by Maria Flook
“Sure thing,” Tracy said. He wasn’t looking at them. Margaret wondered how much longer until he couldn’t stand it, but soon they stood up and went into the living room. There was little space to turn around. Franklin had ten-foot stacks of TV Guides and other periodicals. Hundreds of flattened, monotone detective journals in six or seven separate towers. Margaret liked the black-and-white illustrations: chiseled detectives, good girls in high-necked sweaters, bad girls with a little extra shading to show cleavage, gangsters in zoot suits. Margaret looked at a glass cabinet that displayed some rare Lone Ranger magazine covers; the illustrations were almost translucent. “God, you really do collect things,” Margaret said.
Franklin tugged a TV Guide from one of the precarious towers. “Want to know what’s on? March 10, 1959, 8 P.M.?”
“Sure.”
Franklin read a few listings. There was a show about President Eisenhower’s hometown and the rest were old Westerns like “Have Gun Will Travel.” Tracy sang the theme song: Paladin, Paladin, where do you roam? A soldier of fortune is the man called Pal-a-din. The melody was familiar and it sounded quite haunting; it summoned private memory, and the men shuffled their feet. Margaret pulled the hair away from her eyes and tucked it behind her ear. For a few minutes, Franklin quizzed Margaret with the TV Guide until she couldn’t identify the correct names of the actors on a mystery series.
“Never heard of it? Never caught the show?” Franklin said. He was smiling.
In the hallway, there was a large poster of a naked woman running across a stadium field. “That’s my streaker,” Franklin said.
“Your streaker?” Tracy asked him.
“One of the very first, at least the first one to be verified, documented. This was on the playing field at the University of Massachusetts. The funny thing is, I met this gal. I saw her come into the student union. 1971. I was just visiting, you know. Anyway, I recognized her.”
“It was her? How could you tell?” Tracy was holding his chin, studying the streaker, then he looked at his cousin Franklin.
“I recognized her right away from the poster. A real athlete. It was a thrill, you know, a kick,” Franklin said.
Cam was rubbing his mouth.
Tracy said, “Are you still doing that talk show?”
“I don’t do it anymore. I was on a few weeks, is all.”
“They canned you?”
“Before it got out of hand and became a scandal. The pink slip.”
Margaret’s eyes were very wide and Tracy blinked at her. She changed her expression.
“What kind of guests did you have on the show?” Margaret asked.
“Sports celebrities, writers, actors,” Franklin said.
“Really?”
“Of course they weren’t all star quality. They were local.”
“Oh,” Margaret said, “but I guess they were interesting. I mean, grass roots individuals can be fascinating, it’s your hometown scene, right?”
“Exactly, but they didn’t like my approach. I had an all-girl volleyball team on the show. I had them talking, it was great. The station couldn’t see the point.”
“What’s your line now?” Tracy asked.
Franklin said, “Plastic.” He sold plastic packaging to food industry manufacturers. “Two-ton rolls,” he told them. “They need a forklift with a hydraulic prong to lift them off the truck. My biggest account is for the plastic wrapping on dog-food burgers.” Tracy liked the description of the forklift, that would have been fine.
“You know, Dane Burgers? That cherry-red-colored stuff that looks like chopped meat, it’s loose? I sell the plastic packaging for that. I used to sell something altogether different—velveteen display boxes. You know, if you buy some earrings, they have that velveteen card? It was an interesting line. Anything looks good against velveteen. Put your potato peeler on a velveteen background and it’s called a Gourmet Implement. Put any item on velvet and presto! it sells for twice the price. That’s why it was a good product to handle.”
He walked into the little pantry and pulled out some drawers. He came back to Margaret and gave her some tiny boxes covered in red velveteen.
“These are velvet boxes?” Margaret said.
“There’s a difference between real velvet and velveteen. This stuff you’re holding is actually sprayed on. It’s this fuzz stuff, a plastic product; they just spray it from a gun right on to these little fuckers. Here, you can have these to keep.”
She couldn’t hold all the little boxes and she tugged out the hem of her shirt to catch them.
Cam was smoking a cigarette. He found the pack on the edge of a chair and Franklin gave him a light. “You smoke in this apartment, you’ve got yourself a fire,” Cam told Franklin.
