“Lord have mercy,” Noon said again as she pulled Liz inside the house. “Liz, is this you?” she asked again as Liz stood before her with her head hung. “My baby, my baby, what happened to my baby?” Liz tried to talk, but all that came out at first were unintelligible high-pitched sobs. Noon just heard her saying “Fannie” over and over. “What about Fannie, Liz? Tell me, tell Noon. Look at you, I can’t believe this is you. Come on, baby, talk to me. I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me.”
Liz couldn’t look at Noon. Her eyes were too fixed on the couch. She just wanted to curl up on that deep green couch. The same couch that she used to hate, outdated, adorned with those silly lacy doilies. She just wanted to be on that couch now more than anywhere. She just wanted to sink into it, pull her knees up and rock.
“Liz, you gotta tell me what happened to you,” Noon pleaded. Her voice was shaking as she tried to fight back tears over the sight of Liz: frail and sickly-looking, eyes set deep inside of dark circles, unkempt, smelling. Just unbelievable that Liz, who was always obsessed with her appearances, would come to looking like this.
“I—I hurt Fannie,” Liz managed to say through her sobs. “I’m so sorry, Noon, I’m so sorry.”
“Hurt Fannie? When, where, how bad, is it bad, Liz tell me, now!” Noon went to Liz and grabbed her firmly at her shoulders and shook her one time hard. “Tell me, Liz, right now.”
“What happened to Fannie?” Herbie yelled from upstairs. “Noon, who’s down there? What’s going on?” He ran down the steps still dripping wet from his bath, a towel around him. “What is it? What they say about Fannie being hurt?” His heart was racing; his knees were weak at the thought of something happening to Fannie.
He froze when he looked at Liz. “Liz? That can’t be you. What happened to you?”
“Fannie’s hurt, she’s at the hospital. I did it, I hurt her. Ethel took her to the hospital.”
“Ethel!” Herbie and Noon said in unison. “What did you do to her?” Herbie demanded as he walked toward Liz with one hand wrapped in a tight fist and the other clutching his towel to his waist. “What did you do to Fannie, huh, tell me, did you hurt her bad?” Liz backed up, staring into Herbie’s eyes as he inched toward her. His eyes were full of fear. Liz could see that he was more afraid than angry. When he was almost to her, at the point where he’d have to either stop or strike her, Noon jumped in front of him. She pushed hard against his chest. She yelled at him to go throw on some clothes so they could go see about Fannie.
Herbie dashed back upstairs to get dressed while Noon continued to question Liz. “Is it bad, Liz?” she asked softly, no longer able to hold back the tears.
“I threw a hammer at her, Noon.” Liz gasped, hardly able to believe it now herself. “She was—she was unconscious, but she was starting to come to when Ethel was taking her to the hospital.”
“Your aunt Ethel, is that the Ethel you talking about?”
Liz just nodded and then covered her face with hands.
Herbie was back downstairs in a flash fully dressed. Noon didn’t even have a chance to process this information about Ethel. How could she? One child in the hospital maybe near death. The other one standing before her looking like death. She couldn’t even let the Ethel part sink in right now.
“Noon, come on, let’s go, let’s go,” Herbie said frantically as he stood with the door wide open, letting the sun rush in. “A hammer? Goddamn, why she hit her with a hammer? Come on, Noon, if you coming, come on now.”
Noon didn’t have a chance to smooth at her hair, or grab her purse, or even run upstairs to get her shoes. She pushed her feet back into the red high heels and stumbled out of the door behind Herbie.
Liz stood in the middle of the living room—alone. She felt the aloneness in her stomach, where she felt everything. Her stomach was spinning, and now the living room was spinning too. The colors in the muted green and yellow rug in the center of the floor were washing together as the room turned faster and faster and the lamp tilted, and the pictures on the wall flashed in front of her, and the magazine rack, the telephone stand, the deep armchair, the coffee table were all trading places, playing ring-around-the-roses with Liz in the middle of the circle. Except for the couch. She could trust the couch not to move. She stumbled to the couch and fell on it. Then she mashed her body deep into it. So soft this couch was, like cotton. This couch had the print of her body in its substance. She just wanted the couch to swallow her up.
