How to Fall

by Edith Pearlman

  She clicked the slides. Three sentences per slide was a satisfactory tempo, but sometimes she speeded things up. “There are two diseases commonly associated with starvation.” Gassem, lying on his cot. “In marasmus, the torso swells while the limbs waste.” Reynante, hooked to an IV. “In kwashiorkor, the body develops open sores. Children impassively allow flies to land on their sores.” Tiny Asha, who in fact had recovered and been sent home, permanently dulled, on the back of her father. “The parents of these afflicted children, though familiar with death and in particular with infant mortality, still feel, much as we would, that they are letting their offspring down.” Frances Masmanian’s eyes were hot. “But of course it is we who are letting them down, we whose overconsumption is malnourishing the world. Did you know that the average North American consumes five times as much grain as the average third-world person, much of it in the form of meat, chicken, and eggs? That we foolishly nourish our cattle on this useful grain instead of on greenstuffs that humans can’t eat anyway? When I see red meat on the tables of Americans, I want to puke.” She wouldn’t puke much around here, thought Marty; he and Judy got high on soybeans and fish. “Of course, people avoid the more wasteful foods when they give parties for the Organization.” Judy, who served the same delicatessen fare to everybody, even Marty’s chief, nevertheless bowed her head. “Of the two,” said Mrs. Fenton, showing a hideous picture of a pair of adult sufferers, “marasmus is the more heart-rending, kwashiorkor the more repellent. It is hard not to shudder,”—the suggestible Marlene shuddered—“but whether we shudder in compassion or disgust is difficult to tell. I myself am continually disgusted,” she said with momentary agitation. “Here’s our refectory,” she said more calmly. “That’s my best friend in the pith helmet,” she said, glad that the show was nearly over, aware that, once again, she had been on the road too long.

  Judy’s sympathy shifted from the victims, who were pictures, to Mrs. Fenton, who was suffering right here in their house. Perhaps later that evening she would invite Mrs. Fenton into the little sewing room. The children always felt soothed there. Mrs. Fenton could talk—her looseness would be appropriate, even helpful, when they were alone together—and Judy would listen, listen . . . Now all she could do was help her guest bring the presentation to an end.

  “We have been criticized for speaking so much about the worst.” The front door slammed. The Satterthwaites, elaborately tiptoeing, hung up their own coats. “And indeed at the Compound where I work there is much that is serene, even happy.” A rapid succession of slides: women wearing bright garments, children playing games in the mud. “The staff isn’t a band of angels by any means. And the victims of misfortune are not better than other people. Our patients can be sly, malicious, ungrateful. Often they smell.” Often I hate them. “Also they can be merry.” Also I hate you. She pushed irritably at a jammed slide. The screen revealed its next-to-last picture: the Reverend and his patients’ chorus. “But we must speak more of the worst than of the good, because otherwise it is impossible, impossible,” and here her already harsh monotone became yet more harsh, “to move people to give us money. I have come to ask for contributions, as you know. If I could,” she rasped, “I would turn you all upside down and shake you until bank books came out of your mouths. For you are, you know, greedy, selfish, and unChristian.” Judy wondered whether now was the moment to intervene. “Just as I am.” Marty was sorry the bourbon was in the other room. A snort might calm the lady down. “I too am sinful. I am large; I embrace multitudes. I would not try to induce guilt.” Damn right, thought Paul Winokaur, who every day retarded the spread of cancer in numerous patients. “I am begging.” Marlene Winokaur felt herself blush.

  A long pause. Then Mrs. Fenton’s voice continued. “Before we rise to enjoy the Greenglasses’ repast, here is the final slide. This boy was perhaps three.”

  He was crying. Because he was crying, his lids were lowered, and the usual compelling sight of a pair of large eyes was denied to the viewers. His head was bald. Probably shaved, thought Marty Fox. He thought of the parasites that infest the scalp, and then he thought of the ones that make their home in the organs: the trematodes, the nematodes . . . The small boy’s open, unhappy mouth could have been any youngster’s mouth, or, at least, any black youngster’s; despite malnourishment, the lips retained their Negroid fullness. Marty took note of that. But it was not so much the desolate expression that made the child an effective emblem of deprivation (his picture had already been chosen by the Organization for next year’s poster) but his arms. Oh the sticks. Marty kept examining them. The room was silent. God had not meant arms to attain such a disarticulated state. The joints were still sizeable, though. Marty was reminded of a tinkertoy. The fists . . . the fists pressed against the temples. You could feel the despair. The child’s knuckles touched his forehead. It was a universal gesture. Thus have old men grieved for their ruined houses of worship, their conquered cities. Thus grieved the little schwartse, for his life.

