Sven’s band performed in clubs and toured fairs and campuses. May did not know whether this was success, but Renee seemed to think it was. He was not going to be famous, though, Renee said, her black eyes, with their smudged irises, flicking a little the way they did when she was thinking. No, there was a lid on fame. All the fame that was coming to the city had come already, bringing with it enough trouble in the form of heroin to hold the rest of them for years. I know about that, May would have said. Heroin was here a long time ago.
Still, Sven had a following. Brash, tinny voices—if not very little girls, then those who drew attention to themselves, May thought, by sounding like little girls—asked for Sven at all hours on the answering machine. If they were sitting in the lounge they could hear the voices when the message tape ran. Once May heard, “What the fuck? We waited all night. Listen, fucker—” before the receptionist cut it off. A little-girl voice. She hoped Renee had not heard that.
But Renee was not jealous. Sven was the jealous one. He did not like it when her ex-husband came by. He always put his arms around her after the husband left pocketing his loan—a man for Sven to pity, not worry about, in May’s opinion, though he was from Renee’s own town in Haiti and bore a trace of her handsome tired sweetness.
Once he had the little boy with him, Jean-Baptiste. Annette was “down,” Renee said, twisting her mouth in the angry despair she reserved for mention of her sister. The boy had the body of a stick figure and black eyes out of proportion to his head, like the bee illustrations. He had the small, thin face of his father, dark skin stretched cheekbone to cheekbone as if with thumbs. He was four. Renee knelt down and kissed all along his hairline. Of course money had to be found, for something so small and provisional, half shadow, without a root in life at all, it seemed. The husband jingled his change and held the spidery little hand loosely in his. It was this that Sven was jealous of. It was for this he wanted money, to lure both mother and son, May thought. To best the slouching, grinning father.
“That man—he believe in that stuff,” Renee told her. “That voodoo. His mother at home, she is mambo.”
“But it’s a religion like any other, isn’t it? Just misunderstood,” May heard her teacher voice begin in her head. Fortunately the voice was trapped and could not break out.
“That—spirits. Bad, bad,” Renee said, making a chewing and spitting motion with her lips.
Mambo, May thought. “Carrefour,” she said clearly, surprising herself.
“Carrefour,” Renee repeated, turning her mouth down but quickly adding, “That one, good some time, bad some time.”
Carrefour. A rogue form of the good spirit, the loa, in Haiti. Carrefour used the split second between life and death to decide which way you would go.
When you were substituting, you might find yourself teaching any subject. In her days as a substitute May had taught math, geometry, chemistry. When the geography teacher had her baby early, May had made her way through a whole semester showing films: she patched together a tireless, fertile, randomly celebrating globe. Terraced farming. Festivals of the Andes. Dances of the Caribbean.
In Haiti the loa took possession of the dancer. The capricious, infernal Carrefour, guardian of the crossroads, was he one of those? Was he a god, whose decision could intervene in that last split second? There was no way to ask Renee, and anyway Renee’s curved eyelids had dropped warningly, the way they did when Charlotte got going about Haiti.
Why did I always talk? May wondered. I never just sat there like Renee does. She felt a slow shock: what if all along there had been no need to speak?
The receptionist had chewed Sven out for that message on the machine. It was she who had tacked the picture of him to the bulletin board. May remembered jokes and threats between the girl and Sven in the winter, her pushing Sven out of the way with her hip as she dragged a cart of files backward into the office. Now she sulked in his presence or Renee’s, and reminded him of some requirement of Charlotte’s every time she handed him his schedule.
Sven brought in doughnuts the dietitian didn’t allow and magazines that had to be hidden. For Mr. Dempsey he brought Hustler, and comics that came, Renee said, from a section of the comic store roped off for adults. Dempsey wrapped the magazines in his sweater or had Sven stuff them in the vinyl pocket of the wheelchair. To the twins Sven gave the Enquirer and World.
