by Leni Zumas
Here are my questions:
What do you eat for breakfast? Do you eat breakfast at all or do you play the game of lurker on the grit-stem-white and go hungry for whole hours after waking? Coffee only and black because no cream is tougher but some sugar please because my mouth wants it.
What is in your pinstriped pocket? I will guess a small mirror, a dollar, a matchbook from the one fine restaurant you’ve ever been to, a map of the road that runs past my house.
If you found me in the woods, strewn flat across a pinecone path, would you hold the mirror at my mouth to see if my breath whitened the glass?
Calf corners me at day’s end, as we file out, time for home. Takes my balled hand, pries it open for a small book wrapped in blue sugar paper. Give him this, she says.
You give it, I say, pushing the book back to her.
You! she says, shriek-soft.
But why?
It’s anonymous, Calf explains.
What if he thinks it’s from me?
She honks a sun-drenched laugh, says, I’m not worried.
Is it poetry? I ask.
Her shoulders scrunch at her unroped golden neck. It’s amorous reflections, she says.
It takes me twelve seconds to read the book. Only four of its pages have been written on. Do you ever feel, says the first in black flowered script, like a house with no walls? The next page says, I do! On the third page: Lovers are walls for each other. Do you ever feel like you want some shelter? I will be it for you. On the last page: Who do you think is the prettiest girl at our work? Figure out who, and that will be the person who wrote this.
I doubt Calf meant for this cheap-bound love letter to be philosophical, but innocently she has made it so. She is a confident little cow. I put the book in the bucket I use for scrapings from the animals’ shelves. As I go about my evening chores, feeding and cleaning, the blue sinks deeper under the brown.
Day after day of no reaction from the boy—he’s his usual moping, pinstriped self—and the girl gets weepy. Has he picked another? she is wondering under her sniffles.
The supervisor chastises her twice in one morning for sloppy seams. These guys face a life of wear and tear! he shouts to the room, lifting Calf’s heart in the air as a lesson. If a joint splits, they’re done for! Your job is to make sure the mother-effing seams are tough as teeth.
The polliwog has a cut foot. A smashed bottle half-sunk in the river mud made a slice in the webbed flesh. When it’s a grown frog, its hop will be shaky, but it will hop.
Day after day and Calf gets fed up, as I knew she would. Boredom has killed her shyness and she’s ready, though shuddering, to seek him out. It happens in the yard. The boy has been standing alone, as is his custom, when she walks up and crosses her arms and frowns at the gravel. He takes up her downcast, tongue-tied slack (I see through the buttery window) and makes what must be a joke, from how she laughs and lets her lashes do their work.
They make a soft-skinned pair. I hear them gurgling and chortling. Their laughs run through the open buttery door, falling to rest at our old feet while the cups of coffee cool, as we wait to go back to our needles.
When you cuddle an owlet in your palm, it sobs so quietly you think the sound is feathers rustling. Bend close, and you can tell it’s noise from a tiny throat.
When you nurse a baby eel, don’t leave its mouth at your nipple too long. It won’t know when to stop licking. Elvers can drink so much milk it floods their finger bodies, drowns the organs, bloats and swells them to death. I don’t let that happen anymore. I am strict with milk time.
I would like to forget those two faces getting close to each other, closer now and closest, which is kissing, which I didn’t see them do but know they’re doing away from our work, hidden stripped to skin in the carpet-walled basement of his parents’ house. Or her parents’ house. They both have parents still, parents to pet them, to feed them in the morning and before bed.
A forgetter’s heart is better built here, in my own yard, than in the dread stillness of the stalled white room whose windows give onto a gravel sea. I assemble my materials. Molted snake skin for the muscle-bag, gosling feathers to stuff it, shed smolt scales to protect it from puncture. For thread, the blood-stiff twine I used to suture the polliwog’s foot. For mast, a shard of wood from the splint on the hedgehog’s cracked leg. For crowning touch, fastened with glue, the wolf pup’s fangs from the windowsill.