She pulled her knees up to her chest and rocked against the couch. And then she did what all people did when they fell so low they couldn’t even see up to bottom, when they had even stopped calling the name of Jesus. She called for her mother. Didn’t matter that her mother was dead, had been dead, that she barely remembered the feel of her arms, the sound of her laugh, the way her breath smelled like peppermint when she sighed. She called for her anyhow. “Mommy, I need you, Mommy,” she cried. The calling was hurting her stomach more, so she just moaned. “Mommy,” she moaned. Too tired even to say it out loud, she just moaned it in her head. She rocked and moaned and felt the room spinning around her, while the aloneness spun inside her. She slid in and out of the circles. Dizzy. Continuous.
She didn’t hear the door open. She didn’t see Noon kick off the red high heels. She didn’t hear her muttering about how no way was she gonna be able to keep up with Herbie in those shoes, but she did feel Noon’s hands against her back. Rubbing it in big rhythmic circles.
“Why you here? What about Fannie?” Liz whispered.
“Herbie’ll see to Fannie. I came back to see to you,” Noon said as she patted Liz’s back gently. “I’m gonna run you a warm bath, and after we get you cleaned up, we’ll have some tea, just me and you, Liz.”
“I’m sick, Noon,” Liz moaned. “I’m so sick. I need help. I need someone to help me.”
“Ain’t I always?” Noon asked as she pulled Liz to her and flicked bits of plaster from her matted red hair. “Haven’t I done for you whenever you needed doing for?”
“Why?” Liz asked, almost choking on the word.
“’Cause the Good Lord means for me to. That’s why he fixed it so you would be left on my steps. He gave you to me, you a gift, Liz, you my chile. That’s why, ’cause the good Lord meant for you to be my chile.” Noon rocked Liz and rubbed her back, and she didn’t mind that Liz smelled bad or that her bowels had run all over the deep green couch. She held her tightly and cried quietly because with her church busted up, she didn’t know where she would go now when it was time to put Liz’s name on the altar for healing.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Herbie stood in the middle of the emergency room, where everything seemed to be colored brown. The hard wooden floors, the benches along the wall, the heavylooking desk between two thick pillars. Even the walls had a brownness to them. He was just about to run across the hard wooden floors to the desk, to demand information on his daughter’s condition. No, he was prepared to tell them, he didn’t know the nature of her emergency, just that she had been hit with a hammer, damn, he thought, as it started to sink in. Why in the hell would Liz hit her with a hammer, why not a shoe, a brush, a broom handle, why a hammer? But then he heard Ethel call his name. Same creamy voice, like peach-flavored ice cream, he thought, but with a strength to it, peach-flavored ice cream in vodka. He mashed his teeth hard and turned to the sound of the voice.
“Herbie, it’s me, Ethel.” She smiled as she spoke.
“Now how could I not know it’s you?” he said as he pulled her in a relieved hug, and then asked quickly, “Fannie, you brought her down here, right? Where is she? How is she? Can I go to her? Take me to her, please, Ethel.”
Ethel could see the fear in his eyes, hear it in his voice; she even felt it in his impatient hug. “She’s still with the doctor. We’ve been here since this time yesterday. I told Liz to tell you and your wife what happened.” She put her hand on his arm and led him to a long wooden bench. “She was coming to pretty good by the time we got
here, calling for you and your wife, saying for somebody to take care of Liz. I think she’ll be okay; I think now they’re just doing that observation thing they do.”
“So what, you saying it ain’t serious?” Herbie asked as he motioned for Ethel to sit. “Please tell me you saying it ain’t serious. I couldn’t hardly handle it if something happened to her. All the way down here I kept thinking that she might already be dead. I was trying to notice everything, the granules in the pavement, the veins in the tree leaves, ’cause I knew if she was dead, I wouldn’t see none of that no more. I’d just turn into a zombie, you know what I mean, Ethel.”
“I know just what you mean,” Ethel said as she nestled into the hardness of the wooden bench as best she could, and crossed her leg, and leaned her elbow on her thigh. “I know just what you mean.”
