by Sally Mandel
Brian, unconvinced, pulled the shade down anyway, but prodded her to elaborate on her Peeping Tom experiences. She told him that the only diverting event she witnessed that didn’t emerge from the embellishments of her imagination was provided by a middle-aged couple who stood near their lighted window one evening, and, with a kind of ritual slowness, exchanged clothing with each other. When they had finished, the woman was wearing the man’s vested suit and he her flowered blouse and skirt—and her bra as well, which he stuffed with her nylons. Then they undressed each other and moved away from the window. Sharlie knew they would make love. She only saw this happen once, and sometimes wondered if she’d made up the whole thing. But no, it had happened, and it seemed to Sharlie a beautiful ceremony and somehow very touching.
This morning there was no one home across Brian’s tiny courtyard, and Sharlie chided herself for looking. The spectator impulse was deeply ingrained. She turned away from the window, stood in the center of the living room, and decided that today she would become a participant in life.
Bloomingdale’s. She would go to Bloomingdale’s. Her mother had always sniffed at the place, considering it the epitome of ostentation. After all those years of sedate shopping in boring Bonwit’s, she would strut down to Fifty-ninth Street and buy herself … what? As she scrambled out of her nightgown and into a skirt and sweater, she decided that one of the rules was not to foreclose any possibilities. Spontaneity, that was the theme of the day.
On her way out she wished the doorman a slightly embarrassed good morning, thinking he must know what she and Brian had been up to at seven A.M., newlyweds and all. When she was first learning about sex, she had been fascinated by pregnant women she’d pass on the street, staring at them and thinking, She did it. She had sexual intercourse with somebody, and there’s no way she can deny it. Sometimes the lady in question seemed so austere that it seemed impossible. But there was the evidence before everyone’s eyes in the extended belly and loose clothes. Some of those ladies must have been raped.
The main floor of Bloomingdale’s looked like Fifth Avenue on Easter Sunday. Sharlie stood at the millinery counter, trying on one hat after the other. She watched the parade pass by, wondering if anyone actually bought anything here or whether they all simply stopped by to stare at everybody else. In the contest between fashion and comfort, fashion seemed to win out every time. Women tottered past in toe-crushing high heels, stiff-kneed in the effort to remain vertical. Men with tennis sweaters and pancake makeup eyed one another over the cosmetics counter. Didn’t their mascara run during their singles matches?
Finally she wore out the supply of hats and rode the escalator up to the third floor. She passed through the designers’ section, heading straight for the blinking colored lights of a boutique called In the Wild, Secret Heart. An omen, she thought, I’ll buy a new dress for my heart. For Udstrom’s heart. She hoped he didn’t mind becoming a transvestite.
Hanging amid suspended velvet, plastic, satin, Plexiglas, and aluminum hearts were items her mother would hardly describe as clothes. Everything was brocaded or tassled—not at all the tailored understatement of the wardrobe Margaret had chosen for herself and her daughter.
I’ll look like my mother’s dining room curtains, Sharlie thought, choosing a lacy white-fringed dress. But when she tried it on, she was surprised at how attractive it looked. Radical, certainly, but pretty. She pirouetted in front of the mirror, enjoying the contrast between the dark sheen of her hair and the milky lace bodice.
Heavens, I’ll take it, she thought. Oh, God, Mother would hate it. She resisted the impulse to giggle and marched soberly back to the dressing room.
When Brian got home, she was standing in the kitchen with her hand on the portable mixer. She wore her new dress, and her face was flushed from the heat of the oven.
“Hi,” he said, leaning over to give her a kiss. “What’re you making?”
“Yorkshire pudding,” she said, looking at him with a distracted smile.
He peered into the bowl, his hand around her waist. Then, feeling the ropy belt under his fingers, he stood back a little, looking at her from head to foot. “What’s that, an apron or something?”
“No, it’s not an apron or something, it’s my trendy new dress from trendy Bloomingdale’s.”
“Oh,” Brian said. “Well, I’ll go change.”
“You don’t like it.”