They decided to try to get some sleep and Franklin came back with a good selection of pillows and sheets, some flannel blankets. Margaret went away and came back. “There’s no door on the bathroom.”
“That’s correct,” Franklin said. “The door’s in the basement.”
“It’s in the basement? Can’t you go get it? Why is the bathroom door in the basement?” she asked him.
“A long story. It’s an old house. It swelled. I had to plane the door, but I planed the wrong end. It’s taking some time.”
Margaret looked at Tracy. The bathroom was set right on the living room, there was no way she could sit on the toilet with any privacy. Cam was stretched out in an overstuffed chair in the corner, leafing through a magazine called Corrupt. Tracy took Franklin into the kitchen so Margaret could use the bathroom without him watching. She turned on the shower first and she kept her eyes on the doorway as she sat down, on her hands. She’d rather her hands touched the strange seat than her buttocks. Next, she pulled off her clothes and got into the shower. She didn’t want to touch anything and she stood in the middle of the tub avoiding the stained vinyl curtain when it billowed toward her. There was a bar of soap dangling on a knotted cord. She had to make a decision about using the soap or leaving it where it was. She lathered herself and the wet cord slithered over her belly, her thighs. Then she heard someone come in there. “It’s me,” Cam said, “I’m using the toilet.”
She started to hum a few notes to let him know she was indifferent, she wasn’t listening to him urinate. Then she wondered if he could see her behind the shower curtain like in those Rock Hudson movies when Doris Day was always toweling off behind a dressing screen.
“That Franklin guy is weirdsville,” Cam said, and he walked out. She saw how Cam was picking up some of Tracy’s speech. She never heard Cam say “weirdsville.” He never used that suffix. This was new, for better or for worse.
Even if this Franklin was peculiar, he was gentle and a good host. He made sure they had pillowcases and he brought them a box of FiddleFaddle in case they were hungry. Cam picked up the box of caramel corn and studied it as if he had never heard of such a thing. Then it was the three of them in the dim parlor crowded between the stacks of magazines, the cabinets of assorted Troll dolls and Buffalo Bob figurines.
“This place could spook somebody,” Cam said. Again, Margaret noticed his talk: “Spook” was not a verb Cam used; it was more like Tracy to say he was “spooked.” Then she saw how she was so tired, her thoughts were spinning, these random words didn’t mean anything. The entire floor space, what little there was, was completely utilized. Tracy was lying one way, Cam was going in the opposite direction. Margaret was in between and she knew she should put her head down next to Tracy’s, but there was a giant wood spool in the way. It was for electric cable or something. She could have moved the spool but it was covered with bric-a-brac.
“What’s the matter?” Cam said.
“I’m figuring out where to sleep,” she said.
“It takes a while to get her to sleep,” Tracy said. “She usually sleeps with an electric clock, did you know that?”
“Get away—like a puppy?” Cam said.
Margaret said, “No, not like a fucking puppy! It’s the
ringing in my ears, the clock drowns out the ringing.”
“It’s those coffee beans,” Cam said. “Caffeine makes your ears ring.”
“Then she has to have her sodium pentothal injection,” Tracy said.
“Are you kidding?” Cam said.
“Margaret has insomnia, so I stick her ass with ‘the secret needle.’ She can’t sleep until I stick her.” He reached over to Margaret and pinched her buttocks. “Or, I pretend to shoot her in the head with my index finger. First, I attach my silencer.” Tracy closed his fist to make a gun, then he screwed something to the tip of his pointer.
“Why don’t you just take a sleeping pill?” Cam said.
“Can you mind your own business,” she said. When trucks went by on the street, the magazine stacks shivered. They might get buried alive, but Margaret was exhausted, and she let her head fall back on the pillow. She was lying perfectly still between the two men. The floor wasn’t so bad, it was a good feeling after all the driving. She might have curled toward Tracy, but she didn’t want to exclude Cam. Cam favored a hip on the hard floor, shifted his weight nearer.
Cam said, “You ever have a dream about falling? Sometimes I’m falling, I’m falling off a cliff in the Duster.”