I’ll make it in my yard, under the sun, against the boy who’s run off into the white with a pack slung across his flimsy shoulders. The straps will chafe that cougar pelt. And does Calf lumber feckless behind, her own pack hung jangly around her neck?
Listen, he tells her, skidding his grimy thumb down a page of the train-hopper’s manual, it says devil-may-care. I think we’re supposed to look more devil-may-care.
My handiwork is finished by evening. The baby salmon blink up from the troughs and the turtles venture tiny wrinkled heads to see my face smiling down—See what I did today? as I dangle the heart in a flashlight beam, the best one ever stitched.
I am leaking heavy onto my shirt, two sopping moons, the mild night a cold sleeve between wet skin and milk-drenched cotton. And the turtles, the fish, the gosling, the owlet whose torn wing is near healed and soon to be flown on again hear my voice and understand that I am happy with what I’ve made. Unlike the napkin of muscle beating wetly in my chest, this heart will catch. And it will burn.
HOW HE WAS A WICKED SON
After some weeks in the hospital, I went to a nursing home for the young. One winter afternoon I was delivered to its lounge, empty except for a big-bellied kid reading a gun catalog and a hippie slouched on a chair doing what appeared to be nothing. Beds of fluorescent lights whirred above. Fish tanks gurgled on either side of a large television.
The pudgy kid looked up, blinked, snorted, and said, Did somebody get lost on the way to the death-pop concert?
The hippie laughed.
I looked around for people in charge, and saw none. The hospital van driver dropped my duffel bag on the carpet and said, Enjoy your stay, son.
It was a yellow-brick bungalow moated by a balding lawn on a cul-de-sac in St. Paul, Minnesota. The children of the cul-de-sac rode past on their bikes yelling Eyesore of neighborhood that once was respectable! but they didn’t ride too close. They had been warned. If a soccer ball sailed from their game to land on our lawn, it stayed there until one of us threw it back into the street—or kept it, more often the case, to slam against walls and light on fire.
It wasn’t a place you were happy to be, but I liked its routines. Food cooked by other people. Soap in the bathroom. Sheets washed twice weekly. And there was a boy named Julian I couldn’t stop looking at; when he came home at night from his job at the candle factory, I considered myself lucky to live there.
We all gathered in the lounge on Sunday and Tuesday evenings to express concerns, confess to misbehaviors, hoot and holler. People complained about the undercooked chicken or the injustice of being grounded for not making your bed. I kept quiet during these meetings, scrunched against the wall by the bubbler with Ginna, who whispered assessments of our peers. No knowledge of ass from elbow, she said of Jerome. Legs wide two-four-seven, of Graciela. Medically impotent, of Arnold. Nice but terrible haircut, of Vincent. Thinks he is God’s gift, of Julian.
In the mornings we stood in the meds line, which swam with sour breath. People craned to see what everyone else was getting—who might be on antipsychotics, or herpes medication, or extra-high dosages.
Shit they’re giving me makes my dick soft, said Jerome.
All of them do, said Arnold, except the ones that just stop you from coming.
I don’t have those side effects, declared Vincent. It takes a lot more than that to stop my johnson. But what does it do to girls?
We looked at Ginna, who scowled.
Probably just makes them dry, said Arnold.
I take vitamins, I announced. I don’t have mental heal
th issues.
That sent them howling. Oh, no sir, I don’t have no mental health issues, shrieked Jerome. I’m just visiting here for a fucking vacation.
Keep it down, yelled the tech. This is not Romper Room.
Vincent tugged on the lapel of my velour blouse. Timothy, why you always dressing for funerals?
Ginna explained, Because black is how he feels on the—
But the makeup? You’re not a chick!
I said nothing, reminding myself that Vincent had the hair of a tiger handler in the Canadian circus and was wearing a shirt that said Gone Crazy, Back Soon.
When it was my turn in line, the tech handed over a paper cup of B-12s and asked wearily how it was going.
Great, I said.
No, I mean, really.
It’s going really great.
Are you working out your problems with Chuckie?
Oh yes, uh huh!
