a while.
Opal looked down, startled. The donut looked back at her, startled. She pushed it toward him.
“You want it?” she said.
“No thank you,” he said. “What kind is it?”
She turned it this way and that. From all angles, it was the same.
“A round one,” she said.
He smiled. Was that funny, she wondered, what she had said? His eyes were blue like good news. His expression was the expression of somebody enjoying a joke made on him. He wasn’t mean and tough like a man. He was a little Quaint. Oh how Daddy would have hated him. A thin gentle guy with hair the color of a wood pee-wee. A real Yank. An Academic sort. The sort that turns clear away from you when he coughs. That your beau? hollered Daddy. That all you can come up with you unclean piece of shit?
Shut up, she said.
Charlie leaned forward. “What?”
Quickly, she pointed out the window. “Look at that dog,” she said.
There was a spotted dog in the back of a truck. The dog was looking at them through the plate glass window.
“Now you’ll just have to wait,” Opal chastened the dog. “You’ll just have to wait out there in that car until your owner gets his donuts. Then you can eat them in a bed or wherever you want.”
Charlie laughed. It was a nice, natural laugh and Opal was pleased. He was a good beau, she thought. Real and polite and miscellaneous.
Fuck him, said Daddy. Screw him! Hit him in the face! Hammer him!
“What a cute bugger,” said Charlie.
Shut up! Kill him!
“No use barking,” said Opal to the dog. “A waste of breath.”
“That’s right,” said Charlie, laughing. “No shoes, no shirt, no service.”
The dog wagged its tail, barking at them.
Then she listened: nothing. The sun became mercifully shady and a man came out and got in the truck with the dog. And just like that, she saw, it had turned into a nice, happy moment. A spotted dog. A round donut. Laughing with a beau. She listened. In her head, a reprieve. A nice moment. She felt fairly sure it was a nice happy moment for everyone within range of it. Also, she had survived another hour.
“Well, then,” said Charlie.
“All righty,” said Opal.
They got up and dusted the crumbs off their pants. Then they walked outside and he took her to the bank where she cashed her Social Security check and then she bought cigarettes.
“Now, darling,” said Marlene. “You look like your father.”
She crossed her legs and scrutinized the child in her lap. The child clapped again. The skin on her round face was taut as if the very bones of her face were a loom or a drum. She had a robust, outdoorsy beauty, with hair like gusts of beach wind.
“Now your sister, she looks more like your mother. She’ll be dark and voluptuous and probably a touch—Machiavellian. And maybe a little smarter than you, dear. No offense. It’s just Evelyn’s almost ready to walk, and you’re pretty much a quadruped.”
The child spread her fingers apart, pressing her hands together.
“You sure do like to clap, though, don’t you? Aren’t you good at it?” Marlene pressed her nose against the child’s shiny nub, feeling in the very density of her waist her generous good nature. The child was a scoop of love. “You know, you’ve got a very English nose. You’ll have a blond, English confidence. And confidence matters more than intelligence. That’s the secret. Why else do you think the English ruled the world for so long?”
The child wrinkled her nose and laughed.
“I wasn’t a confident child,” said Marlene. “My Daddy used to tell me all the time I was too dark and too skinny. He used to make me sit in the shade, so I wouldn’t turn brown. He made me wear Mary Janes until I was eighteen because they were flat. My chest was flat. At school they
called me Olive Oyl. Oh they used to tease me awfully. Now,” Marlene shifted the child to her other knee, “If I had been satisfied and confident, like you, I would have saved myself a lot of tears. A lot of tears—”
Down the hall, the telephone rang.
“I’ll get it!” cried Alice.
Marlene looked out the window. “My mother—your great grandmother, is dead. Your great grandfather says I don’t exist. And your grandfather disappeared. Poof. He blew away, like a feather.”
Through the baby monitor, she could hear Evelyn stir in the nursery.
“Alice, darling!” she called. “Evelyn’s up. Are you still on the phone? Would you like me to get her?”
