Something Red

by Jennifer Gilmore

  The radio host urged the caller off the line. This is a case, he said, where no news is just plain bad news. Thanks for calling in, folks, and after the break, more from all of you, the phones are ringin’ off the hooks this morning! Stay tuned for a few words from our sponsors . . .

  A manic commercial for Jordan’s furniture in Waltham replaced the announcer.

  Vanessa shook her head. “We used to.” She remembered Jason in the grass in the backyard. Zachary must have just mowed the lawn that day, and the smell of cut grass was all over them. When she’d sat up, the individual blades were plastered to the backs of her thighs and shoulders. “But not really anymore.” She regretted the time with Sean now. “I can’t really explain it.” How she regretted it! Jason was slow and sweet, but he did not want her. She pictured their little red house swathed in bandages, and she hated Sean and his whole stupid punk posse.

  Benji remembered his sister’s bones. As he’d looked down at her on the field, they had seemed haphazardly placed together; he’d wondered how he would be able to set them back to form a person again. “Well,” he started to say to her, but he was interrupted by a knock at the door and the sound of their mother’s voice.

  The taxi let Sharon out in the parking lot outside Benjamin’s quad. She made her way into the courtyard balancing the cardboard box of doughnuts—a special treat, who cared about the evils of sugar and fat at a time like this anyway? It was amazing to her that at nine in the morning the campus was silent but for the sounds of nature waking: a bird shaking on a tree, another singing, the obscuring of the sky from a clear night into a cloudy morning. The pond shimmered before her, and walking over to the edge, she could see the old women’s fingers of the rough tree branches in the surface and her reflection superimposed over the clouded sky. Startled by the image of her head, which looked enormous from this distance, she leaned in. A duck lit on the pond surface, and the water rippled toward its edges, Sharon’s image growing and receding, bending and folding upon itself.

  Sharon marched into the dorm. The corkboard out front said Arnie and Benji live here! in green cursive. She hadn’t noticed it yesterday, and now she had to laugh a little.

  “Good morning,” she whispered into the door, her head leaning in, the tips of her fingers holding the box of Dunkin’ Donuts like one of her servers holding a tray of canapés before heading out into the party. “Time to get up, sleepyheads!” She remembered her children then, little loaves of bread, so tender and young and also hers. She saw their red, wrinkled feet scissoring the air. They were delicious. They just had no idea.

  Sharon heard whispering and scuffling and drawers opening and closing, then she saw Ben’s big brown eyes and his long nose and his scruffy, just-woke-up curly hair through the crack of the barely opened door.

  “Mom?”

  Why was this so terribly confusing? “Yes, Ben. It’s your mother. I brought doughnuts,” she said, but it came out far more grimly than she’d intended.

  He opened the door, reluctantly if you asked Sharon, and stepped back from it. When she walked in, she saw Vanessa sitting up in Arnold’s bed, rubbing her arms.

  “You two spent the night together!” Sharon said, a little bit happy and, she couldn’t help it, a little bit jealous. “How nice.” She looked over at the desk on Ben’s side of the room, and after noting the impossibility of clearing a place for the doughnuts, she just set the box down on top of his papers and books, where it sat crookedly.

  “Where’s Dad?” Ben asked.

  Bedroom sets, dining room sets, sets for your porch and patio too! the breathless announcer screamed from the radio.

  “That sure is loud, can we turn it down?” Sharon asked, standing in the middle of the room.

  Ben walked over to Arnie’s clock radio, turned the volume down, then crawled back under the covers. “We just woke up,” he said. “Is Dad okay?”

  Sharon looked from bed to bed and rubbed her hands together. Something had happened there, she could tell. They were always good when something happened.

  “He’s fine,” Sharon said. “He just had to leave unexpectedly is all; something came up at work and he had to go early.”

  “That’s what that call was about?”

  Her hands hovered over the box of doughnuts. “Hmm, hmm,” she said, not knowing exactly what call Ben meant. Had she mentioned the early-morning phone call? “They’re still warm. The glazed ones were just out of the fryer when I got them.” She didn’t look at Vanessa when she said the word fryer, but instead picked up the box again and brought it over to Ben. She leaned down and opened the box, offering them to him.

