Licorice

by Abby Frucht

  Because it was so horrible. Unpainted, with filthy windows, and the light bulbs bare on the cracked ceiling.

  “Oh, Daniel,” I said, but he was carrying up our sleeping bags. We were to sleep in a room with two curtainless windows, so with every flash of lighting I saw the dirt on the panes. All night was like that – the heat, the humidity, the dry inside of my mouth at the sight of that filmy glass.

  “Bring me some water,” I said to Daniel, just to talk, but Daniel said our cups were still packed in the trunk of the car.

  So I went into the kitchen, naked, barefoot on corroded linoleum. I can’t live in this town, I thought as I switched on the light. Which blew out with the start of another big round of lightning by which I found the cupboard and the single, plastic cup. I turned on the hot water and rinsed that cup for maybe five minutes before I dared drink from it, and then I carried it into the bedroom and sat, and drank, and gazed at the black space made by the empty closet, and listened for mice, and wondered how Daniel could sleep.

  “How can you sleep?” I said to him.

  “I can’t. Not with you asking me questions.”

  “How can we live in this town?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and turned over and slept. There was another round of lightning and I noticed some blinds on the windows. I pulled them down.

  In the morning I remembered the note on our door. We need breakfast, I thought. We need light bulbs, curtains, sponges, buckets, mops, brooms and anything else you can give us.

  But we had no telephone. No toilet paper, even. Mouse droppings lined the drawers of the built-in cupboards.

  We dressed, went out, found a perfectly normal-seeming hot summer morning in which the tree-studded square, so eerie the night before, looked green and nearly cool. That day we unpacked, got a telephone, called a window washer. Played house for a while, was what it felt like. Not until the week had passed did we phone the people who had written us the note, to thank them.

  “Is this Ben and Leah?” said Daniel, to the woman who answered the phone.

  She invited us for drinks. In the kitchen was a shelf stacked with mugs of all colors and sizes. There was beer, wine, tea, tomato juice, orange juice, lemonade or gin and tonic, said Ben and Leah.

  Gin and tonic, said Daniel.

  Tea, I said.

  “Please,” said Ben

  We looked at him.

  “Say please,” said Ben.

  My tea was iced, in a mug. The mug was wet with condensation. When Leah handed it over, the ghosts of her fingers were still apparent. We sat outside under a weeping willow, sharing two recliners and a blanket. Daniel and Ben had one recliner to themselves. Straddling it, face to face, they were talking about comics; about which strips the local paper carried, and which they thought were funny, and which they thought weren’t. I said to Leah, “That’s how men get to know each other, by talking about things. It’s like they’re having a game of catch.”

  “I” know,” said Leah. “It’s cute, isn’t it.”

  We looked at them indulgently and smiled and then just sat, quietly, happily, as if in imitation of our friendship to come, a friendship bound by its beginning, a day under a willow watching the sporty volley of our men’s conversation. Leah and I have never had that much to say to each other simply because there is little that needs to be said. We are like women sharing a room in the maternity ward of a hospital, who, having had their babies, proceed to nurse, diaper, receive visitors in unison then pass each other going to or from the bathroom, adjusting sanitary pads on the way and then in privacy applying squirts of Betadien to their identical stitches, their identical, burning crotches. In fact Leah and I, when we finally had Simon and Stevie, shared not a room but a stick of cocoa butter for massaging onto sore nipples. Leah’s were cracked; I know because I heard Ben telling Daniel about it one day on another of our shared picnics. Leah heard him, too, so she knew that I knew, and that was what was important. Our two families, over time, formed a bond like the corners of a cardboard box; simple but necessary, as if the comfortable shape of our friendship existed solely because the box was there to contain it. Even the children came to know what to expect of each other; when Simon threw himself on Stevie, pummeled him and knocked him to the ground, not even Stevie was surprised. He pulled himself up, stuck out his lower lip and attached himself to another of Simon’s toys while Leah and I sat and watched and listened and sipped our tea.