“Well, it’s … interesting.”
Sharlie looked up at him briefly, still mixing. “What’s the matter with it?”
“I don’t know if it’s you, that’s all,” Brian answered.
“You only like me in my nice little tweedy stuff,” she said, irritation building in her voice.
“Tell you what, why don’t we shop together from now on, and we’ll get something we both like.”
“Hey, I’m a big girl now,” she snapped. “I can pick out my own clothes.” Her eyes were flashing.
Brian smiled at her. “What’s all—” he began.
“Freedom,” she interrupted. “Hey, look, I spent a lifetime trailing behind my mother in department stores, letting her put clothes on me as if I were her personal paper doll. I’m not going to start that all over again with you.”
“Sharlie, for Christ’s sake …” he said, staring toward her with his hand out placatingly. She backed away from him, unconsciously lifting the still-whirring mixer into the air like a weapon. The thin batter flew about the room, whirling and splattering against the walls, speckling their faces and clothes with pale-yellow droplets. They both stood paralyzed for a moment Then they looked at each other and began to laugh. Sharlie, still holding the mixer with one hand, pointing at Brian with the other, barely able to breathe from laughing.
“You … you …” she said weakly.
“Turn off the mixer, you idiot,” he shouted, but as he grabbed for it, she dipped it quickly into the batter again, reloading and held it above her head where he couldn’t reach. It splattered wildly, and he grabbed her around the waist, reaching behind her to pull the plug out of the wall. Then they collapsed against each other, laughing and smearing the mess into their clothes.
It wasn’t until they sat down to dinner much later, after a chastened Sharlie had scrubbed the yellow drops off the walls, that she said, almost surprised, “That was a fight, wasn’t it?”
“Gooiest argument I ever had,” he said, finishing off a slice of roast lamb.
“No, I mean about my dress.”
“Mmm, that was a fight,” Brian said.
“Sometimes I think I’m going completely insane,” she said. Brian suddenly looked up at her, wondering at the fear he thought he heard in her voice. “I was ready to kill,” she went on. “Over a damn piece of material.”
Brian reached out and took her hand. “There was Bunker Hill, then there was Gettysburg, and finally the Great Bloomingdale’s Batter Battle.” She smiled back at him, but he felt her fingers tremble.
She walked through a densely wooded area carrying a basket on her arm. It was an unfamiliar path, and she stopped to rest, sitting on a large rock that projected from a mossy bank. Suddenly she felt the rock begin to move beneath her. She stood up, startled, her basket falling to the ground, strewing flowers at her feet.
The granite surface shifted and writhed, gradually taking on the shape of a man’s face. The eyes were deeply hollowed, almost like a skull, but they followed her wherever she moved. The mouth twisted until it became a cave, and from its depths howled a scream of outrage.
She stood rooted to the ground with fright, unable to tear her eyes from the shrieking, tormented face. Finally, carefully, she stooped to gather the flowers. She drew back in horror. The pansies and forget-me-nots had turned to lumps of oozing flesh. Her fingers were stained with blood, and the more she wiped the grass to clean them, the gorier they became. She turned her back on the rock and began to run, and she could hear the voice behind her crying, “Mine … you are mine …”
She woke up trembling and pressed herself against Brian’s warm back. It took her nearly an hour to fall asleep again.
Chapter 46
Tuesday morning Sharlie waited for Brian to leave for work, and called Queens information for the telephone number of Mrs. M. Udstrom in Elmhurst. She sat for a long time trying to summon the courage to dial. She remembered lying in her hospital bed at Saint Joe’s working herself up to call Brian to thank him for saving her life. There was no use speculating what would have happened if she had never made the call. Would the numbers under her fingers at this moment precipitate a comparable upheaval in her life? Unthinkable, change of any kind. And yet not to make the contact left her poised on the edge of something forever unresolved.
The voice at the other end sounded tremulous. Suddenly Sharlie’s carefully prepared words fled. She gripped the phone hard and managed to stammer, “Mrs. Udstrom, I’m Charlotte Converse. I mean, Morgan.” She laughed a little with embarrassment and nervousness.