  “Thanks, Mom.” He took a glazed one, the wet sugar glistening over the fawn-colored dough.

  She set the box down on the table between the two beds. She kicked off her shoes and pushed Vanessa over a bit, pulled back the covers, and slipped in with her jeans on. She put the enormous bear that Vanessa wasn’t holding at the end of the bed, and Vanessa put her head on her shoulder. Sharon tried to stay as still as possible, knowing that one sudden movement could make her daughter shift away.

  With sedulous care, Sharon brought the doughnut box onto her lap and opened it. There were three more glazed and two chocolate, a cruller, and two with spring-colored sprinkles, which she had pointed to at the shop even though no one ever ate them.

  “Want one?” she asked Vanessa, adjusting her neck so as not to jostle her.

  Sharon felt her daughter’s head nod against her shoulder, and then, without moving her head, Vanessa reached out and took a glazed doughnut from her mother’s lap.

  And now, Sharon thought, also taking a glazed, now I have chosen to love you. She felt snug and so near to her two children; how had she made such wondrous creatures?

  Sharon remembered her father as he’d been when she was little, his head full of chestnut brown hair, eyes twinkling, unaltered by impending fear, as he bent toward her on one of the few nights he had put her to bed. She had curled into the reverse V made by his arm and his chest like a humming cat, and he’d told her the story of the Snow Maiden. Sharon looked down at the daughter she had created, her left shoulder wet from Vanessa’s quiet tears, and her daughter’s youth seemed as ephemeral as a snow angel’s, just as hers had been. Her father’s low, rumbling voice had vibrated through her: The Snow Maiden listened to the song and tears rolled down her cheeks. And then her feet began to melt beneath her; she fell onto the earth and then she was gone, a light mist rising from the place she had fallen. The mist rose out of the earth and disappeared slowly into the deep blue sky. . . . It’s okay, Snegurochka, her father had assured her, brushing her hair back when she asked, But, Daddy, what had happened to her? She became part of the whole world, he’d said, poking Sharon’s heart.

  Sharon kept the box open on her lap as the three of them sat silently chewing the sweet, warm doughnuts in Ben’s dorm room, until the commercial was over and the news came back softly on the radio.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Cherry Trees

  As Dennis pulled out of the garage, he could hear the phone ringing and ringing, but he didn’t go back to answer it. He noticed evidence of spring splashed across the neighborhood; the border around the Farrells’ lawn boasted many tender buds pushing their way out of the well-tended soil. Soon there would be her red tulips and hyacinths and lilies of the valley. But Boston had still been cold. It had been a brutal winter, even by Washington standards. Even though all winter Ben had called with stories of snowstorms and blizzards when Maryland skies were clear and blue, surprising to Dennis, who thought of the East Coast as one long tendril of a region, its various states connected by the same stars and skies, its uninspired landscape and identical clime, it had still seemed bitterly cold.

  Two houses down, the Ellises had a patch of crocuses already framing the walkway by their front door, and a plot of young, bright daffodils by the ivy near the evergreen at the side of the lawn that gave Dennis a moment of jealousy; he wished he’d asked Zach to plant
something more than ground cover last fall. But having some kid create a garden seemed worse than paying someone to cater dinner and pretend you did the cooking. Could money buy everything? Well, yes, it seemed it could these days, but it couldn’t buy his appreciation. Dennis knew he wouldn’t value the seasonal transformations of a hired-out garden—in fact, he knew he would grow to resent even the most vibrant moments had he not done the choosing and digging and planting and watering himself, just like Roberta Ellis in her massive straw sun hat, kneeling into the soil, her green rubber clogs sticking out behind her ass like little squashed, smiling frogs.

  Turning off Thornapple and onto Brookville Road, Dennis noticed a car following close behind. Perhaps Gary hadn’t trusted him after all. He wished now that he were the kind of man who knew cars so that he would be able to note the type and the model, and that somehow this would illuminate the driver’s intention. It was black and shiny, he observed, which was the best he could do.

