by James Thomas
He uses the telephone to tell me when it’s time for lunch. Just two rings. That’s his code. Then five minutes later he’s at the door, letting himself in.
He reads at lunch, usually one of the classics. He didn’t have much education.
In fact, that’s why I met him. We worked at the same factory, ten miles out of town. It manufactured shoes and boots. I was the boss’s secretary, and Eric worked the floor.
I’ll always remember that first day. He was nervous, tried not to show it, but his hands shook. His hair was brown, his eyes were brown, and the factory overalls were brown. He almost faded into the background of brown leather shoes. Which was quite funny at the time.
But I was describing his day. And he’s not brown any more. Streaks of gray and a balding patch which he rakes over, spreading the hairs thinly across it. And he wears a suit. Usually gray, with a red handkerchief in the pocket. I suppose his eyes are still the same color, but I can’t tell you. If you asked me, I just couldn’t tell you. I did notice they were red tonight, which was unusual, but then the whole day was different. As though the four quarters came together and just rolled away.
I could draw the second half of his day with my eyes closed.
In the afternoon, he has a cup of tea in his office, then he works until six o’clock.
Two rings on the telephone mean he’s coming home for dinner. He has a good appetite and enjoys his food.
In the evening he likes quiet. He always says that after such a busy day at the factory, he needs to sit and think. Which he does, with his eyes closed, his elbow on the chair, and his thumb and one finger pressed against his forehead. Or sometimes he just sits and stares into space.
Eric always goes to bed early. He feels fresh then for the next day.
But now the next day won’t come. It won’t be Eric’s day, and his eyes are red. I’ve never seen him cry before.
I said this day was different. It’s night now, and soon the dawn will come. In the night, the sky was red. A brilliant red. That was beautiful. Black against red. Like a devil with horns or the final crashing chords of a great concerto.
I loved it. Black skeleton of steel in a fiery night. Of course the fire brigade came. I didn’t call them. It was beautiful just watching the sky burning. I don’t think I will ever forget it. Eric was asleep.
They came to tell us as soon as they arrived. Eric knew straight away it was all over.
I love the night. Sometimes I stay up for hours, savoring it. The stars and that great arc of sky. The immense pattern, the changing moods of wind.
Tonight it was special. It was different. And I feel very tired. But happy. An exhilarated feeling, a prickling right down my spine.
Nobody knows how the fire started. Accidental, they say. It happens all the time.
THE SEWERS OF SALT LAKE
“Let’s taste each other’s bodies now without pleasure,” Martha says.
The living room is full of our dogs. It’s evening and the young men from the gas company are lined up in the street singing a Jerry Lee Lewis medley. They’ve got the grand piano strapped on the back of a flatbed truck parked under the maple trees. They sing like fallen angels. Breathless. Great Balls of Fire. Hang Up My Rock ’n’ Roll Shoes.
“Touch me here,” Martha says. High School Confidential. There’s a Whole Lot of Shakin’ Goin’ On. They’re all castrati, with those thin pure high voices that specify otherness and absence.
“Baby, baby, baby,” Martha says.
I accuse her of bad faith. “You said without pleasure.”
“It came over me like a big wind,” Martha apologizes.
She looks skeletal without her clothes on. Ribs like an anatomy lesson. I love her, but what can I do? This morning I made fajitas and she picked out all the bits of chicken, sailed her tortillas like Frisbees to the grateful dogs. Toyed with a piece of green pepper, satisfied herself with slivers of onion.
Tomorrow afternoon it’s the Utah Power and Light people doing Janis Joplin. Big women in meter-reader uniforms singing the blues.
On the far side of the room, under the moiling dogs the twins play. One says “Mama.” The other answers “Mama. Mama.”
The dogs have dug a complicated system of tunnels in the backyard. They hide during the day in the cool underground dark, and pop up at unpredictable intervals like small hairy Viet Cong. This morning the twins disappeared in the labyrinth and Martha put on her camouflage fatigues and went down after them. It’s been three hours now, and I’m waiting for her to return. There’s a light rain falling all over Utah; the state is damp and almost uninhabitable. Martha took the rechargeable flashlight and a box of Ritz crackers in case she had to stay past lunchtime. Mishka and Mishka, the twins, have always loved to explore dark places; I’m not worried. The dogs will look after them until Martha arrives.