His stubby fist under my chin: You touch me, I beat you senseless. He had petitioned for a room change, which they denied, telling him it was a good opportunity to practice tolerance. But don’t get any ideas, you fucking little fruit. He kept the lights on at night to prevent me from sneaking over to fondle his balls.
We smoked on the porch, which was always cold. Wind gusted off the great plains to churn in frozen tiding against its rails. Every day after breakfast I huddled there, cupping my cigarette with the other unemployed people. The house rule was you had to get a full-time job. Not just any job would do. You couldn’t be a stripper or bartender or even a waiter, nothing that bore resemblance to the old lives we had led. People were encouraged to apply at sporting-goods stores or car washes.
Johnnycake, a cook by trade, had been there two months without lifting a finger. He weaseled around the rule with complaints about his crippling hep C fatigue. The deeper reason, he told us, was pride. I cannot work beneath my calling! he said. I been in the weeds at some of the world’s finest restaurants. What I’m gonna do, the golden arches fry station? Please, motherfucker.
You’re just a lazy bitch, said Arnold.
Would you like to see my chart? It’s the medical history of a dead man. I should be underground, boy, but I happen to be alive. For how much longer, no one can predict. Look into my eyes. See the jaundice?
I don’t see shit, shrugged Arnold, who didn’t have a job either and had been there longer than Johnnycake. He had bleeding green tattoos and a scragglish mustache that usually held a crumb or two. When he looked at me, which wasn’t often, I felt the contempt like a dull radar beam. I feared he had sized me up accurately. Spoiled brat, what do you know about suffering?
Ginna was my only friend. We sat in the cafeteria mostly. I watched her devour the cookies, lemon bars, potato chips, and plates of iced cake that were set out each night after dinner to appease us until next morning’s cereal. She was, she explained, eating her way into oblivion. It’s the only crime left, she said, so fuck it. Each week I noticed her getting a tiny bit thicker. She could no longer wear the vinyl pants or black plastic camisoles she had brought from Detroit.
One afternoon we drove to the mall and picked out sweatpants, lumberjack shirts, a huge puffy ski vest in metallic silver. Ginna bought me a candle in a jar laminated with the Virgin Mary. When the bags were in the car she said, Can we just drive?
Dinner was not for another hour; there was space, time to kill. We drove. I loved my car for putting us in motion. White-furrowed streets, big iron sky. In motion, there was nothing to worry about. There was dance music on the radio and Ginna’s cigarette perched out the window and the heater baking our faces.
My hatchback, cerulean with oyster interiors, had stuck with me loyally through recent bad times. I had never lent it to the men I owed money. Never wrapped it around any poles or bridge abutments. Never traded it for a week’s worth of magic beans. After I left the hospital, my father agreed to drive it out along the cheese roads from Eau Claire. Excuse for a visit, he said briskly. I was gladder to see the car than him. He bought me a massive steak dinner at the St. Paul Hotel and we were both on our best behavior.
You do whatever they tell you, he kept saying. Whatever the hell the problem is, I want it cured.
Okay Dad, I said, because he had brought the car. And pulled lawyerly strings to get my felony charge dropped. And paid the very large hospital bill. I prayed hard for God to make me grateful.
What’re you doing? asked my father uneasily. I opened my eyes; he took another swallow of gin.
Let’s skip dinner, I told Ginna. Keep driving. All these lakes around here, we can find one, walk across it.
She yawned. No, honey, I’m not getting grounded at this stage of the game. I have endured fourteen weeks of that place. I’m on the home stretch. You’ll know what I mean in a couple of months.
But please?
And you have your own interests to protect. If they kick you out, there’ll be no more loverboy. No more Julian of the craggy cliffs. No more Julian I hardly knew ye but I did so want to suck thee off. Julian who never speaks to—
He does too! Yesterday he was coming out of the laundry room and I was on the phone with my dad and he looked at me and smiled and said Hey in a shy voice.
Sucker, said Ginna.