But of course Nita and Nalda did not read; their days were spent in sleep and spying and play. They were not interested in other people—even, or especially, their own families—they were interested in the people they saw every day, a few of them, and in themselves. Mostly in themselves, maybe because they found themselves mysteriously doubled again, May thought, after a life spent apart from each other with two different husbands.
There must have been the germ of hysteria in them as girls, May thought. They would have been twin hiders, pouncers, eggers-on, before the duties of marriage came between them. They had had their share of troubles, both of them, but those, Nita’s daughter told Charlotte, had now been placed squarely in her, the daughter’s, hands.
They were a pair of kites now, up in the sky with the string played all the way off the spool. They didn’t look down to see their future in the Alzheimer’s unit the carpenters were dry-walling now, in the wing where rehab had been. They had sailed out past their own lives.
Yet they and she, May learned one morning, were grouped together in Charlotte’s mind, classified: the laughers. Renee told her that. Renee was sitting on the bed shaving away at May’s bad toenail with a razor blade. The nail had turned thick and yellow, and worked itself sideways into the toe so that it could not be cut. When she had finished with the nail Renee lifted May’s legs over the side of the bed and dunked the foot in a plastic basin of hot suds. “Get that one, let her play too.” May giggled, the dry foot obeyed.
Renee pointed at the twins’ door. “So, you see? Like Charlotte say-s, you and them, laughers.”
Thus May received Charlotte’s judgment. “Not like them, you,” Renee added quickly, glancing up. She patted May’s toe with a cotton ball soaked in witch hazel, and began that lulling, pleasantly deceitful singsong of hers. “You, now—pretty as Erzilie. Mm-hm. You know Erzilie? Pretty brown woman.” She patted May’s white hair. “Très smart. She like love.” Renee smiled. “She come from the sea.”
I’m not like those two, May said to herself. The twins had begun to slip mentally at about the same time, and been reunited here by Nita’s daughter, after considerable upheaval in the two families when they ceased to bathe. May had eavesdropped more than once on the daughter as Charlotte talked to her: “She still sits on the edge of the tub and pretends, unless Renee’s with her.”
“Oh! She was not like that, believe me. Oh! She kept things so nice!”
“Well, don’t you worry, we have her spic and span.”
What did it matter, really, if you bathed or not?
But obviously it did matter, to people still in the world; it mattered when a woman smelled, it mattered when matter was involved and everybody’s nose was being rubbed in it. Even here a humid, bacterial odor drifted from both twins if they sat by the radiator.
Or if it did not seriously matter whether you bathed, or whether you had the power of thought, what was it that did matter—if you were not a baby, of course, and were not to grow past this squalid idyll into a childhood?
What was the thing that mattered when nothing mattered?
“I ask this not out of discouragement,” May began with some formality, addressing herself mentally as usual to the mismatched knowing eyes of Mr. Dempsey, “but in hopes of an answer. Now, in class I had to be careful not to answer my own question.” And here she stopped, for what did she believe?
“Well, Dempsey won’t be back this time.” In the ferry snack bar Frieda sat tapping her hooked nails on the Formica. At the sound May felt her heart draw, like a glass going to the bottom of a dishpan. “Wrong,” she said angrily, but her knees began to knock un
der the table. She glared at Frieda, but that was what Frieda liked—attention.
With his hard fingers Sven was rubbing his eyebrows in circles against the large, overhung bone of his forehead, as if he had a headache. What was the matter with Sven?
He swung his long body out of the chair and away, his hair flashing yellow under the heat lamps as he passed the benches that faced the open deck. In the wind he put his arms out and grasped the railing, hanging his head down between his shoulders. A pleasure that was half pain flooded May as she watched him against the blue sky.
Well, that young man has cut a path into my heart. He has, Mr. Dempsey. You know how I am.
I’d say I do. That was how Dempsey would have answered, in a voice hoarse and tolerant, if he had had a voice. Where was Dempsey, was he alive? How heavy it would be if not, heavier than a dozen deaths closer to her, in recent years.