  He drove the exact speed limit of twenty-five down Brookville, making a full stop at every bloody stop sign, then sped up as he was encouraged around the Circle, and down Connecticut on the other side. Still the car followed him past the Szechuan Palace, where he and Sharon ate sweet spareribs and egg rolls on their second date, past the zoo, which he could never drive by without thinking of Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, gnawing on bamboo—gifts from the Chinese! he’d told Vanessa and Ben, who waited hours to see them tumble into view—then over the Taft Bridge past the little park where they were marching today either for a Free South Africa or for a Free Tibet, he was too distracted and habituated to these protests to tell which. The car still followed closely behind as he ducked under the tunnel at Dupont instead of driving straight, continuing on Connecticut until it turned into Seventeenth Street.

  Dennis reasoned that his route was the most central into the District, which must be why the car still trailed him as he passed Common Ground, at the bottom of the Circle. He thought to test his pursuer by getting out and going inside, and he remembered that man who had watched him from the back of the store, then followed so close behind as he’d left it. Or had he followed him into the store? Dennis hadn’t been watching then, he thought now, annoyed with himself. How could he not have noticed such a thing? Had this man been targeting him or targeting just anybody? It made all the difference.

  Stupid fucking feds, that store wasn’t even commie anymore; it was barely progressive. Once Sharon had gone to some women’s group meetings there, and even now as he remembered her heading out the door with her cloth bag, he pictured a circle of women looking at their vaginas. Now punk kids hung out there because they skateboarded in lower Dupont and because of what it once was, but all they bought was imported British music magazines and obscure poetry. He had seen Vanessa with a Common Ground paper bag—slim with a magazine—just weeks ago.

  Washington: such a drowsy weekend town, and today was no different but for the hordes of tourists pouring out of buses along Independence and fanning out onto the Mall. Dennis bypassed the buses, the Smithsonian to his right, that deep red house whose color he had tried for several classes to replicate in a painting during his Corcoran phase only to find it was simply burnt sienna, then he pulled up at Agriculture. He scanned his ID card in the little yellow machine and pulled into the garage. The shiny black car behind him idled by the curb, and Dennis watched the driver duck his head, perhaps to change the radio station, as the garage door came down the way it only did on weekends. Was he James Bond, climbing a wall between himself and his enemy? Or was he the bad guy getting away? Either way, he had been chased down. Breathing heavily by the elevators, he looked to his left, then to his right, and he found himself safe at last.

  Dennis stepped into the elevator and pressed 5 and thought of lifting Vanessa to reach the same button, just as he thought of Tatti lifting him up and up. Dennis would often sit at a typewriter at one of the old wooden desks in that tiny, chaotic office on the fifty-fourth floor and pretend to type letters. Dear Misha. He’d press random keys. He didn’t know the letters to spell yet, and it looked like a strange code. What’s this? Boris had said, coming up from behind and pulling the paper out of the platen. He had smelled like herring and Old Spice. Are you sending secret documents? Boris, that fraud, was too fat, and when he laughed, as he had then, spittle collected at each side of his mouth.

  Had Dennis ever reached the top of the Empire State? He didn’t think it was until twenty years later, long after CHORD had closed down because, Tatti had said, Boris had decided to try Hollywood instead. That was the last Dennis saw of him. He’d thought to invite Boris to his wedding, but his mother had laughed at him. He is long gone, she’d said. Dennis only got to the top of the Empire State Building when he took his own children, and his mother; and that was not until he was a tourist in the city of his birth. He had walked them around and around the tippy-top, pointing to where he used to live. There, he’d said. Where? His mother had looked over his shoulder. I’m going to be sick, she’d said, folding herself in half.

  Or was that his mother now, her arms crossed at her stomach, leaning in? Because she could certainly not be feeling well today. The elevator opened, and as he stepped into the hallway, Dennis thought that perhaps it was wrong to stop here, as it had not been indicated by Gary. He required nothing from his office; he had nothing there to hide. Yet he wanted to conceal everything, his entire person, as if he could bury these effects by taking them, make them unavailable to the men who might come looking.

