by James Thomas
Jessie was crying, sobbing from the shock of seeing Marie dead and hearing Mildred and Tom discussing her body as if it were a float they were preparing for the Fourth of July parade.
Mildred put an arm around her. “There, there, Jessie,” she soothed. “We keep forgetting you weren’t here for Marie’s last year. If you had been, you’d understand. None of us want Marie dead but none of us wanted her to go on suffering.”
“She doesn’t have to be smiling,” Jessie sobbed. She turned on Tom. “Why did you put that silly smile on her face?” she demanded.
Tom’s face panicked. “You don’t like it?” he asked. His eyes sought Mildred’s for confirmation.
“If Jessie doesn’t like it,” Mildred said, “then I guess you’d better change it.”
“What do you mean, change it?” Jessie asked. “You can’t change something like that!”
Tom reached over. He took the index finger of his right hand and tugged down on one corner of Marie’s mouth which responded as if it were made of soft, malleable clay. Tom stuck his finger in the other corner of Marie’s mouth and tugged down again. He stepped back. “How’s that?” he asked. “Is that better?”
Mildred looked at Jessie expectantly.
“We can do anything you want with the mouth, Jessie,” Tom said. He poised his index finger. “You just tell me what you want.”
Jessie fled. She ran out, past the parking lot, around the corner to the high-school playing field.
Mildred found her there, sitting on the grass, hugging her knees.
She sat down next to her. “Come on, kid,” she said gently, “don’t you think you’re a little old for this?”
Jessie whipped her head around to look at Mildred. She thought she was ready, ready to tell Mildred what she really thought, how Mildred and Marie had been so close, how they had always left her out, even left her out of Marie’s death. “Too old!” she demanded. “Too old?” she repeated to herself. That was the problem right there. None of them was any longer too young to die.
Mildred was smiling at her, tilting her head slightly to the side as if saying, Are you all right, are you ready to go on?
Jessie smiled back. Mildred nodded her head up and down, her smile growing with each movement. Then she poised her index finger in the air and waited.
Jessie laughed, quietly rocked back and forth, laughing until the tears rolled down her cheeks. She nodded and Mildred reached over with her index finger and pulled the corners of Jessie’s mouth down. Jessie stuck out her index finger and pushed the corners of Mildred’s mouth up. Down, up, down, up, they went, laughing then rolling on the ground until they could go back and tell Tom that Marie looked just fine.
SPACE
A beautiful woman stood at the roof-edge of one of New York’s tall midtown apartment houses. She was on the verge of jumping when a man, coming out on the roof to sunbathe, saw her. Surprised, the woman stepped back from the ledge. The man was about thirty or thirty-five and blond. He was lean, with a long upper body and short, thin legs. His black bathing suit shone like satin in the sun. He was no more than ten steps from the woman. She stared at him. The wind blew strands of her long dark hair across her face. She pulled them back and held them in place with one hand. Her white blouse and pale blue skirt kept billowing, but she paid no attention. He saw that she was barefoot and that two high-heeled shoes were placed side by side on the gravel near where she stood. She had turned away from him. The wind flattened her skirt against the front of her long thighs. He wished he could reach out and pull her toward him. The air shifted and drew her skirt tightly across her small, round buttocks; the lines of her bikini underpants showed. “I’ll take you to dinner,” he yelled. The woman turned to look at him again. Her gaze was point-blank. Her teeth were clenched. The man looked at her hands which were now crossed in front of her, holding her skirt in place. She wore no wedding band. “Let’s go someplace and talk,” he said. She took a deep breath and turned away. She lifted her arms as if she were preparing to dive. “Look,” he said, “if it’s me you’re worried about, you have nothing to fear.” He took the towel he was carrying over his shoulders and made it into a sarong. “I know it’s depressing,” he said. He was not sure what he had meant. He wondered if the woman felt anything. He liked the way her back curved into her buttocks. It struck him as simple and expressive; it suggested an appetite or potential for sex. He wished he could touch her. As if to give him some hope, the woman lowered her arms to her sides and shifted her weight. “I’ll tell you what,” the man said, “I’ll marry you.” The wind once again pulled the woman’s skirt tightly across her buttocks. “We’ll do it immediately,” he said, “and then go to Italy. We’ll go to Bologna, we’ll eat great food. We’ll walk around all day and drink grappa at night. We’ll observe the world and we’ll read the books we never had time for.” The woman had not turned around or backed off from the ledge. Beyond her lay the industrial buildings of Long Island City, the endless row houses of Queens. A few clouds moved in the distance. The man shut his eyes and tried to think of how else to change her mind. When he opened them, he saw that between her feet and the ledge was a space, a space that would always exist now between herself and the world. In the long moment when she existed before him for the last time, he thought, How lovely. Then she was gone.