Later I look out the window and see Martha coming out of the entrance under the gooseberry bushes. She’s crawling on all fours, carrying Mishka in her teeth by the back of his overalls.
“Where’s Mishka?” I say.
“The dogs are bringing him up. They’ve carved out little rooms down there, with tiny beds and candlesticks made out of empty C-ration cans. It’s comfortable and warm, not at all what I expected.”
At the entrance to the sewers, in the basement of the county courthouse, a sign forbids the public to pick up anything they might find and take it home. The corporation guides wear their dress uniforms; instead of the billed caps they have on miners’ helmets with powerful carbide lamps. Martha carries Mishka in a sling, tucked against her belly; I carry Mishka in a backpack.
“Mama,” Mishka says.
“Mama, Mama,” the other Mishka answers.
The compulsory tour is given once a year to citizens chosen by lot from the voter registration rolls. We are happy to be here, though we wish they had allowed us to leave the babies at home. Martha reads to me from her leaflet:
“Various nocturnal animals may be encountered in the tunnels and must on no account be fed or petted or disturbed in any manner. Respect the ecology of the sewers.”
The guides walk close to us, nightsticks drawn in case we become recalcitrant. The one nearest to Martha frowns when she stumbles, and pushes her back in line, but not unkindly.
We are in the Baptist Catacombs, under Sears and Roebuck. Luminous skulls are set in niches all along the walls. Loose pieces of Baptists have fallen from their resting places and are scattered underfoot. The small finger bones crack like twigs when we step on them.
We arrive under the Temple in time to experience, from beneath, the ritual rinsing of the baptismal fonts. The rush of holy water through the golden pipes startles the twins; Martha gives them suck, one on each breast.
A crocodile drifts slowly down the stream a few feet away, eyes and nostrils barely above the dark waters. A woman in a calico dress throws him a slice of Wonder Bread and the guards strike her down with their sticks. Softly at first, but with increasing fervor, we sing old Eric Clapton songs. After Midnight. Layla. Bell-Bottom Blues.
JANE
Rachel is the one whose hair is golden like Mother’s. They wear it in the same way, freely, without braids or bobby pins. Her hands are Mother’s, too, white and smooth. They are hands to be held, not to hold, and her eyes are wet and bright, like pools of water. That blue. People say that Rachel is beautiful. She says yes by how she spreads a napkin on her lap and lifts a fork neatly to her lips. After brushing her teeth and combing that hair, she stands at the mirror and studies herself, practices a smile. My watching doesn’t stop her. She likes an audience.
Now that she’s gone, I can stand here, too. I have the bottom floor to myself: the two bedrooms (hers and mine) and the bathroom with its mirror. In another week, I will have the whole house. Mother and Father are going to visit her. It is not a vacation, says Mother, only a house in the country where girls like Rachel stay, a school that teaches them to forget and be girls again.
Mother says that forge
tting is hard. The bruises are gone, but Rachel still bleeds in her thoughts. This can only be healed by the quiet hours of the country house. At night, when the darkness returns her to that other night, the nurses can help. Without them, the remembering would smother her. Mother and Father tried to lift it off, but it was too heavy. It came every night those two weeks she was home. I could hear her whimper through the wall. The sound of a baby without milk. The bed creaked as she rocked herself in a cradle made of her own arms. After the screaming began, Mother and Father would run downstairs to shake her awake and hold her. They stopped the screaming but never the low whimper. It came from deep inside, and must have been a roaring in her head.
Rachel could be a mother by Christmas. Like a nightmare, it is not something that will stop on its own. It can only grow. Rachel is young, just eighteen. Mother was twenty-eight when Rachel was born, almost thirty with me. Everyone knows there will have to be an abortion, but Mother still wonders what the baby would be like. After all, the baby is not just Rachel. It is half the man. Would the new, little fingers feel rough? We are told that in the country house Rachel talks about things from the past, our old songbird and the dollhouse we had. Her appetite is good, but this is the baby eating.