“That’s the most common kind of dream,” Tracy said. “If it’s happening in an automobile, it’s a contest between the subconscious and the superego. You know, the vehicle versus the driver. Any other passengers? No? Freud says these falling dreams are directly connected to when you were a baby and your dad pitches you in the air and catches you again. You go up in the air and you come down, plunk, but you’re always caught, you land in your father’s arms.”
“Cam’s father never threw him in the air,” Margaret said.
Tracy said, “Every baby gets thrown into the air. It’s a rite of passage. Cam got thrown in the air, believe me.”
“It didn’t happen,” she said.
Her muscles loosened toward sleep. She felt both weighted and freed in an early dream and then she saw it. Across the room, it glowed, a fleshy figurine impaled on the brass finial above a lampshade—a Kewpie doll. The sun was just rising, its rosy light concentrated in the rubbery figure. The doll’s queer smile looked worn, almost erased, but she could make it out—an indented line cheek to cheek. It had a submerged presence like the picture of the fetus on the chandelier. Margaret sat up.
“What is it?” Cam said.
She rested her forehead against her knees.
Tracy stood up. He saw the doll. “This is it, this little thing.” He removed the doll from its perch. “It struck a nerve,” he told Cam. “She’s not over it yet. She’s not dealing with it.”
“The abortion?”
“It’s taking forever, most people are over it by now.”
Cam told him, “Some people don’t find it so easy.”
Tracy wedged the Kewpie doll behind a crowded bookshelf. He kneeled beside Margaret. Cam touched her shoulder.
She shrugged away from them. She didn’t want to be coddled. “Shit! I’m just tired. How many miles was it?” she said.
“Plenty,” Tracy said.
“It was a long way,” Cam said. “It’s the picture on the chandelier, it stays with you.”
“Your family’s crazy,” Tracy said.
They settled back on the covers and tried to rest. Tracy took Margaret’s hand and bit her fingertips, playfully, traveling up her arm. She liked the sensation of his mouth against the surface veins on the inside of her wrist. It reminded her of a baby’s suck. It made her think of nursing her baby, all babies, all over the world. It was a longing that some women carried to the grave. The multiparous nipple is a dark, ginger circle, emblem of instinct, its erectile capacity mirrors the male; milk shoots across the room. Across the sky.
Margaret had once known a girl who was born with some extra nipples. Sometimes this might happen, nipples appear along the milk line anywhere from the underarm on down to the high ledge of the hipbone. The girl was having her extra nipples surgically removed, but Margaret always thought it was a mistake to have plastic surgery. There might be something lucky about being born with this fertile sign.
Her thoughts took a possessive drift through her daughter’s early years—then she saw the clinic ceiling. Margaret had her abortion at the Amelia Earhart Women’s Center, a health cooperative managed by lesbians devoted to physical fitness and volunteerism. The workers wore white smocks above Spandex exercise tights. Margaret waited for her turn with the doctor. She sat beneath a giant portrait of the famous flyer, who looked more like a parking-lot attendant in grey overalls. Margaret looked across the coffee table strewn with an assortment of female body-building magazines and she saw a teenaged girl from out of town. The girl had discolored teeth and her hands were mottled. Margaret heard the clinic nurse say the word “scabies.” Margaret studied the rash on the girl’s hands. It was sad, the girl being afflicted with scabies and then this.
When they called Margaret’s name, she walked into a room and recognized a dermatologist who routinely visited the prison where Margaret worked.
“It’s you?” she said to the dermatologist.
“I don’t just pop pimples,” he told her.
The clinic attendants steered her over to the narrow table, and she sat face to face with the doctor, who explained his dual role in medicine. He said he wore “many hats.”
“I guess the pimple business is slow?” she told him, but she fell back on the rubberized pillow. She rested her forearm over her mouth rather than over her eyes. She waited for the doctor to remove the particle of flesh. It happened in two or three steps, a severe gradation of pain, then it was over. But what of its source, that stinging complexity, the nature of “being,” which she still could not fathom? Did that speck cling, suture itself to her from its own desire? The doctor continued to speak of the prison, their mutual acquaintances, the inmates’ skin tags, prickly heat, moles, carbuncles. Was he really saying these things?