You’d have done the same, of course, Mr. Dempsey. We might have fallen for each other, if we were ourselves.
We might indeed.
You met my daughter. I met your son. My son—you know he died. Though she could not think how Mr. Dempsey would have been told about Nick.
I do. I know everything.
Frieda said, “What’s he say? Sven. Where’s he off to?”
“Going to jump,” May said. Lately she could get out these short sentences and be understood.
“Jump! Ach, God,” cried Frieda. “He can’t leave us on the boat.”
“Juh—kidding,” May said. She got up and pulled her sweater tight, determined to go out into the water-chilled air.
It was still early in the day. Very early Renee had come calling softly down the hall to waken them in time for the ferry. Even so they had been too slow, hurrying out across the wet flagstones after an early breakfast of fake scrambled eggs, getting the straps of their tote bags hooked in their sweater sleeves, and sending Sven back into the building after the sunscreen and Frieda’s insulin cartridges. Nita and Nalda were grumbling sleepily. Sven refused to make a third trip, for Nita’s Walkman. He was impatient, verging on angry, and hurrying them as May had not known him to do before. Renee was no help. Still in her guard’s uniform she was beckoning to Sven from the lounge doorway every time he went inside. Once she caught him by the arm but he shook her off.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter all that much,” Charlotte chided him. “Renee, would you bring us a quick coffee? And one for you too. It’s made, in my office. I know I said the early ferry, but let’s be loose. We’re going to see the bees. We’re going to have fun!”
“We said the eight o’clock.” Sven threw the last things into the back of the van without a glance at Charlotte. “Get in,” he said roughly to the last of them, the clumsy new man, Mr. Tower, and he tossed in Mr. Tower’s satchel and the back cushion he took everywhere with him.
Charlotte’s pink face peered into the van. She stuck her thumb up. “OK, folks, looks like we’re set.”
May grabbed for her.
“What, dear? Oh, Mr. Dempsey. He went to the hospital last night, I’m sorry to say. I haven’t heard yet. Aren’t you pretty today?” Charlotte had picked this up from Renee. She leaned in and fussed with May’s hair until Sven gunned the motor.
On the freeway Mr. Tower, the clergyman, who was not detached from worldly things, or restrained in manner, or even polite, not used to things at the center yet, began to complain that he did not have his knee brace. It had been with his bag. “I’m sorry,” Sven said. “I’m sorry.” He was driving very fast, but it didn’t matter because there was no traffic; they had three lanes to themselves. In the mirror he glanced at Tower hunched tight-lipped in the middle seat. “I mean it, Mr. Tower, I’m sorry. Charlotte will find it, she won’t miss a thing. Don’t worry.”
Even so, they raced up to the ticket booth too late, the ferry had not pulled away from the dock but all the cars had boarded. “Christ!” Sven said, and in the emptied lot he got out and slammed the door.
From the direction of the ticket booth a girl in khaki pants and shirt came running down the lot. Panting and angry she shoved a paper bag into Sven’s hands. Pills, the knee brace, something for the brother-in-law?—Charlotte must have sent somebody after them.
So they would have to wait, first in line for the next ferry. But no, Sven was jumping in, starting the van, letting up the clutch so fast they all lurched in their seatbelts. The ticket-taker in his neon orange harness was waving them over; there was room after all. They jolted onto the ramp and drove deep into the cavernous ferry, which was half empty.
Before they could get down from the van the ferry was under way, and before anyone could tell her not to, May went over to the chain being hooked by a boy in overalls to a pole in a socket, across the huge open car bay where the deck dropped off. She stood on the oily floor watching the water churn out behind them. Her hair blew all over her face and into her mouth.
It was that moment of elementary happiness when the land is left behind and the expectation fills you that something will happen, something has been greeted, joined, agreed to, something to free you. She felt that same bay yawn in herself, and her spirit swoop to the wide entrance and dip as if to drink.