Herbie wondered how Ethel could know just what he meant. She hadn’t raised any children to speak of, other than the couple of years she tried to fit raising Liz in with her singing career. But she said it with such knowing, he thought. Right now she appeared miles away, her big rounded eyes in a whole different time and place. Her crossed leg swinging lightly to the rhythm of whatever was going on in her head. He sat back and put his arm along the back of the bench. And then he let his hand lightly touch her shoulder. She turned and looked at him. He thought it looked as if she had been crying. He dismissed that. He never knew Ethel to cry. Even when she got word that her sister had been burned up in the car fire, Ethel didn’t cry. But there was a weakness to her eyes that he had never recognized before. Maybe it had always been there, he reasoned, but since it was her strong tenderness he needed back then more than anything, he had never let himself see her weakness.
“Thank you for getting Fannie down here,” Herbie said slowly. “What—what happened, how did you come to be the one to get her here and everything?”
“Well, I went by to see Liz yesterday morning. I hadn’t seen her since I been here, and God, I can’t hardly describe it.” She pushed her fist to her mouth, as if daring a sob to come forth. She felt Herbie’s hand squeeze her forearm; it was the way a friend would.
Herbie asked, “Were they fighting? They’re so close I can’t even imagine it. Fannie’s subject to blow up now and again, cuss a little, but wasn’t neither of them violent with each other.”
Ethel rubbed her hand across her neck and thought about Liz’s hands trying to choke her life out. “Can’t speak about it now, Herbie.” She cleared her throat. “It was just bad, very bad.” She sat back against the hard bench buffered by Herbie’s arm.
They were both silent and still for a time. Herbie had softened for a moment at the realization that this was Ethel he was sitting here with, his arm draped casually around her shoulder. But then his whole body gushed with years’ worth of feelings he wanted to get out. How hurt he was when she left him; how enraged when she’d dropped Liz off; how desperate when he didn’t have her to hold late at night when Noon was still and cold. And then back to angry when she went year after year and no contact other than the money that she sent faithfully for Liz. As he sat in the brown dinginess of this emergency room, quiet activity all around him, words inside of him bursting to get out, it happened. The way it always did with Ethel. He couldn’t tell himself that it wasn’t there, because it was. Didn’t matter that he and Noon had done it for a day and night, done it so much until he thought his heart would stop cold; it was there. He squeezed her arm. He rubbed his hand slowly around her shoulder.
Ethel knew hand strokes. She knew which were friendly gestures, which were acts of compassion, cordial, which were from someone who would take control or inflict bodily harm. It was the way she had protected herself over the years. Through the contact of flesh. Flesh couldn’t lie. Just a touch, a handshake, the press of a thumb, the palm of a hand that she’d allow to touch her bare back, and she would know if someone meant her harm. So naturally she knew Herbie’s touch; it was there, the way it had always been. The ambivalence even now as his hand circled her shoulder. The desire, tinged with sadness. But an honesty, though. There was always a wholesomeness to being with Herbie. He wasn’t just with her just for his basest pleasures. It was like he needed healing. The way he’d cry sometimes afterward and tell her that his wife wasn’t right, no natural desires to her at all. And he’d apologize for being there, in a confessional sort of way. And she thought that if she were the settling-down type, Herbie would have been the type she would have settled down with. But she wasn’t the settling-down type, and she had felt Noon’s flesh earlier as she held her arm to walk her home. And she knew Herbie and Noon were well suited for each other, and to allow otherwise would have been improper, even for Ethel, whose brand of proper ran hard against the grain.
She shifted in her seat. Herbie squeezed her shoulder tighter. She turned sharply so that he was forced to sit up. She took his hand and felt the desire running all through his palm. She turned to face him, to look in his eyes, so there would be no mistaking her point. She saw it welling up in his eyes, his desire, dead center. She saw the muscles in his jaw shift like an earthquake getting ready to happen.
“Just friends, Herbie,” she said softly and firmly. “We just friends from here on out.”