  This was where he kept the Coronation Egg! he remembered now as he reached the office. When Sharon had threatened to throw it out with all the other tchotchkes from their travels—a replica of the Golden Gate, a silver spoon imprinted with the Eiffel Tower, matchbooks from Moscow, a lifetime of crud—he had saved it, cupping it in his palms and laying it down carefully in the passenger seat of his car, cradling it all the way up from the garage and into his office, where, lowering it down ever so carefully, he had set it in the bottom drawer of the file cabinet. It was a schlocky knickknack, Sharon had claimed, yet he’d had a powerful fear of breaking it. From some Russian five-and-dime, Sharon had said dismissively, and he had been amused by the image of this small-town American conceit set against a place that felt more like a strange planet than a country.

  No Glinda today, no more wishes, he thought, his heart seizing when he opened his door. Of course. Of course the men, James Bond or no James Bond, had already come. As he took in the complete disorder of the room, the mess of glass and dirt and dust and papers, he thought not of all the officious things he’d done here, but of the time, after a long lunch with Sharon at Dubliner’s on St. Patrick’s Day, he’d tried to have sex with her on the meeting table. He thought of his children at his desk, their feet not even touching the floor, and of his mother visiting—Sigmund had refused—and the way she scanned every part of the place, running her hands over the cabinets and shelves as if to brush away dust, or to make an impression with her own hands.

  It was difficult to make out what had been taken. Soon, though, as he went toward his desk, he could see that the Landsat images he’d been looking at last week had been ransacked, the locked cabinet in the right drawer of his desk thrown open, the useless lock broken. The framed photos that had lined his desk were turned over and several were on the floor. Dennis picked up one of Vanessa in profile, sitting on a decaying log fence at the farm in Skatesville, then one of Ben at Pierce Mill, the wooden wheel a whirl of motion behind him. Beside the desk, facing upward, the glass cracked, split from the center as if from a gunshot, was a photograph of Sharon—tanned and freckled, one hand on her hip and the other forming the V of a peace sign held up close to the camera, disproportionately large. He leaned down to pick it up, wiping the glass dust from her face.

  The three photographs Dennis had behind his desk on the radiator were missing. There had been an old picture of his father sitting on a ledge at City College eating a sandwich, still gesturing with his hands while his
mouth was full, and also a photo of his mother as a little girl, all bundled up for the cold, feet wobbling in ice skates. It was such a modern, candid shot for the era—who had taken it? Dennis had wondered many times when he had picked it up at his desk and looked into the little girl’s eyes, amazed that they were the same as his mother’s. Also missing was the photo of Tatti and Dennis, an image from over a decade ago, his mother reaching her hands out to her sides, a gesture to embrace the world, the Washington Monument rising behind her as if it were stabbing her in the back, and Dennis in profile beside her, clearly amused by his mother’s joy.

  All six drawers of the standing metal file cabinet were also flung open, most of its insides taken or tossed about the office, as were the few plants Dennis had set atop his cabinets and bookshelves that Glinda kept alive. The floor had a layer of soil flecked with white granules of fertilizer, and the files were torn open, clearly in haste, while some lay unhinged at the bottom of drawers. Dennis brushed the dirt by the file cabinet with his hands as he knelt down at the bottom drawer and peered in. The egg was not there. That fragile, breakable egg, as vulnerable as his mother, and the delicate carriage placed as if to pull it away. He tried to block out the sound of his mother’s voice: To carry the czarina, she told him, wiping the red hair from her face.

  The car resumed its place behind his as Dennis turned onto Independence. He checked behind him in the rearview, but instead of confirming his fears, he was instead distracted. The cherry trees were in full bloom! To his left, the banks of the Tidal Basin were filled in with soft clouds of light pink and white blossoms, the supple branches reaching out along the water in a motherly embrace. The round swelling of the Tidal Basin always seemed so warm and welcoming, unlike the rigidly rectangular Reflecting Pool, which stretched out long and lean across the way, regally impervious even when the Mall bulged with people. As impenetrable as Lincoln’s pool was, the Tidal Basin always held someone in its soft, forgiving waters, and today many paddle boaters—pretty girls with ribbons in their hair and fat children eating ice creams and old men in sandals looking up to Jefferson in his round house—all weaving in and out of the trees bordering Dennis’s view.