by Mary Morris
I wasn’t convinced as I followed him into the old Downtown Branch of the Chicago Public Library. George dashed off toward the card catalogue to find books to show me what energy could do. I wandered into the main reading room. This particular room always had a special place in my heart that I never shared with anyone. My father would bring me down with him on the train, and I used to study under the stained-glass windows in this expansive room during my Christmas breaks. I entered high school when I was eleven. A well-dressed man with tortoiseshell glasses and aging navy suits, who read thick accounting books with tiny print, used to sit beside me and expose himself. It happened perhaps a half-dozen times that year. He always came at lunchtime and sat beside me. He’d lean over and ask, “What are you reading?” Books were no use to me in solving the problem of this man. I knew something was wrong, but I wasn’t sure why. I was impressed by his terribly lonely eyes, not unlike those of the great ape Bushman. I had never seen a man aroused before, and it perplexed me; I thought he was deformed by disease and perhaps unzipped his fly to relieve some hideous pressure I could only faintly understand. In the end it was the regularity of his appearance that frightened me, and when at last I went to the guard, the CPA—for that’s what I now assume he was—snatched up his books and dashed, like a hunted thing, from the library. I knew exactly where I used to sit—the far left-hand seat in the tenth row of tables beside the social studies section. I found that seat and sat down, waiting for George.
I had been preparing a research report that Christmas on the life of a soybean, an interesting life with endless possibilities. The soybean is one of our most versatile plants. The purple flowers, the brown, hairy pods. Why can’t women be exhibitionists, I wondered? Why aren’t there lady flashers? A group of widows from Indiana, obviously with some church-organized tour, flaccid matrons in polyesters with patent-leather shoes, passed by, and I focused on one. She wore a green and pink striped shirtwaist and dark pumps, and I tried to picture her hiking up her skirts, sending some young man shrieking across a sand dune or out of a men’s room.
The seat to my right where the pervert always sat was pulled back, and George sat down, shoving books on oil wells in front of me. He showed me a picture. Oil spewing from the sky, riggers catching it like moonbeams in their hands. “It’s energy that keeps America running,” he said. At that moment I wanted to press him to me, to rid him of fantastic schemes, terrible fears, the memory of illness. Instead, I let my hand rest across his arm and he held my fingers in a comfortable intimacy. “Solar power’s more like it,” I told him, zapping rays from our own private star. Oil’s depressing: all that animal juice, our crushed remains.
My grandmother never had much use for men, and after she was widowed, though she had many offers, she stayed single. She had wanted to be a dancer, but first her father, then her husband, refused. She was an ethereal woman who seemed to embody the qualities of a soap bubble, frail and transparent, leaving the impression that the wind, not her heart, would carry her away. We worried when she walked out into a windy Chicago day, half blind, taking the bus to Marshall Field’s when they had a pistachio ice cream sale. Sometimes, she confessed, she’d go out just so that young men would help her cross the street, because, though she didn’t marry, she liked to flirt. Still, I wasn’t prepared to find a packet of love letters, neatly tied with a pink ribbon, in a bottom drawer. When she was in her eighties, she had told me, “Men aren’t so great, you know.” I didn’t know. All the letters in the package were from the same man, written in the same hand. “Dearest,” I read, “it has been two weeks since we spoke, longer since I’ve seen you.” I scanned the letter for a signature but found none. I fantasized a married man. I skimmed. “Though I realize the limitations of my station and affection for you, though I see how awkward my approach must seem, I do not feel inside me this awkwardness. What I feel, I believe, is genuine.” I read the remainder of the letters—all variations on the same theme, the anonymous man’s longing, her evasiveness. The voice reminded me of Bill Swallow, so I wasn’t surprised when the phone rang as I read and it was he, reminding me we had plans for that evening. I’d been lost among another’s possessions for days, it seemed, and had forgotten my grandmother’s attorney. I made an excuse that I had much to tend to in the apartment, and we agreed he’d come over and we’d order in.
Bill left his rubbers in the hallway. “Terrible rain,” he said, handing me his hat. I phoned Shanghai and ordered sweet and sour shrimp. When I gave the man the address, he said, “Shall I do it da way Doca Linga like it?”
“Yes,” I said, “do it the way he likes it.” In the middle of dinner, Bill gripped my hand and said I was the woman of his dreams. Lawyers have a knack for getting to the point. To think I could play a lead role in the nights of someone I scarcely knew was startling, and he saw in my eyes that he’d put me off. “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said. “It’s just that I’ve been looking for someone like you for a long time and I know you’re what I want.”
“You’re hardly thirty,” I told him. Of course he knew nothing about me, beyond the surface, but maybe that was all I knew of George. Bill blushed and lit a Pall Mall. “And you don’t know me.”
“I know enough,” he said flatly. Maybe he did know enough. But he didn’t fit my image; he wanted a wife who’d live in the suburbs and shop at Sunset. George fitted my image, if only for continuity’s sake, as if he held my childhood in those pediatric hands. Even the man from Shanghai linked us together. “Won’t you at least consider staying a little longer?” Bill said. “Then I could get to know you more.” I said I’d consider it if my paper gave me more time off.
