The Running War

by E. L. Carter

  “Well, I guess—”

  “If you become one of those people, then you will be that to others.” She sits back, triumphant.

  I’m quiet. She’s twisting it around, and I’m trying to catch her sleight of hand. “What about Grandma?” I ask, turning to our guest as she hovers by the mantel, afraid to take a seat it seems. Then I turn on Mrs. Bird. “Why don’t you tell me anything?”

  “Anything?” She frowns. “Well, I know that your grandma was starving when your grandfather found her in France. I know she had been alone in the woods for a very long time, and that she was an orphan. I know she’d been adopted into a family of horse traders along with her brother, and that she was the only one left. I know she missed her brother most of all.”

  When I don’t say anything for a long time, Mrs. Bird continues. “I loved horses and she told me her brother did too. We used to go down to the pasture together and look at them. She said her brother knew them inside out, every part, could see things in a second like—I don’t remember what she called it, but bone spavins. If they had them. Things like that. She said she loved to look at them because it felt like a gift to his soul when she did.

  “I wish I could tell you your Grandma was vivacious, sassy, funny, adventurous. She was very smart, and she learned to read and write almost magically. But mostly she was just numb, Madeline. Like a person in a survival suit. I think she was like most of us—she didn’t like her story but she couldn’t help living it.”

  When I still don’t speak, she says, “How’s that? Is that what you wanted to know?”

  Of course she knows it’s not. I don’t even want to answer. Maybe it’s avoidance, but suddenly the image of the little girl I found comes into my mind and won’t let go.

  It was the second time I read Kris’s journal, in my new apartment. I had emptied my backpack, hung my three shirts and black waitress pants, and folded my shorts and undies on the shelf above the hangers. I was almost shivering with urgency, ready to warm my wings and fly. Clear up this mess. Grab my gift. Go.

  I turned to the crate, your rumpled uniform, desert camouflage with the name tag facing out. It looked like it was about to jump at me and then start laughing. It didn’t. It lay there, very still. Finally I pushed it aside. Below it lay the spiral-bound college notebook. PERSONAL. Did you really write that? I turned it over. The real name might be on the back. The back was, in fact, blank, but on the way there, when the book was sideways with the trim hanging down, a piece of paper fluttered out, and when I looked down there was a little girl in my lap.

  No older than three, she looked straight at the camera. Her eyes, dark like mine, were full of something bright. I wish I knew what it was: the joke, the story, or the song. But it was sealed in the dead space between her and the photographer.

  I scrunch down on the couch to reach into my front pocket, and when I have extracted the picture I hand it to Mrs. Bird across the coffee table.

  “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know. It was in Kris’s journal.”

  “She looks happy,” Mrs. Bird says. “I wouldn’t expect that.”

  “She’s in love with the photographer,” I say, almost by accident.

  “Well, someone loves her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Children are little looking glasses, you know.”

  I wonder what my reflection would look like on her face. I say, “Mom taught me to hate people. Grandma. That’s what I was asking before. I want to know if it’s true.”

  “Well, her whole life, people hated your grandma. But she was my friend.”

  “Can you be her friend and mine at the same time?”

  “You tell me.”

  “It’s up to me?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  I turn to Grandma. “I don’t know,” I say. “I guess I don’t know anything.”

  Grandma places the little box on the mantel and disappears.

  The man whom I had seen in the window three days before I got this job sat right by the coffee machine yesterday. It was my second day to walk across the street for work. I wondered if he remembered it too: our strange encounter through reflective glass and sunlight, the way I turned from him and he followed with his eyes. He smiled when I brusquely took his order, not because he didn’t notice, but because he clearly wasn’t concerned. He had the nerve to be tall and olive-complexioned, with high cheekbones, a crooked nose, and eyes that went down to the disappearing point. The beautiful ones are the worst.

  Stella the chef snickered when I was waiting for an order at the counter in the back and asked her, “Who is that guy over there?”

  “All the waitresses ask me that question.”

  I glared at her. “He stares too much is all.”

  Stella is an older woman with a Long Island accent and the kind of face that has had to grow old just to protect itself from life’s cruelties, a face soft inside, too soft to show anymore. She laughed again and switched a skillet off the burner, replacing it with a fresh one. “I think he likes you.” She poured the food onto the plates and passed them up to the counter.

  “Great. Fantastic.” I snatched the plates and stomped away.

  At least the Riverstone is small, chef-owned, a one-waitress show with food that’s ready in its own time. There are no sections, no spiteful hostesses who seat people based on their presumed willingness to tip, no junior high waitress hierarchy. There are no rows of commercial ovens, no prima donna managers who want the dishes done before customers have finished their meal. In fact the protocol at the Riverstone is that at the end of the night I’m the dishwasher, which makes for a messy kitchen during rush hour.

  So the Riverstone is relatively easy, except for that one-top who had the nerve to tip me 25 percent after I was just shy of rude, and who has the impudence to return today and seat himself by the coffee machine again.

  I go to him and stand on the other side of the table, not next to him, and pull my order book out of my apron.

  “Do you have a name?” He sits back in his chair, one foot crossed underneath his leg, the way I’ve seen little kids at school sit.

  “Funny you should ask,” I say, not looking up from my order book. “I do.”

  “Mine’s Avi.” He smiles. His clothes are wrinkled, like he left them in the dryer for too long. Some people don’t notice details. He wears them like he notices but doesn’t really care.