After a moment, the child began to crow. The bathroom door swung open down the hall.
“No,” came Alice’s voice. “I’ve got her. You just stay put, Mom. OK?”
“Fine by me,” muttered Marlene. She looked again at Frances’s face. Flawless. Unremonstrative. Stay-put. In a matter of years, she would be sporting a beach ball on the Jersey shore, signaling to her friends.
“Now where were we?” Marlene said.
But then her daughter’s voice rose softly above the monitor static. Hush, hush, she was saying in her husky voice. Mommy’s got your bottle right here, brown baby.
Marlene listened to her daughter’s voice through the monitor. Why did she have to call Evelyn brown baby? She wasn’t brown anyway, but white as a sheet. Like Alice herself. Marlene was sure Robert Bussard would have approved of Alice as a woman. If she hadn’t been illegitimate, of course. But she wished he had gotten just one look at her fair skin—not Portuguese skin, but the skin of some cloistered princess—and her roundness-in-the-right-places, if not even a little fatness, and that fullness of her lower lip that cast a shadow on her chin. He father had an artist’s eye for women.
No, no … please don’t apologize again … please don’t … make this awkward.
Marlene tilted her head. She reached over to turn off the monitor. Instead, she withdrew her hand, listening. Through the static, she heard her a sigh.
No. It’s nice of you. I’m flattered. But I really don’t want it to feel … I wouldn’t want Charlie to think … Exactly.
After a pause, Alice’s laughter filled the room. The quality of this laughter made Marlene sit upright. It was a deep-throated laugh. It was sexual. She twisted up the volume knob of the baby monitor. In her lap, Frances bleated.
“Stop that,” said Marlene to the child. “Hush.”
… Yes, well. I really am flattered … I don’t get a hell of a lot of invitations … I’m stuck—
The child screeched again, amused, perhaps, at the projected voice of her mother.
“I said be quiet,” snapped Marlene.
Static. A long pause.
But please … Please just don’t say anything else like that. I can’t say it … back to you. OK?
Then, as if in dismay, the child in the nursery began to wail. With the monitor volume on high, the scream filled the room. Frances turned, seeking her sister. Through the screaming, Marlene could still hear scraps of her daughter’s voice, filled with a kind of forced jocularity.
… Ha, I know … when the boss says it’s time … Watch yourself with … those …
The rest of it was lost to screaming.
Marlene snapped the monitor off. She sat there several moments, swallowing back the acid in her throat. In her lap, the infant raised her hands questioningly, as if to confirm there was nothing in them.
Harriet was pointing a finger in his face.
“I want to know what the hell you were doing with Opal Ludlow on Saturday.”
“What?”
“Are you lovers?”
“What?”
Harriet shook her head, her expression livid. “Don’t lie to me again, now.”
The point of Charlie’s pencil, still pressed to the page of his daily log, snapped. He looked down at it, stupefied. The big shambling figure of Bruce was coming quickly up the hallway, hands out in front of him, saying, “Hey, wait a minute, now.” A pair of nurses who’d been talking there pressed themselves back against the wall, staring.
Harriet still filled the office doorway. “Several people saw you. That’s one hundred percent unacceptable. You got some balls. What exactly do you think your role is here? Jesus?”
“All right,” said Bruce. “Let’s take this inside.”
“—And I didn’t even find out ’til today. Like some fool!”
Bruce put one hand on Harriet’s back. Violently, she shrugged him off.
“I’ll move when I move,” she shouted over her shoulder. Then, as if on second thought, “You been covering for him since day one, Bruce! At the expense of my work and my clients. People’s lives!”
She stood, panting in the doorway, looking hard at Charlie, who was still transfixed by his pencil point. Her face was shiny with sweat.
“Harriet,” said Bruce softly. “Go in and sit down.”
She was not moving. She was glaring at Charlie with a look no one had ever shown him before.
“Harriet, baby,” said Bruce.
Finally, the broad shoulders slumped. She sighed and walked in slowly, taking a chair on the far side of the room, joints cracking.