At first Herbie was insulted that she moved away from him so sharply, forcing him to drop his arm. He expected that she should have leaned into his arm, let him console her for once. He was all prepared to mash his chin into the top of her hair, tell her not to worry, whisper in her ear, blow into it. But her sharp movement at that moment insulted him. “Well, we always been friends. That’s never stopped us from being, you know, from being especially good friends.” He laughed a sly laugh. And then the words of the high-bosomed waitress that he had met at that Lawnside club years ago tromped through his head. “Miss Ethel got pretty much the same thing your wife got. Miss Ethel just advertises hers a little better.” And Herbie realized he had done it. Turned into the type of married man he swore he never would. He’d always told himself that if Noon had had a normal nature, he would have never sought out Ethel; certainly he wouldn’t have spent time at those houses on South Street and later Arch Street. But he had just experienced Noon’s nature, feasted on it until he thought he’d burst, and here he was ready to talk some jive for a little time with Ethel.
And then the containment. As Ethel’s thumb stroked his palm, she felt the containment. She could feel the desire receding from the surface of his skin. She liked that. Maybe now he’ll think it’s worth it to put a lid on it, pack it on up, and save it for Noon.
“Of course we just friends,” Herbie said emphatically, embarrassed too. “It’s just that it’s been a long time, Ethel, you know, I still got some powerful memories, powerful memories, but yeah, we just friends nothing more, nothing more.” Herbie was sitting up on the edge of the hard bench; he was facing Ethel. She was leaning back against the bench, and he looked at her from her head, to her rounded eyes, her healthy lips, and chest. “Just friends,” he whispered, “just friends.” Damn.
Before Ethel could say anything, the thick brown doors just to the side of the large brown desk swung open and Fannie walked through, escorted by a white-jacketed doctor.
She stood for a few seconds to focus her eyes under the large bright lamp fixture that hung just a foot or so above her head. She blinked hard and squinted and looked across the room at Herbie and Ethel. “Herbie,” she said weakly, and before the word was out of her mouth, Herbie and Ethel ran to her, almost knocked each other over to get to her first. Fannie’s head was bandaged.
“Are you her parents?” the doctor asked.
“Yes,” Ethel said quickly.
Herbie looked at Ethel when she said that. He put his arm around Ethel’s shoulder, deciding he’d help her play the part.
“She’ll be fine,” the doctor said, rushing his words. “It was a bad hit to the head, but the wound is clean. You’ll want her to keep it dry for the next day or two, aspirin for pain, and you’ll want to get her back
here if she develops a fever, blurred vision, dizziness, fainting, or vomiting. But again, let her take it easy for the next couple of days and she’ll be fine. Follow up in about a week with your private physician or clinic.” He patted Fannie’s shoulder and was back on the other side of the brown wooden doors.
Herbie and Ethel blanketed Fannie with hugs. She felt for the bandaging, gently, though, because her head still ached some.
“Can you walk?” Herbie asked, holding her by her waist. “How do you feel, I’ll hail a cab, are you okay? Oh, God, I’m so glad you’re—you’re standing here like this.”
“Like what?” Fannie asked, half laughing. “I’m a mess. Bandages wrapped around my head like I’m a mummy, and I haven’t brushed my teeth since this time yesterday.”
“But you alive, baby,” Ethel said, kissing her cheek, “you alive.”
“How’d they treat you back there, the doctors?” Herbie asked as he pulled Fannie to him and hugged her again.
“Okay, you know, asked me to count from ten to one over and over, asked who was President. I told them Truman.”
They all three laughed.
“I don’t know how Eisenhower would feel about that,” Herbie said. Then he stopped laughing and looked at Fannie. “You need watching over, you coming home with me, you ain’t going back to that house. And that’s settled.” He said it firmly.
“I was gonna say you could share my room with me, Fannie,” Ethel interrupted. “I’m not working, so I’m there all day and night. I been enjoying your company so since I been here.”
“Actually,” Fannie said as she balanced her weight between Herbie and Ethel, “I was thinking of going back to my house. Somebody must see about Liz, she needs help, bad, she needs help real bad.” Fannie’s voice rose in degrees, and her arms moved up and down frantically so that she almost lost her balance.
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