No, it was a skating rink. She could see ice, and the blades slide over it. There was a sizzle, no, a scratch, no, deeper than that, the blue shaved metal against the frozen water. Skirts flew. Nicky’s corduroys patinaed with a beard of white from falling. His wonderment at his daughter. His encouragement. His own slipping and tumbling to the hard surface like a clown.
Shutters closed, shades down, curtains drawn, when she woke up it was impossible to tell what time of day it was. Through the walls or windows she could hear someone practicing scales on a violin. She felt apprehensive (violin went pizzicato on a harmonic minor scale). She searched the apartment hoping to discover a note, but she found none (what could he have said? she wondered, in any case, or even more—what was it she might have wanted him to say? forgive me? or, I love you? or, don’t be here when I return?) and gave up the search. Standing before the white glare of the refrigerator—empty save for the bag of brown withered alfalfa sprouts, box of baking soda, half-eaten pickle, empty wine jug—she shook her head, as there were no words she could say aloud even to herself addressing what she felt about the night. The cold air passed over her and she looked down at her flat front, saw between her legs the indefinite mound with its wave of hair and cupped her hands over it there, moving them in and down until she could feel the rush of liquid warmth, leftover Krieger. Unexpectedly, she began to jump up and down, first on one foot and then the other, to force the liquid out of her. She ate the half pickle instinctive it would work further against those little white fish swimming their way up inside her. The pickle was rotten, however, and she spat it into the sink. Water which she drank head tucked under the spout tasted like an old penny.
It was five-thirty before she found the restaurant shaded under its awning in the complicated streets over by the river. She was hastily dressed in blacks and whites, assigned her station, left to her own devices. By six the maître d’ had summoned her back into the kitchen (hung with copper pans, pots, double boilers; garlic and fried organs defining the atmosphere) and told her she was fired.
“You got no clue what side of a plate the knife belongs at got no clue the difference between your soupspoon your teaspoon your dessert spoon, it won’t do nothing personal, I am regretful, you may have dinner the cashier’ll pay you, no hard feelings”—and to the Calabrese chef: “Got some of that baked scrod from yesterday for the raggaz’ here.”
“I can learn, man.”
He was already walking away, “Okay no hard feelings I explain everything Mr. Franz and good luck? okay.”
Slowly she walked back downtown. She counted out several coins from her change purse and bought a newspaper at the cramped smokeshop on the corner around from Krieger’s apartment. It was dusk outside when she pulled on the cord to raise the Venetian blinds, and the sun streamed in to form geometries that crept and hesitated at blue bats in the Chinese rug. Off came the pink dress and the odious white brogues that she always wore on special occasions (though they pinched her toes in their stout leather tips) and she replaced them with jeans and her moleskin shirt. She sat with a pencil just like mama Opal had always done and circled job offerings in the classifieds, feeling only slightly abashed at what solace she took in the simple repetition of a pattern her mother had set so long ago. The variety of possibilities that lay in those long narrow columns of type was as startling as what it represented from a child-adult’s view; that is, from the view which is taken for the first time when work is equated with money, money tied to the ability to shelter oneself from the world’s welter and to feed oneself, and those simple abilities touched by freedom. At once she understood that she was free, washed with freedom, inundated by it, and in turn daunted by it. There was no need to be a waitress or a secretary.
Something high up, literally, is what she would take, a job where she could see out over the entire city. This would be her criterion, and why not?
She had only slept with one man before Krieger but she had had enough experience to know he was not for her. She would get a job, independent of anyone, and would find a place to live. Before a mirror she began to brush her hair. She decided to grow it out. This was to be another start. She would not allow herself to feel guilty or disgusted with sleeping with him—she could do it again if she felt like it, nobody could tell her what to do one way or the other. Not that she wanted to, but it was her choice, hers alone.
The sun moved down into the cross streets and flickered out on the tips of the pieces and bits of clouds which could be seen from down in the concrete caves. The streetlamps came on and colored the uncurtained room with a fastidious yellow. She fell asleep reading a chapter in Krieger’s copy of a thick blue volume which had been left open (not on purpose, she had hoped—again that tremendous pressure to interpret motives, his, her own, whoever’s) to a page which discussed an event she had never heard of before, a historic betrayal:
There are many ways of looking at sin, but from the universe philosophic viewpoint sin is the attitude of a personality who is knowingly resisting cosmic reality. Error might be regarded as a misconception or distortion of reality. Evil is a partial realization of, or maladjustment to, universe realities. But sin is a purposeful resistance to divine reality—a conscious choosing to oppose spiritual progress—while iniquity consists in an open and persistent defiance of recognized reality and signifies such a degree of personality disintegration as to border on cosmic insanity…. iniquity is indicative of vanishing personality control.