“All right,” she said. “I’m ready. I’m ready to talk.”
Bruce shut the door behind him. Turning, he said, “What in God’s name is going on, Charlie?”
Alice pushed open the glass door.
Hal looked up. Seeing her, the opacity left his dark eyes.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey. Hold on.”
A forty-something redhead stood at the register, wallet in hand, wearing a wry smile. The woman looked Alice up and down. Her gaze made Alice’s face hot. She walked with great intention across the store. A young girl in a Catholic school uniform sat on a footstool, intent on her book. Nearby, a man in a baseball cap appraised the shelves, hands in pockets.
“Ten dollars fifteen cents,” said Hal behind her.
“Phooey,” said the redheaded woman. “I’ve only got a dime, darling. Could I owe you the nickel?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Oh wait. Here. One, two—two pennies.”
“It’s all right. Really.”
“All right, Hal, darling. I’ll owe you then.”
Against her will, Alice turned. The woman was combing back her stiff hair, looking evenly at Alice. She cast a long look at Hal, and drew herself reluctantly out the door.
Hal sprinted around the counter.
“Hi,” he said.
Alice looked down. “Hi.”
“Are you upset? You look upset. Do you want to take off your jacket?”
“No,” said Alice. “Thank you.”
“Why are you upset?”
“I’m not upset.”
Behind them, the schoolgirl sneezed.
“God bless you,” said Hal.
“Listen,” whispered Alice. “You really, really, really shouldn’t call me at home.”
“All right.”
“All right? Just all right?” She laughed. “It’s not all right. I know you just want to be my friend. But it doesn’t look right, really. I wouldn’t want Charlie to think anything was going on. You understand that right? How it looks inappropriate?”
“Looks?”
“Is, I mean. Is inappropriate.”
“Why is it inappropriate?”
Alice opened her mouth but said nothing.
Hal stepped back slowly, nodded, and sighed. He moved away, back behind the register. He shoved a stack of books aside, and began to sort them on the counter.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“I don’t.”
“You don’t what?”
He looked up. “I don’t just want to be your friend.”
He was gripping the spine of a book. He set it down next to the register.
“Come here,” he said. He grabbed her by the wrist.
&nbs
p; He pulled her into the blue storeroom. Pushing her shoulders back against a file cabinet, he stood squarely in front of her, the sun lighting his closely shaven head.
“I think about you all the time. I think about your hair. I think I love you.”
“No, you don’t!” cried Alice.
Hal’s brow wrinkled. He shook his head, his mouth open.
“No,” Alice said, pushing repeatedly at the bridge of her nose. “You’re—you’re like a gosling.”
“A what?”
“You were sick, and now you’re better, and I was just the first person you saw. You just decided it was me because I was the first person you saw and liked when you could see. It’s not me.”
Hal cocked his head back, as if struck.
“But that’s not it,” he said. “I can’t believe you’d say that. I’m like a duck? My love is like a duck?”
Alice put both hands over her face.
“I can’t believe you’d respond like that,” he said. “You certainly—don’t have to love me back.”
She took her hands from her face. “Well, OK, then.”
“Fine,” he said, shrugging. He took a stack of books in his arms. “Then get out of my storeroom please.”
“Don’t,” Alice said, astonishing herself. “Don’t go.”
And just like that, he put the stack of books down.
“See?” she said shrilly. “You’re so young. You don’t even know how to act.”
“What? I should play hard to get?” Suddenly he winced, and covered his temples with his fingers. “Jesus.”
She stepped toward him. “Are you all right?”
Under his hand, he was smiling.
“Gotcha,” he said.
“Damn you.”
“Seriously,” he said. “You’re hurting my brain.” He gestured for her to move out of his way. Then he stopped and ran one hand over the bristles of his hair. “I’ve been feeling like something else lately. I mean I’ve been feeling—unlike a corpse. I don’t want it—to stop. You might not understand. I could try to explain. But I can’t explain. If you could live every day over again with me, then maybe—” He paused. “I’m alive. I feel.”