  Judy thought: we are not so bad. But Marlene thought: we are wrong, wrong. Paul Winokaur endured a moment of panic when he couldn’t find his wife’s tousle of hair, but then he saw it, all filaments, against the whitening walls (Marty Greenglass née Fox was turning on the lights). At that moment, Marty could have renounced the world. Frances Masmanian did resolve to do just that. And though with time their passion weakened and their resolutions faded, they never forgot their feelings on seeing the little boy, nor were their contributions to a variety of relief associations ever less than generous.

  The pledges to the Organization that night were large, and the conversations during sandwiches and wine subdued. One woman—the woman who had scratched the movie screen in order to liberate the image within—was unable to talk or eat at all, even when she saw Mrs. Fenton tucking into a turkey-and-Russian. Bill Masmanian agreed with the man who, indicating Mrs. Fenton with his thumb, remarked that lofty ends may rely on low instruments. It was, after all, an old truth.

  A newer truth did occur to Bill. It had to do with all these kindly and generous friends of his, who did not conspicuously consume, who did wonder about the nature of the good life, who gave time and money, feelingly. Hell gapes for the merely empathic: that was what Bill was beginning to think. But since there was no typewriter handy to release its opinions on the matter, Bill lost hold of the idea before the evening was out.

  Trifle

  Pinky was making the trifle this week. Trifle was the only dessert offered on Thursday nights. It was expected, smiled at, disregarded. The meal itself drew customers to The Local—the soup, the salad, the main dish, the cheese, the wines. And then, at the end of the repast, patrons idly consumed a bit of trifle with their coffee—“real coffee,” Marvin called it.

  About the trifle, Marvin said to Pinky during her first week at The Local, five months ago—well, he stocked the best rum, the freshest eggs, the thickest cream, and homemade jam. He allowed cakes to dry out. But the trifle remained not quite loved. “Like an orphan,” Marvin said.

  Pinky looked up from scrubbing a pot. Could he be alluding to her? But no, he was pressing his thumbs onto the cake, assessing its degree of staleness.

  Anyway, Pinky wasn’t really an orphan. She was a half-orphan at most, and she couldn’t be sure even of that. Her father’s name was unknown, but that didn’t make him dead. He was a number on a folder and some recorded attributes. Caucasian, five feet eleven, without inherited defects. Free of disease, at least on the morning he had donated his sperm. But who knew, maybe he had picked up some slow organism the very next day. Maybe he was dying in agony right this minute; and she, his daughter, was not at his bedside, did not even guess that he was gasping for air. He had been twenty at the time of the donation, a graduate student in Physics. Perhaps he was still a graduate student—he’d be thirty-eight now, they often haunted their departments for decades, doing lab chores and growing wispy beards. She’d seen them at coffee shops near her old home in Providence, Rhode Island.
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  But maybe Jerkoff had earned his degree after all. Maybe he was working in a lab close to her present home in Godolphin, Massachusetts. Godolphin called itself a Town but was really a leafy wedge of Boston. One noontime he’d walk into The Local in search of an omelet. Or he’d hear of Thursday Nights when the daytime bar and café morphed into a Restaurant. He’d make a reservation; and he’d come in, a little late; and Pinky would serve him, and someone would note the resemblance, and . . . But he was tall, at least according to the form he’d filled out. So why was she was only average? Had he lied about his height?

  That was her father—a sociopath.

  Her mother? Both of her mothers? A pair of lanky opinions.

  One of them, Paula Pinkerton, was a pharmacologist. The other, Mary Kelly, provider of the womb, was a pediatric nurse.

  Pinky had abandoned them the day she turned seventeen. She didn’t go far; Godolphin was only fifty miles from Providence.