“Come on!” From the stairway to the passenger deck the others were calling her faintly over the engines and the wind. She realized as she turned to follow them that she had been waiting weeks to smell the deep fishy cold Pacific water that ran into the Sound, and to hear gulls squawk, swiveling their heads to peer into the ferry as they banked on the offshore wind.
On the passenger deck she could feel the floor tremble with the steady grinding progress of the vessel. The ferry’s shadow rode on green water that had its own purple undershadow, and morning sun on the surface in a million loose rings.
Soon the wind let up and the water relaxed into larger, sliding rings, linking and unlinking. At a certain point the near water became the far, and at that point it was milled into kernels. Glorious water and sky. The sky was filled with very white scraps of cloud. Everyone should be breathing this air, everyone should be borne slowly upward and down, sitting at a table. But Charlotte had kept the child Jean-Baptiste from his ferry ride, caused Renee to fight with Sven before the sun was up, left her in the hall with her hands clasped behind her neck and her elbows drawn together in front of her mouth, a silver track on each dark cheek.
May did not go out onto the deck, because at that moment a man moved out from under the yellow light to Sven’s side and began to talk to him. The man had a young, dried-up, nervous face. He had on torn shorts and had not taken the trouble to shave, which caused May to dismiss her first idea that he was trying to pick Sven up.
The two talked at the rail while she stood undecided. She sat back down to get her breath. “It’s cold out there!” Nita ventured, and she and Nalda, just now fully awake, shivered elaborately. When May tried to prop her cane it fell on the floor. “Look at you!” Frieda said while she was bent over scraping to get it out from under the chair. Frieda snatched the cane up and presented it to her. “Now put—the wrist—in the loop!”
When May looked again the man was not there, so she wrapped herself in the sweater, pulled her hands inside her sleeves, and set off for the foredeck. The gulls were circling and fighting, diving after French fries someone had thrown over the side. Sven whirled. “May! What are you doing out here?” When she had sleeves, hands, and cane in order enough to get a grip on the rail, he said, “So—did you want some coffee? Careful,” and he took her arm. “Time for coffee.”
“No.” She jerked her elbow away. “Here.” She swayed.
Before she knew it, though, he had steered her back to the table with Frieda and the giggling twins, and closed her hand around a Styrofoam cup of very black coffee. She didn’t know what else to do so she took a sip and burned her tongue. “Oh Sve-yen!” cried Nita. “Where’s Renee?”
Sven was already heading for the deck. “Back at the ranch,” he called over his shoulder, unsmiling.
Lo
sing sight of him, May pulled herself up out of the chair. She had broken into a sweat, her weak leg shook. Who did he think he was? She was not going to be hauled back and forth against her will, she was going out onto the deck. She was going to please herself. Draw in enough sun and sky to last her the dark wet months.
“There she goes again,” Frieda screeched after her. “She’ll fall!”
By herself May could think and look, under the open sky that had turned a deeper blue. Fewer clouds now, just white puffs here and there like ducks on a pond. And real ducks—ducks were out in the middle of the Sound with them, diving under and when it seemed too late for them to have any breath left, far from where they had gone down, coming up through the shimmying, elongating rings. May tried to get her own breath.
Ahead you could see the Olympics. Below the forested slopes there was a land of meadows, hidden from sight. And Charlotte’s sister’s bees would be out all day in their thousands, out and back, stirring the flowers and massing in the inland fences overgrown with blackberry. Out and back. And the idea of coming back to rest, or for good, troubled not a one. A bee’s life of effort, of unforced, pitiless agreement. Yet how the bodies twitched, and whirled off, as if in a passion. She hoped they would see some of that on this trip. The message bringing and the shooting off in pursuit and the ecstatic burrowing, not just the boxed seething.
She was a rare thing, Charlotte would sing, off-key, when they came in to lunch after having their hair set. Fine as a bee’s wing.
Seven Loves Page 15