In the dollhouse, I remember, Rachel and Jane were two dolls exactly the same, and our babies were smaller dolls the size of erasers. They, too, were all the same. Since Mother never bought us doll men, our husbands were always at work. We would wait for them on the tiny porch just as Mother used to, standing at the window, looking out for Father.
Now they are getting ready to leave. Although Mother is busy, she writes a list of things for me to remember: water the plants, feed Domino, and bring in the paper. The last part is important. Nobody should know that I am alone. I need to lock the doors at night and make sure all the windows are closed. Mother holds my hand and says this is difficult for all of us. Her hand is like a small bird caught in mine. We talk about what I am doing in school and the watercolors I paint. While I tell her about the self-portrait I want to do, we make dinner together. Father will come home soon, and then we will eat. They are leaving tomorrow.
Most girls would like this. Rachel would. She’d invite her friends over and listen to their music on Father’s stereo. I can see them smoking pot and joking about boys. That’s what Rachel would do, or have a boy over by herself. But Rachel is gone. I will tear up Mother’s list, let the begonias starve in their pots, Domino cry at the neighbor’s house for milk, and the papers pile up on the drive. I will smile naked in the mirror, at every lighted window, my hair loose and dark on my shoulders, and one night I will hear a door open somewhere in the empty house and then, soft like the branches on my window before a storm, footsteps on the stairs: his at first, then Mother and Father’s rushing after.
OFFERINGS
Emily often felt invisible. Only yesterday she had been at the dentist’s office waiting patiently for her three o’clock appointment. At three-fifteen Mr. Mackley was called. At four, Debby Chapman. At four-fifteen she asked the nurse why her name hadn’t been called. The nurse’s face turned red and she was lavish with her apologies. Emily caught one of them as they flew around the room and added it to her collection.
People were always saying they were sorry to her. Last week while having a permanent, she watched in the mirror as the hairdresser removed the curlers, and frizzled tufts of hair fell to the ground. The hairdresser cried. Emily comforted her and accepted a complimentary wig to wear until her hair grew out. The hairdresser insisted she take several apologies and Emily obliged her, but on the way out she left two of them on the magazine rack.
The butcher was sorry he didn’t have round, would lamb steaks do? The cleaner was sorry he couldn’t remove the marinara sauce from her silk blouse, she should have brought it in sooner. The ad agency liked her portfolio, but regretted that they weren’t hiring for another few months. The doctor was sorry, her husband’s tumor was inoperable.
Some days she could fit all the apologies into her purse, but most days she had to stuff the overflow into her pockets and under her wig. Sometimes she cut them into circles and dropped them into the coin rolls she picked up at the bank.
One day, about two years after her husband died, she received a postcard that read:
WERE SORRY YOU DID’NT WIN FIRST OR SECOND PRIZE IN THE SWEEPSTAKES YOU ENTERED. AS A THANKS FOR ENTERING, HOWEVER, YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE HAS A SPECIAL GIFT TO YOU FROM US. JUST SHOW THEM THIS CARD.
The next time Emily went downtown she stopped into the bookstore to pick up her gift. The clerk said he was sorry, the store had run out of the original prizes, but she could have an overstocked paperback on the art of origami. Emily was going to let the clerk keep his apology since she felt that getting the book was enough, but he just left it on the counter so she picked it up and used it as a bookmark.
On the bus ride home she took out the book and her day’s collection of sorries. She practiced on the small apologies first, folding them into ducks and cranes and owls. Some of them were cumbersome and difficult to tame. Others were easy and almost creased themselves. Following the book closely, Emily refused to use scissors and as a result a few of the apologies could not be trained. These she sewed to the hem of her skirt.
She was so busy that she missed her stop. The bus driver told her he was sorry, but she’d have to get off and take another bus since he was going back to the yard.