FEAR: FOUR EXAMPLES
My daughter called from college. She is a good student, excellent grades, is gifted in any number of ways.
“What time is it?” she said. I said, “It is two o’clock.” “All right,” she said. “It’s two now. Expect me at four—four by the clock that said it’s two.” “It was my watch,” I said. “Good,” she said.
It is ninety miles, an easy drive.
At a quarter to four, I went down to the street. I had these things in mind—look for her car, hold a parking place, be there waving when she turned into the block.
At a quarter to five, I came back up. I changed my shirt. I wiped off my shoes. I looked into the mirror to see if I looked like someone’s father.
She presented herself shortly after six o’clock.
“Traffic?” I said. “No,” she said, and that was the end of that.
Just as supper was being concluded, she complained of insufferable pain, and doubled over on the dining-room floor.
“My belly,” she said. “What?” I said. She said, “My belly. It’s agony. Get me a doctor.”
There is a large and famous hospital mere blocks from my apartment. Celebrities go there, statesmen, people who must know what they are doing.
With the help of a doorman and an elevator man, I got my daughter to the hospital. Within minutes, two physicians and a corps of nurses took the matter in hand.
I stood by watching. It was hours before they had her undoubled and were willing to announce their findings.
A bellyache, a rogue cramp, a certain nonspecific seizure of the abdomen—vagrant, indecipherable, a mystery not worth further inquiry.
We left the hospital unassisted, using a succession of tunnels in order to shorten the distance home. The exposed distance, that is—since it would be four in the morning on the city streets, and though the blocks would be few, each one of them could be catastrophic. So we made our way along the system of underground passageways that link the units of the hospital until we were forced to surface and exit. We came out onto a street with not a person on it—until we saw him, the young man who was going from car to car. He carried something under his arm. It looked to me to be a furled umbrella—black fabric, silver fittings. It could not have been what it looked to be—but instead a tool of entry disguised as an umbrella!
He turned to us as we stepped along, and then he turned back to his work—going from car to car, trying the doors, and sometimes using the thing to dig at the windows.
“Don’t look,” I said. My daughter said, “What?” I said, “There’s someone across the street. He’s trying to jimmy open cars. Just keep on walking as if you don’t see him.”<
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My daughter said, “Where? I don’t see him.”
I put my daughter to bed and the hospital charges on my desk and then I let my head down onto the pillow and listened.
There was nothing to hear.
Before I surrendered myself to sleep, there was only this in my mind—the boy in the treatment room across the corridor from my daughter’s, how I had wanted to cry out each time he had cried out as a stitch was sutured into his hand.
“Take it out! Take it out!”
This is what the boy was shrieking as the doctor worked to close the wound.
I thought about the feeling in me when I had heard that awful wailing. The boy wanted the needle out. I suppose it hurt worse than the thing that had inspired them to sew him up.
But then I considered the statement for emergency services—translating the amount first into theater tickets, then into hand-ironed shirts.