  “Weird tea,” said Daniel, that very first day when I gave him a sip.

  “The stuff’s wicked,” said Ben. “How do these women drink it?”

  “Don’t ask me.”

  “Don’t ask us, either,” said Leah, and they didn’t, and we went on sipping, sipping. Which is how we were, together. If Daniel and Ben went out to play pool, Leah and I stayed home, apart in our separate houses but together in our welcome solitude. At midnight sometimes, we’d phone each other.

  “Must have gone out for a drink.”

  “Yep.”

  “Night, Leah.”

  “Night, Liz.” Then back to our books, our thinking, our dishes, our tea, our letters, our showers, and when we were pregnant, our fierce, shared exhaustion.

  “When Leah climbs steps, her hands cramp up,” we heard Ben say to Daniel.

  “Liz fell asleep at the post office,” said Daniel. “She has a special cot there to lie down on in the safe.”

  “In the safe?”

  “In the safe.”

  “With the ‘Cash On Deliveries,’” I’d tell Leah, and that would be all, because the rest she would already know. How the tiredness felt, like wine in the veins, so that lying there I floated in the mildew-scented safe inert as the CODs.

  As I did again today, three years later. The cot had mail sacks on it that I had to move out of the way, and when I lay down I felt like one of them, so lumpy and insensate that the news circulating out in the mailroom failed to excite me; there’d been another “attack,” people were saying, like the one on George in the post office lobby, only this one had been in the bank, but just as brutal, just as sudden and pointless and desperate and quick as lightning so there were no witnesses, only the victim who had a broken rib, who said the guy had “kicked him out of nowhere” and then run off. When it was over, the street was empty like before.

  “Makes me tired just to hear about it,” I thought, and lay looking at the shelves of the safe and sniffing the mildew. I dug around in my pocket, pulled out a licorice toffee, then fell asleep chewing it.

  When I woke I said to no one, “Bring me some water.”

  And rose, and went into the mailroom where it was closing time, where the shutters were drawn, the fan just ticking to a stop. Someone banged shut the door of the safe, and I knew that had I not wakened I would have been locked inside.

  “So THAT’S what’s happening,” I explain, yawning, to my doctor. “It’s the weather, I think.”

  Dr. Kirshner says, “Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t.”

  “The humidity,” I add.

  “Could be.” She seems more preoccupied than usual, a bit tense, actually. I don’t blame her. While sitting in the waiting room I heard her on the phone at the receptionist’s desk. The waiting room was empty except for myself, and the receptionists were gone, and the files hung stiff and untouched in their racks. The doctor was booking a night flight to London, although midway she started asking about Paris as well. Then, London again. Her lover, a tax consultant, lives not far from us in a house whose lower half he has converted into an office. I picture him up in his bedroom, changing pinstriped sheets, unaware of the fact that his lover has booked herself a one-way ticket to London. I wonder, Why London? of all places on earth.

  “Do you have anything you want to talk about?” I almost ask, but don’t, realizing that she is my doctor, that I am her patient, that the question would go answered, anyway.

  “Why am I so bloody bushed?” I ask instead in my best Lon-donese, but get no clue in return, no spark, no lift
of the eyebrows, just her skilled, gloved fingers probing my vagina at which task she is appropriately, tactfully silent. Male doctors always start small-talking the second they make the plunge, as if, were they not asking me what movies I’d seen lately I might think they were putting a move on me. Doctor Kirshner squints, cocks her head as if listening to the scrape of the swab on my cervix, then withdraws the instrument, performs a few palpations on belly, breasts, underarms. “Hold your breath, “she instructs, and I’m reminded of the Doberman’s sloppy attention, and then of Daniel in his by-now familiar push-up posture, our bodies not touching, his worried eyes traveling the naked planes of my torso. Planes, not curves, but a torso undeniably female in the way it has learned to accommodate itself to this particular choreography. Every woman’s life is graced by this same pas de deux, her healthy body supine under the scrutiny of another living being. As a rule, men don’t undergo this, unless they are sick. Daniel, as far as I know, has never lain belly-up under the gaze of a doctor, practically naked, having to answer questions about feature-length films. I told the last gynecologist who asked me my favorite, “An autopsy flick for pre-meds at the college. A little slow, and the guy was deadpan but convincing.”