That night, as I slept, a huge crash woke me. I thought we’d been bombed—but who’d bomb Chicago, especially this block? What secrets needed to be destroyed here? Another crash came, and I knew it was a thief, boring his way into the once protected walls. I crawled into a ball under the covers, hoping whoever it was would mistake me for an unmade bed. Another crash came, from the bathroom it seemed, followed by a settling sound. I waited for what felt like hours. Every shadow was a masked man, every light from the street a burglar’s flashlight. I was afraid that, if I opened my eyes, a foglike image would appear in the mirror and I’d have to comply with its most ludicrous wishes. Finally I switched on the light. Dust rose from beneath the bathroom door. When I opened the door, I saw, lying in a heap on the floor, the bathroom ceiling.
The plumber explained that for years a slow leak in the hot-water pipe above the tub had seeped water, like reaching fingers into the weakening plaster, separating it from the pipes until finally it caved in. George came over in the evening. “What a mess,” he said, peering in. He took off his tie, jacket, and cuff links. He watched television while I packed, this time my things—for I suspected, in a superstitious moment, that the bathroom ceiling was intended as a warning for me to get away. Maybe if I was gone, he’d come looking for me. I curled up in George’s arms and slept. I had a vague recollection of him kissing me at dawn and of him whispering he’d miss me. When I woke, he’d left for the hospital. While dressing, I found his cuff links on the dresser, where he’d forgotten them. I wrapped them in tinfoil, stuffed them in a brown paper bag with a note that read, “I’ll always remember my head on your arm. Thank you for staying here.” I phoned him. “They’ll be with the doorman,” I said.
“Is there a note?” He didn’t seem to care about the cuff links. I said of course there was a note. “Then I’ll get them right after work.” He paused. “I really will miss you.” I knew he would. I knew after work he’d pick up the package from the doorman, he’d read the note, and the chain of events would continue after I’d gone, and he’d think of me, the way I’d think of him. I stapled the paper bag shut and put George’s name on it; the doorman thought I was leaving him a child’s lunch.
Once you grow accustomed to them, distances don’t seem so great. I’ve made this trip a hundred times. The plane lifts me into the air and we climb above the l
ayer of cumulonimbus clouds, the artist’s conception of heaven. I think of souls rising. Every time I go back east, I relive my life in the plane, like the embryo repeating the history of its race in the womb. I leave crying. Somewhere over Ohio, my adolescence begins. By the time we’re circling LaGuardia, I’m on the brink of a somewhat somber adulthood. The year before, I’d left my grandmother in front of her hotel, waving at me. She wore a dark blue dress with white flowers, and blended into the water and sky behind her. There were mostly students on my midnight flight, and the pilot greeted us over the loudspeaker: “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. This is your pilot, Captain Crasher, welcoming you aboard.” Nervous laughter tittered through the cabin as we ordered more drinks. Either a sick joke or the words of a madman. I saw no omens.
I had been back for more than a week when my mother phoned. We had a brief conversation—the usual kind, in which she asks questions and I answer yes or no. She always wants to know everything, as if details could provide intimacy. If I try to turn the conversation around and ask her questions, she always says, “Oh, nothing’s new. Dullsville around here.” I try to explain, when she resumes her questioning, that I’ve grown up and I’ll tell her what I want her to know. She quickly switches topics. “I went to close up the apartment today.” She sighed. “You can’t imagine how much I wanted you with me.” The movers came and all the furniture went to a resale warehouse. “I saved you the eggbeater and some pots.” Bill Swallow had gotten everything smoothly through probate. “He asked about you,” she said. “I think he likes you. I gave him your address.” She also gave Sammy whatever he wanted, to avoid a fight.
One of the movers slammed the old bed into a wall, and one of the rare, hand-carved posters snapped in half. She said she’d cried her heart out. And as she was leaving, the doorman handed her a package, the one I’d left for the man who was supposed to pick it up. “I opened it,” she said, “to see what was inside.” She had no business opening it, and we both knew that. It was a sealed package between adults, one of whom had broken his part of the bargain. I also knew she’d read the note, which she didn’t mention, thanking George for letting me sleep in his arms, and that she’d misunderstood its meaning.
“What’ll I do with the cuff links?” she asked. She sounded perplexed and exasperated. When I told her to throw them out, she protested in a high-pitched voice, “But they’re gold.”
“Look, I’ll tell George to pick them up. All right?”
“Good, that’s good.” She was excessively relieved; I might as well have said I saw Grandma last night and she looked just fine to me. What my mother needed was continuity, the sense that things would go on as they’d always been. But my grandmother was dead and George had not come for his cuff links and some things would just not be what they’d been. Or could have been. I sank into obstinate silence. “Tell him to come by in the evening, all right?” she went on. “After dinner. We can have a little chat.”
I didn’t say anything. My mother paused, breathing deeply, as if this were some obscene call she’d just made, and I listened to her breathe across the seemingly endless stretch of midwestern plain.