“Yes. I know who you are,” the voice said tonelessly.
“I would like to see you. Meet you,” Sharlie went on.
“Why?” asked Mrs. Udstrom.
“Oh,” Sharlie faltered. “Well, I think it would be nice…” Oh, my God, she thought. The woman’s son is dead, and I think it would be “nice.” “What I mean is, I would like to thank you.”
“Not necessary,” said Mrs. Udstrom.
“Oh, but it is,” Sharlie gushed, thankful that videotelephones were not yet the norm. Her face was so crimson and hot that she put her hand against her cheek to cool it down. She took a breath and tried again. “Mrs. Udstrom, I would really like to talk to you. In person. If you think it would be difficult for you, of course I won’t impose. But it is important to me.”
“All right,” the flat voice replied. They arranged a time, or rather Sharlie arranged and Mrs. Udstrom agreed.
The shabby frame houses on Twenty-sixth Avenue seemed deserted to Sharlie as she walked along the cracked sidewalk. She was grateful that she’d worn a pair of slacks. She shuddered, imagining herself waltzing into one of these sad homes sporting a designer dress whose every thread shrieked “privilege.”
She passed a clump of dusty gray trees surrounded at its base by a bouquet of litter. In front of Number 159, she stopped, staring anxiously at the peeling paint and the cellophane stretched over missing window panes.
Do I really want to do this? she asked herself. But Udstrom’s heart thumped steadily in her ears. She walked resolutely up the cinder block steps and knocked.
Mrs. Udstrom opened the door so quickly that Sharlie wondered if the woman had been watching out the window as she hesitated on the sidewalk. Sharlie tried to smile, but Mrs. Udstrom’s face was expressionless as she stood aside and said, “Come in.”
She led Sharlie to a tiny living room. A tea set had been laid out on the coffee table. The older woman took her seat on a stiff-backed chair and motioned to Sharlie to sit on the couch. Sharlie noticed that Mrs. Udstrom’s cup was chipped along the rim.
“Thank you,” Sharlie said, lifting her teacup. She helped herself to sugar, but her fingers had begun to shake, so she set the saucer down and folded her hands in her lap.
“Mrs. Udstrom …” she began tentatively, “I appreciate your letting me come.”
Mrs. Udstrom nodded. She wore a faded-blue dress—to match her faded eyes and faded, peeling house, Sharlie thought. Her face was fined and nearly as gray as her hair. She was a lean, bony woman, and Sharlie thought she must have been quite handsome before poverty and misfortune had worn her down.
“I want to thank you … for your son’s … for your son …” Sharlie began to blush. This was much more difficult than she had thought, probably a mistake altogether. How much of her impulse to come here had been the need to express gratitude and how much was a macabre curiosity about the mother of the stranger who had become so significant to her?
Finally Mrs. Udstrom spoke. It was the monotonous, flat voice Sharlie recognized from the telephone.
“I done my Christian duty, that’s all.”
“It was a wonderful thing. You saved my life.”
“I done what I had to.”
The statement seemed so final that Sharlie thought she should probably get up and leave, but Mrs. Udstrom sat stirring her tea and regarding her with pale eyes that were filmed with something indefinable. Grief? Exhaustion?
“Could I trouble you for a glass of water, please?” Sharlie asked reluctantly.
Mrs. Udstrom got up without a word and returned a moment later with the drink. Sharlie opened her bag and took out the ten-A.M. medication she had prepared before leaving the apartment. With Mrs. Udstrom watching silently, she swallowed nine pills and capsules, crowding as many into her mouth as possible in order to avoid being forced to ask for more water. She set the glass down, and still Mrs. Udstrom stared at her with complete disinterest, as if Sharlie had merely inserted herself temporarily into the woman’s sole line of vision.
“I’m sorry … about your son,” Sharlie said finally.
“He got what was coming,” the woman responded curtly. She saw the shock in Sharlie’s face and went on. “Giving you his heart’s the one decent thing he ever done, and that wasn’t none of his doin’, was it?”