  I want to live where nobody knows me [she wrote]. You’ve got to understand. I don’t hate you. My post office box is 105446. Don’t come after me. I’ll write every week. I don’t hate you.

  We wouldn’t dream of coming after you [they wrote back]. Self-actualization is our watchword. We’ll send refills of your Ritalin to the post office.

  Pinky had stopped taking Ritalin a year ago. Coffee worked much better. For awhile she had sold the pills in downtown Providence; later she simply flushed them down the toilet.

  In Godolphin she checked into the Y.

  She found The Local five days later.

  On that warm October day the glass doors had been detached from the central post and folded back into two gleaming accordions. The brass tables were square and the small bar curved. She examined the menu—sandwiches, salads, omelets.

  At eleven in the morning there were three patrons, alone, each chewing behind a newspaper.

  Pinky leaned against the post.

  A man with an abundant mustache—graying blonde, like tarnished gold—was putting condiments and napkin holders on unoccupied tables. He retied his white apron and began to sweep the floor. He nodded at Pinky without speaking. The door into the kitchen was open; no, not open, there wasn’t a door at all, just an archway. Pinky saw a sizeable shoulder in a white tee.

  She had already been turned down by a dozen nondescript restaurants who didn’t need anyone at the moment thanks leave your name. She had conquered her distaste and marched into the Women’s Bookstore and Café. “Too late, the position’s filled,” sighed the proprietor. She had failed to find employment in an organic Undermarket. (“As opposed to Super,” the manager explained.) She’d been snubbed by a Cigar Bar downtown. “Too young,” the interviewer said, but too chunky was what he meant: face too round, and those eyebrows like awnings . . .

  The man with the mustache was still sweeping.

  In the kitchen the shoulder moved again; then a buzz cut came into view over a heavy Asian face; then the whole organism disappeared.

  “Can I help you?” said the man with the mustache at last.

  Pinky swallowed. “You can give me a job.”

  He looked at her kindly. “We are four people—Inez and I and Kazuki the Chef and Fogg the Bartender. Those titles are mainly for tax forms. Everybody does a bit of everything. Four is sufficient for our enterprise.” After this long-winded refusal he leaned on his broom. “What do you cook?”

  “I wasn’t aiming to cook, really. Washing up, waitressing, busboy stuff, that’s all. Though I do know how to mix a lot of drinks.”

  “And what do you know how to cook?” he persisted.

  “Okroshka, radish pie,” she said fast. “Eels, lots of ways.” She thought with sudden dismay of the oven at home; its door probably hadn’t been opened since her departure. Half-empty Chinese cartons stood on the counter... “Tomato baked with maple,” she resumed. “It is an unusual dessert.”

  “Our dessert is trifle. We make the jam ourselves.”

  “I’ve made jam.”

  But he was no longer listening to her. “The trifle is necessary but incidental.”

  She attended silently.

  “We used to be five,” he said.

  Pinky inhaled.

  “We could be five again.”

  She held her beath.

  “What’s okroshka?”

  She exhaled. “It’s a Russian soup. The recipe calls for cooked chicken, mustard, fresh dill, fresh or dried thyme, and Kvass. Did I mention cucumbers? I usually substitute sour cream and white wine and a little stock for the Kvass. The recipe also calls for pickles, but I only put them in when it’s just we three eating. Guests tend to pucker.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen. Do you want to see my birth certificate?”

  “No. Where do you get your eels?”

  She told him about the eel ranch in Rhode Island. He was interested also in her apricot chicken and her okra with figs. “Mostly, though,” he warned, “you will serve and wash up, just as you offered. Okroshka—a witty name whatever it means.”

  “It means hodgepodge.”

  He smiled. “And your own name?”

  “Pinkerton Kelly. I’m called Pinky.”

  They shook hands. “Marvin Fiore. I’m called Marvin. And this”—he extended his hand toward the sidewalk—“is Inez.”

  Inez entered with assumed shyness—for who knew, she said to Pinky later; Pinky might have been a representative of the Health Department in schoolgirl drag. In that case Inez would have managed to sidle into the kitchen and, once there, raise the trap door and clamber down the metal stairs into the basement and sweep away the mouse droppings. “Of course we have mice,” she laughed. “Our beloved comensils.” Her laugh erased the scar on her chin. When she wasn’t laughing the scar looked like a curve drawn deliberately to emphasize the chin’s perfection. Pinky looked and looked away; she’d been taught not to goggle at people’s unconcealable flaws or at their unconcealable loveliness.