  It was then I switched to Dr. Kirshner, who to her credit has never mentioned that my uterus is tilted. Dr. Kirshner has a crease between her eyebrows, blonde hair cut in mild, abbreviated spikes, and a stethoscope with glow-in-the-dark ear pieces. We’ve joked that her examining gloves should be phosphorescent, too, but it’s a joke that the doctor doesn’t take seriously; her sense of good fun goes only so far. Today she maintains an introspective air, as if her finger in my rectum might be grazed, unpredictably, by one of life’s sharp truths. I wonder how impatient she is for whatever awaits her in London, and think sadly that this might be the last chance we have to examine each other. Already, I miss her, although we’ve never once spoken outside of the office. It seems to me I can’t look at another woman without wanting to be her friend; otherwise, when she’s gone, I might forget all about her and she about me, and then, what will have been the point? The point of what? I think. Of anything, of all our hearts and souls, and reaching down I wrap my fingers around the wrist of her still-gloved, still-exploring hand.

  “Sorry,” she says, “Did I hurt you?”

  “No. I mean yes. A little.”

  “You’re fine,” she says, and removes the glove and drops it into the wastebasket. The basket is empty except for that glove. The parking lot, too, was empty, as were the slots in the appointment book open on the desk.

  “I’m tired,” I say. “I didn’t menstruate last month.”

  “You might be a little depressed now and then, without even really knowing that you are. That happens sometimes,” says Dr. Kirshner.

  “I don’t think so,” I say. I’m wishing we’d get to the point. Part of me wants to, part of me doesn’t. A urine test, I’m thinking, but the doctor is still distractedly talking.

  “You might not be drinking enough water,” she is saying. “Fatigue is commonly associated with thirst.”

  “I drink tons of ice tea,” I tell her.

  “Tea is a diuretic.”

  “I drink licorice tea.”

  At this the doctor perks up; the very spikes of her hair begin trembling eagerly.

  “Licorice tea. Hang on. Back in a jiff,” and then she smiles and walks out the door leaving me to contemplate the British lilt of her “Back in a jiff” along with the notion that if it is possible to be thirsty without knowing it, and if it’s possible to be depressed without knowing it, then it must be possible to be anything without knowing it. Well, almost anything, I think, pulling on my clothing in the curtained enclave, then pausing, finding a paper towel, wiping myself dry of petroleum jelly, of sweat, of-yes—desire. Is it possible to be desirous all the time without knowing it? I think of asking the doctor, when she bolts back in waving a sheaf of papers.

  “You say you’ve been tired?” she asks.

  I nod.

  “Amenorrhoea?”

  “Excuse me?”

  The doctor sighs impatiently.

  “Skipped periods,” she answers.

  “Yes. Well, one.”

  “Bloating? Achey limbs?”

  “I haven’t noticed,” I say.

  She looks disappointed.

  “A little headache now and then, recently,” I realize.

  “Right, “says Dr. Kirshner, scanning her papers. “How much do you eat?”

  “Varies. Depending on what we can track down. Lots of zucchini, lately, and croissants, pates, imported marmalades, and –”

  “No. I mean licorice. How much in a day?”

  “A lot.”

  “A lot.”

  “Yes.”

  “Cut it out,” says the doctor.

  “Cut what out?”

  “Cut the licorice out of your diet. At once. You are suffering its effects.”

  “What effects?”

  “Mineralocorticoid,” says the doctor resolutely. “Low potassium, high salt. Do your eyes hurt, yet?”

  “No.”

  “Are you repelled by light?”

  “Never,” I say. “Are you sure you think you’re on the right track? Do you think maybe I could be–”

  “That’s fine. Very good. Throw the licorice away. You could end up in hospital.”