What was peculiar, she thought, as the book lowered onto her chest, was that Krieger had underlined the word recognized. Was it possible he could find it in himself to think that reality would cease to exist if he failed, or refused, to recognize it? She watched the fish tour madly through their liquid world and then regarded the room with a fresh eye—how, Hannah wondered, was it possible she could want him, Krieger, to be above a thought like that? No, she’d been on the road too long. The exposure to all this city madness come so soon after those years spent in country madness had bad results; the centerlines kept rushing over the insides of her eyes when she shut them, hoping to push away that word. Survival, that was all Krieger was thinking about, right? His survival, and even hers? That was a good thought, though it refused to settle in. Whatever it might have meant, the book left open to that page, the days she had been through—these and the other discussion she read about the blue men and women who walked the earth long before Adam and Eve fell from grace—palled like anything in the belly of this mendacious whale: I’ve come, she thought (though not in any words at all, but just down inside somewhere), like Dorothy, to a place at least of wonder, if not bewilderment. And mama Opal and Nicky and uncle LeRoy were enveloped in a dream, as was her dear sweet long-dead Vache, her pet whom Kitter had put down in the pasture one awful afternoon. This too came from Dorothyland, though in the morning was washed away as clean as shower-washed streets.
It wasn’t supposed to happen, she had allowed herself to let it, but three nights later it happened again, although this time Hannah was led down the darkened hall by a hand more confident than the one she had felt tentative against the blue skin of her wrist in the doorway before. She, also, tried against tentativeness. Lena, she thought. She toked off the hash pipe whose ivory bowl glowed under the violet of the black light. Impetuous and prurient, and nothing she had ever done before. Her hips felt loose. She pushed her tongue into his navel. Krieger rasped breath even as he laughed when she moved her head down and closed her mouth around him, to bring him back up so they could do it once more. And how shocked she was at the physical pain and also with the beginnings of the sense of real debasement when she felt a canopy—him, his flesh—straggling across her and he’d gone ahead with forcing himself inside her before she was ready to take him—or, at least, he tried to, his efforts having come to an abrupt conclusion when she pulled away, fighting off his hands as well as the indeterminate, clenching water of the bed, her skin gone hazy and cold. When she had recovered her bearings, she began not quite an
apology but an explanation—something that would be honest, and allow that she had never much tried all this before. He had nothing to say, because he’d fallen asleep. It was just one further matter they would never come to discuss, in part because she knew that through the way she had placed herself under him, thinking trespass, thinking bawdy, thinking maybe Lena all the while, thinking possibly other things, he could eliminate any protestation, and say simply he merely gave her whatever it was he had read in her movements she wanted; and that it was, none of it, really his doing.
Thereafter, Lena was exiled. Krieger didn’t seem even to notice that in the morning Hannah refused to look at him full-face, and by evening she had moved from the bed in the back room to the couch in the front.
None of this (she herself noted) frightened her. But she had not finished. Frustrated by all the difficulties she came up against in her search for work, as the sentimental act of circling descriptions of jobs in the paper had also staled, and after the two bottles of red wine Krieger had bought to go with the take-out Korean, she was startled at how easy it was for her to agree to drive a panel truck to Norfolk, Virginia, without having any notion whether the action—by Urantian standards—was of sin, error, evil, or iniquity.
Registered to a Thorns Haggard, who was paying for it to be driven back down to Virginia, the truck was old, rust-pocked throughout, and the paint which covered it in paisley swirls went some way toward worsening its already garish appearance. The paisley was a statement, though, as his daughter had explained the day he came home from a football game to find it transformed, a social statement, and rather than argue, with misgivings her father had loaned her (Mona) the truck so she could move to an apartment in the city—where it all was, as she put it, at. Thorns’s daughter—whom Hannah had had some difficulty seeing as a “business associate” of Krieger’s that night when they met, although Krieger soon enough demonstrated that she was—advertised on a bulletin board at City College. Gas, all meals, return train fare, seventy-five dollars, drawn out in block letters under the words “Big” and “Bux,” in a refulgence of Dayglo inks with a and the legend Have a happy day! running the circumference.
“You drive down you make just one little extra stop,” Krieger proposed.
Hannah nodded and the wine relaxed the muscles in her neck so that her head tilted unwarily off to the side.
“There’s five hundred in it for you, Hannah.”
“To drive a truck a few hundred miles.”
“For the little extra stop-off you’ll make.”
“What little extra stop-off,” wry as she could manage.
“I don’t know, search me, if I had to guess I’d say probably drugs taped under the chassis, but I don’t know don’t need to know don’t want to know.”
“Forget it.”
Krieger quickly rejoined, “Hannah I said probably and then what did I say after that.”
“You said you didn’t know.”
“So well?”
“What do you get out of this?”
“Another five, five you get and I get five.”
“For what?”
“Middlemanning, of course, and this is where the middleman code of ethics comes to bear, see no hear no speak no evil. It’s a one-shot enterprise, we both make a little cabbage and get out, and about the drug part?—I honestly don’t know. I’m like you but probably even more strictly organic-macrobiotics, that hash business was absolutely an aberration, occasional foray into monosodium glutamate but I can’t help myself this stuff tastes so good doesn’t it,” jabbing wooden chopsticks into the warm noodles, lifting a quivering brown bundle to his lips, then quoting as he chewed,
“‘Courage is the price
that life extracts for granting peace,
the soul that knows it not
knows no release.’