  Inez carried a basket of leeks. Her eyes were pennies. Dark curls were silvered here and there. Only the scar interfered with her careless beauty; the scar and also the crooked upper teeth, too many of them, forced to slant backwards into the mouth. The large straight canines looked like fence posts. But her smile was warm despite the unruliness within, or maybe because of it.

  “This is Pinky,” said Marvin. “Our new associate.”

  The trifle didn’t require the oven. It did require the whole of the supplemental refrigerator, a box the height of a bedside table, the kind of thing that college kids used for beer. This refrigerator had been bought especially for the trifle, though it was home also to Kazuki’s insulin and the breast milk for Fogg’s infant child. Fogg had to bring the baby to work whenever his wife, a hospital chaplain, was on call. Sometimes this happened on a Thursday night. The child had a name, but everybody followed Marvin’s example and called him Blessed Event. Blessed Event usually slept placidly in a wicker basket underneath the bar, but sometimes he did wake up; then someone would plunge the bottle into a cup of very hot water, and then whoever was least in demand would feed the little fellow—Fogg himself, or Marvin, or Inez, or Pinky, or Kazuki; occasionally a trusted guest took on the job.

  The trifle was made in two stainless twenty-portion pans. Now Pinky put them side by side on the wooden trestle table. She pressed cake into the bottom of the pans. She poured on rum. She opened the glass preserving jar. The purple jam shivered.

  Trout—forty of them currently occupied a wooden ice chest—patiently awaited Kazuki’s attention. Tomatoes, now in a basket, would soon offer their smooth cheeks to Inez’s knife... “Know what I think?” Pinky said to Marvin, who had put on his quilted vest and taken chopping board and onions onto the back porch to avoid scenting the trifle.

  “What do you think?” he amiably asked.

  “I think God created potatoes on behalf of our Patate in Tegame.” She spread jam on top of the soaked cake.

  “You are a sentimental
goose,” he replied. “Goose, goose—shall we do a goose one of these days?”

  “Oh, Lord, yes, with prune dressing.” Her mind skidded helplessly back to the Christmas before last; meanwhile she dropped custard onto the layer of jam, spoonful by spoonful. Her mothers had given a holiday party for twenty people. She had roasted a goose. “You have a rare talent,” said one of the guests, rising from the crowded table and lifting his glass, his dyed hair greenish under the cruel light of the chandelier. “Pinky we love you,” and he probably did, they probably all did, those couples, some tender, some uneasy, some disappointed . . . She was still covering jam with custard. “My parents are embarazo grande,” her best eighth-grade friend Evangelista had once confessed. “Five years in this country, maybe fifty words of English. Yet they’re muy intelligent,” she added fiercely, as if Pinky might suggest otherwise.

  “The custard is depleted,” said Marvin. “You are spooning air.”

  Pinky stored the two pans of trifle in the little refrigerator. This past Christmas she had feasted with Marvin and Inez and the others in their narrow brick house just on the border of Boston. On holidays and Sundays the staff always gathered for supper at the Fiores’. Attendance seemed to be one of the terms of employment.

  On Sundays Kazuki brought his ancient mother. On Sundays cheerful, freckled Fogg brought his cheerful, freckled wife, who always wore a turtleneck as if it approximated a priest’s collar; or maybe she too bore a scar, located, unlike Inez’s, in a place of concealment. She carried Blessed Event. Inez cooked a new dish—a thick soup, maybe, or a ragout, testing it out; and they all dined together at a round table, shoulder to shoulder, an experience impossible at the busy Local; and Marvin toasted Our Family; and the dark unused bedrooms upstairs weighed on Pinky’s spirits which were never high on Sundays anyway—for what were they doing back in Providence without Pinky to interpret the news to, or to drag along to a dreary art film, or to hold the sign at a demonstration while they shouted: the two of them in similar but not identical long ash-colored coats and cropped pewter hair; really, home with its pale walls and engravings and vases of eucalyptus was composed of hundreds of shades of gray.