Yes, I was—for swollen lips, gloomy stare, scrawny hips, hacked-off hair. You know those advertising campaigns where you’re supposed to wonder if the models are really models or just accidentally well-made people they picked off the street, kids whose scars and freckles are not painted on, who seem too intelligent to shop at the store being advertised and thereby convince you that the clothes they’re wearing are worth the price? Julian looked like those ads. His perfect cheekbones were humbled by a smear of pimples around the mouth. He wore damp cardigans prickly with strands of hair flecked orange from last year’s dye jobs. I wanted to jump into his malnourished arms. I wanted him to dream about putting his head on my shoulder. I wanted him to tell me the names of his favorite books, and play me albums on the turntable he had prized enough not to pawn.
In the meantime, I launched tiny smiles from across rooms.
On a morning of unbelievable good fortune he stood with us—the destinationless—on the smoking porch, wrapped in a red wool scarf, and announced that they were hiring at the place he worked.
Where’s that, Little Professor? said Johnnycake.
The candle factory, said Julian. It’s completely mindless. Eight an hour.
Why ain’t you there?
Took a personal day. He mouthed to me, I’m going record shopping. I stared back, anchoring my bottom lip against the gape of shock, flicking ash onto my shoes. Was this pretty-mouthed, green-eyed creature really talking to me? Before he even got the words out (Want to ride along?) I was saying yes.
He said, You have a vehicle, do you not?
Yes!
I’ll drive, he said. If that’s okay.
My father’s instructions, upon delivering the car, had been: Do not let a single one of those criminals lay a hand on the steering wheel. The hatchback was just three years old. The one thing on this earth registered in my own name.
I’ve been here longer, reasoned Julian. I know the roads. You’re fresh from the hospital.
I got here a month ago, I said.
His gorgeous brows went up. That long? Shit. Time travels at unusual speeds.
On the sign-out clipboard in the office, I wrote Job Hunt next to my name. The tech called after me, Try Hot Topics at the Mall of America. The kids who shop there dress like you. You could recommend your favorite brand of eyeliner.
Julian wrenched back the driver’s seat to make room for his legs. He fingered the picture of Jesus dangling from the rearview and asked, Is this supposed to be ironic?
I guess, I said.
Whatever floats. So where’d you go to college?
Um, Yale? I said.
Oh really? I was at Harvard for a brief while, myself.
I tried to think of where Yale was. Somewhere in Massachusetts.
I studied semiotics, continued Julian. The postmodern condition. God died first, then all the authors. He waited for me to nod, so I did. It was hard to concentrate with his corduroyed thigh so close, wiry muscle straining the fabric. His thigh. His groin.
Were you a banger? he asked.
No, just pills.
Encapsulated! He lit a cigarette. Consider yourself lucky. Hypodermic love affairs are hard to shake. Can I smoke in this car?
You can do whatever you want.
I like that system. He reached over to tweak my earlobe. It was not a brotherly gesture. My face flooded like a great bloody plain. I hadn’t kissed anyone since my days of paddling on dance floors in chemical surf. What if I couldn’t remember how? What if the hard little scab on Julian’s lip got snagged in my molars?
But there was no kiss. He took his hand back and put it on the radio dial. No stations in this cow town. How do people live here? Don’t you think it’s incredible?
That they listen to bad radio?
No, he said, I mean the grim and gaudy spectacle of the postindustrial Grain Belt. The subaltern longing.
Yes, I said cautiously.
We rolled into the parking lot of Caribou Coffee. The engine idled and Julian turned to me, switching on a blast of bottle-green eyes. Could you spot me some cash for a drink? I haven’t gotten paid yet this week. And my parents have been detaching with love.
It would be my pleasure.
Thanks, sweetie.
Sweetie sounded clunky in his mouth, but I wasn’t complaining. I would take the crumbs. I would saunter proudly into Caribou with this fine creature on my arm, or next to my arm. The coffee shop was staffed entirely, except for the manager, by residents of our house. They greeted us with hollow enthusiasm, angry that we weren’t at work ourselves.
When you gonna get gainfully employed, man? demanded Jerome. They’ll kick you out soon.