“He was so troubled?”
Mrs. Udstrom’s mouth twitched in what Sharlie presumed to be the bitter remnants of a smile.
“That’s what they call it, do they, ‘troubled’? Well, he troubled me all his life. And it wasn’t that he didn’t get nothin’ at home. I sacrificed and worked, two, three jobs, day and night, housework, laundry, and anything so’s he got a clean shirt for school and somethin’ for lunch in his bag. And to keep this place.”
“His father?” Sharlie asked.
“Run off. Before Martin was born.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” She hesitated, then asked. “If you were working, what did you do with … your boy?” She couldn’t bring herself to say “Martin.”
“When he wasn’t in school, he come with me. Or stayed here.”
“By himself?”
“Now, who would I keep him with?” Her voice was tired, resigned. “Anyway, he liked bein’ alone. The other kids use to torment him so’s he’d shut himself up in his room, and I’d have to whip him to get him to school.”
Sharlie looked stricken, and Mrs. Udstrom continued, still without a trace of emotion in her voice. “He couldn’t talk right. Had this stammer. Oh, he didn’t say much anyhow, but when he did, it come out all stuttery. The other kids, they’d make fun.”
“How cruel,” Sharlie said.
Mrs. Udstrom shrugged. “That’s kids.”
She sat musing for a moment. “Martin, he went for a whole summer once without sayin’ more’n a word or two, and them you couldn’t hardly figure out.”
Sharlie was beginning to feel ill. Her head ached, and her stomach was queasy. She longed to get out of this shabby room, away from this woman who said such terrible things in a worn voice as if she were reciting her grocery list. Sharlie set her teacup down.
Mrs. Udstrom was gazing off into a dark corner. “But I kept this place. I did that.”
“Yes,” Sharlie said, hoping her urgent compulsion to leave wouldn’t come bursting out in a scream. She stood up, forcing her voice to remain level. “Well, thank you for seeing me. And for the tea.”
Mrs. Udstrom rose also. There was nothing in her face to indicate that she cared whether her visitor stayed or left. Sharlie walked deliberately toward the front door, resisting the impulse to run. She stopped at the threshold and tried to smile.
“Well … thank you again,” she said. Mrs. Udstrom nodded wordlessly, and after hesitating for another moment, Sharlie started down the steps. She heard the door click shut behind her and kept her stride under control just in case the woman was watching her. Then, safely around the corner, she began to run. She ran and ran, fur
ther and faster than she had ever been able to run in her life. A ten-year-old boy-shadow raced beside her, laughing and jeering and stammering her name.
Despite her exhaustion, she couldn’t go straight home. She took a cab to the Metropolitan Museum and spent almost two hours looking at Renaissance paintings, comforting herself with their classic order and their declaration of the civilized nature of humanity. She began to feel less distraught, and was able to think calmly about her interview with Mrs. Udstrom.
One of the astonishing things, she thought, was that the woman had never once inquired how Sharlie was doing. One wouldn’t necessarily expect solicitude, but certainly there would be a natural curiosity. After all, it was her own son’s heart beating across the teapot. If Sharlie were his mother, she knew she’d be straining all her senses searching for some hint of her child’s immortality in the recipient’s body. Mrs. Udstrom was a hollow shell, all the color bleached from her life, all vitality abraded away by misery. For such a woman there seemed to be no such instinct as curiosity. Only acceptance, a dull, grinding tolerance of everything that fell into her path.
Sharlie walked slowly through the Medieval Court and sat down to rest in the chapel alcove, imagining the face of Mrs. Udstrom’s tortured son against the shadows. She understood his childhood torment, felt their fates converge—her years of pain and his seemed to twist together into a pattern of shared anguish. Her heart, his heart, pounded, echoing in the dark chamber of the chapel room. She knew him now. This afternoon in that defeated house, she had stared into the past of a man whose heart she carried beyond death. She realized also that finding him had finally set her free. Udstrom’s life was over. Hers was not.