THE LAST PARAKEET
I think the last Pyrruhura parakeet is about to make a statement. The camera has moved in on him so that he takes up the whole TV screen, and his black eyes, first one, then the other, have me fixed at my breakfast table. He is pink and green but he has blue shadows under his eyes just like all the guests on the “Today” show because it’s so early there in the New York studio. He is gripping the finger of a Brazilian biologist with his wiry yellow feet. While I pour the milk on my Rice Krispies, they flash a little sign under him, BRAZILIAN PARAKEET, LAST OF SPECIES. They say he turned himself in.
There is a little surreptitious knock at my door, a knock trying not to be a knock once it has called attention to itself. That will be my neighbor, Hattie, from across the hall. Hattie is a single lady. I carry my bowl of Krispies with me, walking backwards to the door, keeping an eye on the TV. The little knock comes again and I open the door with a jerk. Hattie’s there in a fuzzy pink bathrobe with a green towel around her head. I have to look at her because this is an uncommon sight. Generally, I see Hattie at dusk, in a sort of mating ritual, taking some man in off the doorstep. They always look drabber than she does and a bit deaf to the call. Hattie asks without blinking for the Worcestershire sauce. I don’t inquire what for.
When I get back to my TV of course they have gone on to something else, namely ways in which divorced women can turn hobbies into fortunes. One of them is there on the screen looking pleased with herself and the subtitle under her says DIVORCÉE MILLIONAIRE. Bryant Gumble asks her if it isn’t just a little vulgar to leave a marriage and then make all that money.
I sit down at my table and pull my feet up under me. I’m not even putting this milk away until I hear what that parakeet has to say. I play with my watch trying to figure what time it is in Brazil. He must have made his decision sometime deep in the night. Then he fluttered out of the dark and threw himself against the biologist’s windows, I imagine, like a giant pink moth. My guess is that the loneliness got to him.
I wonder how he figured out that he was alone. Did he fly all around the rain forest looking into other bird faces for one like his own? Or did it just dawn on him one day, amidst all the screeching and crying?
Willard Scott comes on with the weather. This is one of his secure, toupee-less days. He’s got a picture of Elvira Hoopsmart, who is one hundred years old today in Ascot, Pennsylvania. He makes the camera come in real close on Elvira so we can see her little black eyes. She’s beautiful, Willard notes, but he doesn’t mention who turned her in for being one hundred. This species is safe, I think, unless Willard has a whole drawer full of old pictures and just makes the names up every day.
There’s a sharp little knock on my door which I surmise to be made with the aid of a Worcestershire sauce bottle. Hattie is all dressed up for work now with high heels and a white blouse up to her chin, and blue, blue shadows under her eyes. They never ask the questions you want answers to on these shows.
There he is. It’s the 8:30 news roundup, just the essence, you know, of everything. “Here are some of the stories we’re working on for you.” The president is there for a second and a couple of hangdog astronauts and somebody in the hospital being given new hope and some handcuffed kid looking at the ground. There’s a long shot this time of the Brazilian biologist lounging in his chair and holding his finger out at Bryant. The parakeet looks so small. Time does not permit us to hear his version.
SNAPSHOT, HARVEY CEDARS: 1948
My mother touches her forehead, throwing her green eyes into shade. Her mouth is pink, her hair blond like wheat. She is tanned. She is the best-looking woman on the beach, only she will never recognize it. She wraps her long body in an aqua sarong and winces, believes her hips are a bell. Even now she is counting, waiting for the camera to flicker shut.
My father’s arm weights down her shoulder. He is muscular, his stomach flat as a pan. He looks full ahead, pretending he is with my mother, but already he is in Florida, developing new cities, pumping dead mangrove full of sand. He sees himself building, building. He will be healthy. He will have good fortune. And years in the future, after his Army buddies will have grown soft and womanish, all his hard work will pay off: people will remember his name.
Their shoulders touch. Their pose says: this is how young couples are supposed to look—see, aren’t we the lucky ones? But my mother’s head is tilted. What is she looking at? Is she gazing at the tennis player by the outdoor shower, the one with the gentle hands, the one who will teach her to unlearn things? Or can she already hear the gun which my father will press into his forehead, twenty years away?