That night she couldn’t sleep. She rummaged through her closet and put on the dining room table all of the apologies she had collected. By candlelight and without the book to guide her, Emily folded the regrets into hundreds of winged creatures. The more she folded, the more skilled she became. She even removed the sloppy apologies that were sewn to her skirts and fashioned them into pterodactyls.
The next day was April 29th, the day she always visited her husband’s grave. Emily hired a taxi to take her to the cemetery. While passing through the gates the driver said, “Sorry, I can’t wait for you, but I’ve got to pick up a fare at the airport. Give us a call when you’re ready.”
She waved him on after quickly folding what he had given her into a butterfly.
Emily trimmed the grass around her husband’s gravestone and washed the bird droppings from the marble. She tried to remember the sound of his laughter and the way he used to scan her body with both hands. She tried to imagine a conversation they might have after making love.
Even though the dampness of the earth made her think of bones and dust and gravity, she tried to picture her husband in heaven, as one of the clouds that roamed the sky.
She opened the hatbox she had brought along and lifted out an apology that she had meant to give her husband before he died. It was an awkward shape and she rarely looked at it because it filled her with shame. She deftly folded the edges until the perimeter of the regret was smooth. Emily studied the apology before each fold, carefully coaxing it to forget its graceless form and accept her design.
She took an hour to give it the wingspan it needed. When she placed the finished apology on the gravestone she watched it unfold its wings and fly.
BREAD
Imagine a piece of bread. You don’t have to imagine it, it’s right here in the kitchen, on the breadboard, in its plastic bag, lying beside the bread knife. The bread knife is an old one you picked up at an auction, it has the word BREAD carved into the wooden handle. You open the bag, pull back the wrapper, cut yourself a slice. You put butter on it, then peanut butter, then honey, and you fold it over. Some of the honey runs out onto your fingers and you lick it off. It takes you about a minute to eat the bread. This bread happens to be brown, but there is also white bread, in the refrigerator, and a heel of rye you got last week, round as a full stomach then, now going moldy. Occasionally you make bread. You think of it as something relaxing to do with your hands.
Imagine a famine. Now imagine a piece of bread. Both of these things are real but you happen to be in the same room with only one of them. Put yourself
into a different room, that’s what the mind is for. You are now lying on a thin mattress in a hot room. The walls are made of dried earth, and your sister, who is younger than you, is in the room with you. She is starving, her belly is bloated, flies land on her eyes, you brush them off with your hand. You have a cloth too, filthy but damp, and you press it to her lips and forehead. The piece of bread is the bread you’ve been saving, for days it seems. You are as hungry as she is, but not yet as weak. How long does this take? When will someone come with more bread? You think of going out to see if you might find something that could be eaten, but outside the streets are infested with scavengers and the stink of corpses is everywhere.
Should you share the bread or give the whole piece to your sister? Should you eat the piece of bread yourself? After all, you have a better chance of living, you’re stronger. How long does it take to decide?
Imagine a prison. There is something you know that you have not yet told. Those in control of the prison know that you know. So do those not in control. If you tell, thirty or forty or a hundred of your friends, your comrades, will be caught and will die. If you refuse to tell, tonight will be like last night. They always choose the night. You don’t think about the night however, but about the piece of bread they offered you. How long does it take? The piece of bread was brown and fresh and reminded you of sunlight falling across a wooden floor. It reminded you of a bowl, a yellow bowl that was once in your home. It held apples and pears; it stood on a table you can also remember. It’s not the hunger or the pain that is killing you but the absence of the yellow bowl. If you could only hold the bowl in your hands, right here, you could withstand anything, you tell yourself. The bread they offered you is subversive, it’s treacherous, it does not mean life.
There were once two sisters. One was rich and had no children, the other had five children and was a widow, so poor that she no longer had any food left. She went to her sister and asked her for a mouthful of bread. “My children are dying,” she said. The rich sister said, “I do not have enough for myself,” and drove her away from the door. Then the husband of the rich sister came home and wanted to cut himself a piece of bread; but when he made the first cut, out flowed red blood.