At home, she embraced Celeste, and her daughter returned the snuggling until it went on too long and she pulled free. Tracy told Margaret, “Don’t think of it as someone. It’s not anyone.” To Margaret, these pronouns were wrenching.
That night she went drinking with Tracy but the whole Amelia Earhart softball team arrived at the same bar in bright uniforms, cheering victory slogans. Margaret recognized the woman who swabbed her vulva with Betadine, and there was the woman who, at the end of the procedure, removed the canister for inspection, searching for the purple wedge of placenta like a bit of blackened tripe.
The next day, she hoped to feel nothing, to forget it. Then, the radio announced a partial eclipse of the sun.
“Can you believe this?” she said to Tracy. She knew there was a connection. That afternoon, the sky greyed. It was unlike the warm half-darkness at dusk or the translucence at daybreak. Shadows evaporated, buildings were blotted dry of definition. She watched the sun until a red-brown disc, a mask of tissue, merged with the blinding circle. Did Tracy see it that way, that half-coagulated blur that moved over the sun? Why should she make him see it her way?
She closed her eyes and saw two steady torches. Then her eyes adjusted. Margaret had heard about Japanese women who were blinded by the harsh sights of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They didn’t become blind in the usual sense, they suffered no physical injury to their eyes. After the A-bomb, the subconscious lowered a grey curtain. It was a gift, the women said. Physicians and psychiatrists were intrigued by this phenomenon; they tried, with varying success, to coax these women to see, but they were met with refusals.
Sometimes Margaret started laughing, a tearing laughter that snagged through a web of congestion in her lungs.
“It’s going to take a while,” Tracy told her, but he was over it.
III
Before they left Franklin’s house, Margaret telephoned her ex-husband, Phil, without mentioning to him that she was halfway to Chicago. She just wanted to talk to Celeste. Her ex-husband w
as in the middle of a game of Dungeons and Dragons. He refused to put Celeste on the telephone at this critical moment in the game.
“Excuse me?” Margaret said. “You can’t put my daughter on the telephone because you’re doing what?” Her husband had always used these commercialized fantasy worlds to evade her. During their marriage, he had arranged and catalogued increasing stacks of science fiction paperbacks at his bedside. From her pillow, she saw book covers depicting pocked moons, red-eyed snakes and reptiles, oversexed Amazon Venusians. At New Year’s, he reread the Hobbit trilogy and went to the national convention. He tried to initiate Celeste; each blithe suburban ritual was concluded with a bedtime reading from one of his fantasy manuals. Phil’s taste for dwarfs and dragons seemed peculiar coupled with his ongoing homeowner’s odyssey.
Tracy said he understood the profile. “The American gentry live in a void. The climate is freeze-dried. Phil depends on these subterranean civilizations to fill an intellectual vacuum.” Yet, Tracy couldn’t find the right comment when last season Phil boasted to Margaret, saying that he had actually used his sci-fi collection to weatherproof his split-level against the New England winter. Phil had distributed his paperbacks on shelving against the north walls, floor-to-ceiling, adding a thermal resistance factor of R 11.
“I’m calling back in an hour,” she told her ex-husband. “Celeste better pick up.”
Then she called Elizabeth. Margaret told Elizabeth it was unavoidable. Cam was doing what he had to do. Elizabeth asked her why they were stirring things up, why didn’t they leave the past the past? Why didn’t they just try to accept it? Margaret cleared her throat and shifted her tone to enlist Elizabeth to her side. She said, “You know Cam—you know Cam, don’t you?” There was silence on the other end of the line, as if Elizabeth were considering all the years since she birthed her one boy.
“Yes, I guess I know him.” Elizabeth’s voice sounded frail one minute, sharp the next. It was often this way.
One time, Elizabeth was leaving the house to go to a banquet and Margaret noticed that her stepmother had forgotten to smooth her makeup. There was a smear across her upper lip, a heavy stroke of beige foundation. Margaret saw the flawed makeup and wanted to take a handkerchief and dab at the smear until it was blended. She took Elizabeth by the sleeve and they looked eye to eye. There was something in Elizabeth’s face, a distance that could not be overtaken, some denial of their intimacy, their connection, and Margaret could not touch up the Max Factor or cleanse that helpless defiance from Elizabeth’s mouth.