AUGUST EVENING
He drives a new-model metallic-blue Cougar with all the accessories including air conditioning and a tape deck and beige kidskin interior plus some special things of his own for instance a compass affixed to his dashboard, a special blind-spot mirror, extra strips of chrome around the windows and license plates, a glitter-flecked steering wheel “spin,” and, in cold weather, a steering wheel covering made of snakeskin. In warm weather he likes to cruise the city as he’d done twenty years ago or maybe more except now he’s alone and not with his friends as he’d been back then. As if nothing has changed and the surprise is that not much really has changed in certain parts of the city and off the larger streets and he’s drawn back always a little expectant and curious to the old places for instance St. Mary’s Church where they’d all gone and the grammar school next door, the half-dozen houses his parents had rented while he and his brothers were growing up though he couldn’t name their chronological sequence any longer and one or two of them have been remodeled, glitzy fake-brick siding and big picture windows so it’s difficult to recognize the houses except by way of the neighboring houses which are beginning to be unrecognizable too. There’s a variety store close by the school hardly changed at all where he parks to get a pack of Luckies and just as he’s leaving he runs into this woman Jacky he’d known in high school back before she was married and he was married and she’s in tight shorts that show the swell of her buttocks and her small round stomach and a tank-top blouse like a young girl would wear looking good with her fleshy smiling mouth and her eyes shadowed in silvery blue and her legs still long and trim though a little bunchy at the knees. At first it almost seems Jacky doesn’t recognize him then of course she does and they get to talking and laughing and it’s clear she likes him looking at her like that asking him questions about his job and where he’s living now since the divorce and what’s his ex-wife doing, and then they get to talking about old friends and high school classmates, guys he hung around with, some of them they haven’t seen or heard of in years so you’d wonder are they still alive but better not ask. And gradually they run out of things to say but neither wants to break away just yet they’re smiling so hard at each other and standing a little closer than you’d ordinarily stand, Jacky’s the kind of woman likes to touch a man’s arm when she talks, and he’s thinking a thought he’d had before and probably she has too that the marriages by now are more or less interchangeable like objects blurring in a rearview mi
rror as you speed away but also it’s the warm lazy air smelling of soft tar from the streets and sirens in the distance or is it a freight train like those childhood sounds you’d hear at night . . . melancholy and sweet-sounding with the power to make your eyes fill with tears. And they see themselves off somewhere hurriedly undressing . . . and the frantic hungry coupling . . . and the orgasm protracted for each as in slow motion . . . and the sweaty stunned aftermath, the valedictory kisses, caresses, stammered words . . . All that they aren’t going to do but they’re locked together seeing it and Jacky’s eyes look dilated and he’s feeling the impact of it as if somebody were pushing hard on his chest with an opened hand so that he almost can’t breathe.
Honey was that sweet are the words he isn’t going to say and Jacky can’t think of what to say either so they back off from each other and she says “Take care” and he says “Okay—you too” and he gets in his car and drives off sad-feeling and excited and eager to be gone all at once—knowing not to bother looking for her in the rearview mirror, he’s accelerating so fast.
THE FACTORY
I have always hated the factory. It has a gaunt steel frame like a skeleton. I’ve often imagined it without its red bricks, just an etching of black against a red sky.
Of course, I’ve never said anything about this to anyone. Especially to Eric. You see, he loves the factory. He would like to put up his sign in those flashing neon lights that the city firms can afford. He saw a rainbow once over a petrol station there. I think he would have sold almost anything to have one of those on his roof.
Every day he is up early. He sings in the shower and eats his breakfast quietly. He always reads the business section of the newspaper, then quarters it neatly.
His days are like that. In four parts.
The first is the morning, which I’ve mentioned. Then there’s the day at the factory. That’s in two: the morning and the afternoon.