  In hospital, I think. Daniel won’t believe this.

  THE FOOTPATH that was gone, the time I looked for it with Danka, is here the very second I arrive at the plateau, with Stevie in the backpack, pointing the way. It opens just on the opposite side of the tracks, like a doorway that somehow was closed on that earlier afternoon and now stands hospitably open. At the spot where Joe turned to me and tipped his cap, I pause to examine the plunge of the trail. It drops at an angle of around sixty degrees over hard-packed earth, stone, and tree root, winding this way and that among straight trunks and half-embedded boulders awash in blue shadow. There are no footprints.

  At the base of the slope, the trail swings left into a broad open stretch that I recognize at once as part of the college’s long-abandoned arboretum. A formal array of Asiatic magnolias, planted opposite one another along what was once a gravel footpath, makes a passageway from near to far. At the end the trail detours the dense pokeroot border that I once explored with Daniel. There we found the ruins of a medicinal garden left to time and weather, its triangulated pathways nearly lost beneath an overgrowth of grass, periwinkle, and catnip. The pokeroot must have made the border, with the yarrow just inside, and with the triangles, Daniel supposed, planted according to use and property: one for gout, one for bites, burns and poisons, one for digestion.

  “And one for sleep aids,” I guessed.

  “And childbirth,” said Daniel.

  “And aphrodisiacs,” I said, and plucked a stalk of sweet cicely and made love to him with it so that when we were done he smelled faintly of-what?-I can’t remember, and today there’s none growing. Instead I pause for a look at the pokeroot flowers -the slender, tapered clusters – before continuing on through the arboretum past a row of water spigots among lichen-covered rocks. Stevie, squealing, points up a slope into some woods again. It’s not steep, just a gradual slide, and the forest thins out as it reaches the crest. Just ahead under a hedge apple tree stands a little greenhouse no larger than the bed of a pick-up.

  At once I know that this is where Joe is living, so I walk straight up to it, casually and eagerly as if I know no such thing at all, as if I’m thinking it’s only a potting shed and feel like looking at the pots.

  Of which there are quite a few all of varying sizes, all terra cotta, in stacks on either side of the door. The top half of the structure is glass, including the levered roof. Along the east-facing wall have been tacked strips of burlap of indeterminate color, all faded and water-stained.

  Cute, I am thinking. Joe doesn’t want the dawn to wake him up. He likes to sleep late-sleep good-he would say, fondling himself, curled up i
n his Cro-Magnon nakedness on his bedroll of coarse army blankets, a sack of wood chips for a pillow.

  He must get splinters in his ear. He must get splinters in his skull unless he sleeps with his cap on.

  He must keep a kerosene lantern.

  He does.

  And a camp stove.

  Yes.

  And a pallet for Eva the dog.

  Yes.

  And a sink, a washcloth, a roll of toilet paper, a shelf of books, and underneath, a pink laundry basket piled with clothes.

  Cute, I’m thinking. And what does he eat?

  No evidence of that. I’m glad, anyway, remembering the slingshot. No pelts, no bones, no paws, no stink.

  Maybe Eva buries the remains.

  No can opener, even. Just a knife, a plate, and a box of kitchen matches.

  And a bottle of Red Devil Louisiana Hot Sauce.

  No salt, no fork, and a citrus crate for a table.

  On the table, a placemat from Disneyworld.

  Cute, I think. Just what I would have guessed from a man like Joe. He grunts, he sees, he wants, he takes, but he doesn’t want much, just enough to get by. Just enough to survive. Just enough, I am thinking, looking at the bedroll and the woodchip pillow-to share.

  Then Daniel asks where we’ve been I tell him there seems to be somebody camped out in the greenhouse behind the old arb.

  “You mean to tell me you seem to have been snooping around,” says Daniel.

  “I mean to tell you it seems to be public property,” I say. “I mean to tell you it seems to be made of glass. I mean to tell you I let Stevie point the way. I mean to tell you it seemed pretty interesting.”