Burning Issues
THIS IS WHAT I always come back to, Evelyn thinks, as she tries to wake the children. I always come back to that night when Mars came down and kissed the earth the way Walt said and we couldn’t wake them up then, either. The children can sleep through anything. They always have.
The toast pops up but it’s still pale, so she shoves it down the way she’d like to shove other things down. It goes in easily and she watches it, disappearing into the toaster, the light of the toaster warming her hand. She’ll have to go back upstairs and wake them, but she knows it’s useless. In the morning when they were going to school, she used to dread waking them. She’d bang on pots or drop cold water on their heads. She’s never slept the way they do.
She’s always waked at the slightest sound, a little rustling beside her, a truck passing. She hadn’t even been able to wake them the night when the collies were born and she and Walt wanted them to come and see the dog lick the sacs off and bite off the cord or the night when the ex-con tried to break in and the police had come. Or when Mars had come down so close to the earth.
The toast stings her fingers as she plucks it from the toaster. It’s charred this time, and she thinks she should throw it out. Instead, she scrapes the burned part off with a knife. It’s not her fault, she tells herself as she butters the bread. She likes to watch the butter as it softens and spreads, opening into rivulets on the toast. She’d been that way in Walt’s hands, like butter on warm bread. She likes to watch it melt the way she liked to watch the ice melt when the first thaw came. She’d always wanted him to take her to a warm climate. She had read somewhere that some people are like alligators and their blood adjusted to the temperature of the air, but she knew she wasn’t one of them. The winter chills always entered her bones, and she could never get warm enough in the north. She’d have lived at the equator if Walt had wanted to move there.
She calls once more, and as she begins to walk to the stairs, she hears rumbling above. This time they call back, their voices hardly the voices of children anymore. They’d looked huge last night when she tucked them into their enormous baby beds.
It was late, and they had fallen right to sleep. Evelyn tried to read but couldn’t, and she’d gone back into Laura’s room to see if she was still awake. But Laura had fallen sound asleep the minute her head hit the pillow. Laura had always been that way. She didn’t want to go back to it, but she couldn’t help it. She went back again to the night when Mars had almost come down and touched the earth. When the red planet was big in the sky as a football. She and Walt had shaken each one of them in their beds and, finally giving up, had just gone into the backyard themselves and watched Mars like a big fireball overhead.
She burns the eggs. She’s forgotten about them and they sit in the old iron pan, frothy and smoky. She turns them, and dark crusts of egg appear. She debates throwing out the eggs, but it’s not her fault. It’s theirs for not waking up. And she has to blame that picture of Walt, sitting there on the windowsill in the sunlight. The light coming through his eyes, his mouth, coming right out of him, at that hour of the morning. Just at breakfast time. In the corners of the Lucite frame, little rainbows appear.
Sometimes she asks the picture what she should do. Sell the house? Move south? The light animates his face, as if he’s smiling at her. She noticed it the other morning and it made her shudder. As if he’s somehow trapped inside in that Lucite frame and he can’t get to her, like that TV show she saw once when someone was trapped inside the pistons of his own automobile.
He’d looked that way, the light in his eyes, the night when Mars came closest to the earth. It was the closest the planet had been in four hundred years, and it wouldn’t come that close again for another four hundred. It was once in a lifetime, so they’d tried to wake the children, but they couldn’t. So they’d taken a blanket and they’d lain down on it and watched as the planet pulsated, blue and red, and it seemed to vibrate above them.
It seemed so close and fiery, they’d almost expected it to say something to them, but it just hung overhead like a blessing. And after watching a while, Walt had curled up beside her and whispered into her ear. He’d said, “I want you.” And that night was burned into memory. It wasn’t like the other thousands of nights. That one stood out as if he’d reached farther into her than anyone ever could, so that she knew this was where she belonged. The ground had felt dewy and cold, even with the blanket under them. And his hot breath on her neck had wedded her to him, like a brand on a cow.
Upstairs she hears the children, rumbling in the bathroom, washing their faces, brushing their teeth. Big children, huge children now. The children so huge, she can’t imagine how they ever came out of her. It seems impossible, but somehow they did. Burst out of her one day when she thought she’d explode. And one, Sam, had come so fast, he had spilled out int
o Walt’s hands on the way to the hospital. Walt had grabbed the baby in his hands, wrapped him in his own shirt, and said the baby was a little hot potato. That was what Walt had said. He’d called the baby a hot potato as he slipped into his hands.
They come downstairs in their pajamas, all grown now, like the zucchini seeds she’d planted a few years before when monster zucchini grew. They’ve flown in from cities east and west, and she watches as they clomp downstairs. They come close and touch her, cheeks moist with sleep, then move away.
“Your breakfast is getting cold,” she tells them. They sit down obediently and swallow their grief. They eat cold toast, burned eggs, seared bacon. She probably should throw it all out, she thinks, and begin again.
About the Author
MARY MORRIS was born in Chicago and now lives in New York City. In 1979 her widely known short stories were collected and published in Vanishing Animals and Other Stories, which won her the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters’ coveted Rome Prize. Morris has been the recipient of a CAPS award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.