That’s Amelia Earhart.”
Hannah scoffed, “Amelia Earhart never came back.”
“It doesn’t mean she wasn’t brave and anyway who knows?—she might be sitting down to roast pig and jungle juice on Papeete even as we speak, there’re those who have their theories she simply dropped out of civilization, ditched the plane and the monkeysuit for paradise and pampas skirts.”
“I miss the point.”
“Point is what have you got to lose?”
“Well,” she said, uncomfortable at the reference to women—knowing how shallow that particular vein in Krieger most probably ran—“I’ll give it some thought,” which Krieger took for yes, toasted, remarked how the humidity was up and summer was coming, old dead wet wearying summer.
Very early in the morning, night still, a taxi. This was a deep, smoky warehouse block, new moon, her face close to the red metal, unlocked the door then buffed the handle with her sleeve. It was a motion congruous with Hannah’s resolve to be smart, but was so inefficacious it caused her to smirk. When she glanced up the moon too was a smirk, thin white smile between buildings. Inside, the cab was separated from the trailer compartment by a jerry-built wooden wall behind the seat. Hannah laid her paper sack with sandwich and carton of chocolate milk beside her. The recognition that what she was about to do would have sent uncle LeRoy reeling in anger made her smirk grow to a smile, cryptic, forced, but its self-consciousness was felt in the skin itself as it flexed across her face and fled. The fear was present in beads of moisture which collected under her nose; she locked the door and sat for some minutes in silence surveying the wind-borne fragments carried through the marble-and-limestone box canyon there before deciding she could not collect her thoughts, then fumbled for ignition, set off down Seventh Avenue for the tunnel. At every pothole the homemade godseye, another social statement, that dangled by a length of yarn from the mirror (glass cracked) swung into her face—she pulled over, took it down, opened the door. There was a stray cat feeding at a wire basket. She threw the godseye into the basket and thought what a good companion the cat would make on the trip, reached out to pet it, but it leapt down off the basket’s rim and ran crouching low toward the shadows. So the plastic virgin on the dash with nodding wimple would ride as masthead and companion, she thought, the heck with cats, although the cat would have been warm in her lap.
Once she emerged from the tunnel, left behind the city and its southern boroughs for those miles of tank farms and oil refineries whose burnoff flames ascended, tongue-shards shot up into the orange sky, she settled down into the drive, studied signs and the blink of highway centerlines. Krieger, Wrynn (whom she was fond of—father figure? such a fruitloop), the stuff in the back of the truck, or underneath—whatever trouble lay there ceased to exist as the radio’s yellow face came on to:
“I got a little red rooster
too laazy to crow the day…
Little red rooster
too laazy to crow the day.
Keep everything in the barnyard
upset in every way …”
and as the slide bar culled and begged, Hannah felt good to be alone again, here on the highway—
“If you see my little red rooster,
won’t you please drive him home?
See my little red rooster
please, drive him home …”
and she said, aloud, “please, drive him home”—
“… ain’t had no peace in the barnyard
since my little red rooster’s been gone.”
She sang along, soulful, faking the words and guessing the rhymes. Somewhere (she did not know where) outside Washington she found an all-night gas station lost under a cloud of insects come to circle the fluorescent tubes secured in tin tents over the two islands. The vending machine inside was broken. She breathed in the crisp morning air that was to be found out toward the edge of the asphalt where there was a field that bellied up toward a house, outlined there like a child’s drawing. Dawn stained the clouds behind the row of pink pumps as she turned around to walk back to the van and a diadem aura pulsed at the attendant’s duckbilled cap. She must have been ten miles down the
road before she realized that the attendant’s comment about a cot in the back room of the office was meant to be an enticement. Although she flinched at the thought—picturing his bony face and toothy mouth, and the blue shirt unbuttoned to reveal a furry chest—it was not from prudishness but the unmistakable sensation of having discovered something for the first time.
This was what men did? what they wanted? she reasoned, as the music finished and a talk show came on. They were discussing the seven-second delay, as if there wasn’t anything else in the world worth thinking about.
Nicky’d been the same way, within his sickness, after his own fashion—still, obstinate and unbending, and even unmerciful. Was that how it had come to pass she had been in New York over a week now and hadn’t begun to search for him yet, hadn’t put three minutes into it—even though this was part of the point of coming back in the first place, so that she could tell him about mama Opal, tell him his wife was gone, tell him she knew he’d left them because she turned out to be a girl instead of what he wanted? Pretty damn monstrous to assume all the blame because there wasn’t that nasty little Freudian doodad down there—oh, god, could she tell him a few things if she could find him. Maybe she never would, though. Find him, or tell him? Either one. Woe all sewn up in it.
It was like the road, this business—just there is all, just something made to travel on, make use of while all the while leaving it behind and allowing it to perform its function of simply stringing out mile after mile, moment after moment.
Come Sunday Page 15