  “Coffee?” I ask.

  “God, I love the smell. Don’t you? Right here, before it rips my guts out.”

  I sigh. I almost get taken in, and tell him I can’t stand coffee at all, the stomach ache or the shakes, and that I try to stick with ginger tea, but then I remember myself and stop. I don’t accept this kind of trick anymore, the one where I think I might want to stay, where the giddy feeling starts to creep into my head and it’s only a matter of time before I light the fuse on my next bomb. I shift from one foot to the other and stay completely quiet.

  He’s looking right at me, trying to peel the words out of my throat and lay them out to dry in the air between us. Finally he says, “Well, I guess I’ll try an espresso then.”

  “Thank you, sir, I’ll be right back with that.” Sir? I turn my back to him so I can make his coffee and when I empty the espresso maker, I hit it almost hard enough to break.

  He’s watching me, and it makes my back hot. I didn’t know backs could be embarrassed. I put the fresh grounds into the machine and push the button, wait while the water drips through.

  I stayed for a week once on the Rue de Mauvais Garçons in Paris with a certain mauvais garçon who had invited me over after a kiss at a symphony in San Francisco. He brought me fresh pastries in the morning and goat cheese that was still warm, and he told me that his two goals for the year were to be able to think in French and tell wine regions by taste. We went to the museum with all the Rodin sculptures, visited Notre Dame, and had dinner at a restaurant where someone’s black dog walked around begging for samples from ta
ble to table. He wasn’t really a bad boy, he was an intern with a planned future in business, and he told me he was falling in love with me.

  It was at night, down by the river where a gang of friends were drinking wine and complaining about America. I walked away, down by the river that glowed in the streetlights, until I was under one of the bridges, gilt and carved with animals by daylight but at night a safe hiding place. I heard him calling my name but kept myself perfectly still, the foreign spy with a Massenet opera in my head, until he gave up and went back to his friends.

  I left the next day though he’d asked me to stay longer, and held onto me at the subway station until the doors opened and I wrenched myself free to walk inside. I could see him through the windows, his sad eyes, waiting for the scene to change and me to walk back out—but it wasn’t a movie, and the loudspeaker spoke to me, the spy, in my grandparents’ language. Run, it said. The train lurched forward.

  Now Avi’s espresso finishes. I turn, and I’m not at all blank, but I don’t really know what my face says. He smiles again, for the first time unsure of himself, and now I want to say, It isn’t you at all, really you’re beautiful.

  I place the little cup down next to him and slide it his way. “Thank you, miss,” he says, mocking my sir.

  I turn around and walk away. I won’t even start what could have been.

  The desk in Mrs. Bird’s study sits behind the couch and off to one side. It’s made of some rich old wood, refinished into a dull luster. I have a whole family peering over my shoulder as we talk. This time, before I sit down, I walk over and squint at the frames. There are little boys and little girls. Some photos are faded and some look like digital prints. Some of the children are blond, and some have dark hair and eyes. There are preteens, teenage girls in dresses or T-shirts. One of the girls looks so much like Mrs. Bird I wonder for a second if it’s her. Two girls touch each other’s hands and laugh. A boy looks straight at the camera, serious. I don’t know Mrs. Bird at all.

  “Why are you always alone?”

  Mrs. Bird laughs. She’s taken her place in the easy chair, gingerly the way old people do, with her hands hooked over the arms as she descends. “I think the question ought to be why you’re always alone, Madeline.”

  I stand up from the photos on the desk. That is the question that remains, isn’t it? I say, “That’s easy. I have an allergy to men.”

  “You mean your body expects poison.”

  “Expects?” My body knows what it knows. I glare at her. Her beauty intact, hair swept up and safe now, safe in a dying body.

  “I’m not trying to judge you, Madeline. I’m just trying to say that something else is possible.”

  “That I see poison where there could be love.”

  “It must seem impossible.”

  “It does.” I head back to the couch now and sink into the cushions. But I don’t elaborate. I don’t tell her about the one who threw me against walls, or how I left my body at age nineteen and became a weapon against my own happiness. I want to find what my brother left me and then run, as fast as I can, somewhere, I don’t know where, just not here.

  She’s quiet anyway and I pick up my tea. She knows how I like it now and has done the cream perfectly. I take a sip, slurping a little bit to keep the heat off my tongue. “I don’t know anything about them, Mrs. Bird.” I gesture behind me. “I didn’t even know if you were married.”

  “Well, he died forty years ago.”

  “And you decided to stay single?”

  She holds the cup in two hands. “My true love had already died long before.”

  I blink my eyes and look at her. She meets my gaze but says nothing more. We both hold the silence for a long moment, letting what has been confided rest, without addition but also without retraction. The study is still in shadow, and the light on the desk meets the light coming in the window somewhere along the border between the couch and the wall.

  “I loved my husband, Nels,” she says finally. “He gave me four beautiful daughters and he was really always kind. I have kids all over the country, and they’ve given me kids all over again.”

  “Why don’t you move by them? Is it this house? It seems like you’ve lived here forever.”

  “Nels and I bought it.” Mrs. Bird turns in her chair and points to the wall, under the window. “That’s where his desk went. I gave it to my eldest when she got married. We used to sit together and read in here after dinner. He loved T.S. Eliot, could recite the ‘Four Quartets’ almost by heart. He was in the war, you know. I think he felt like Eliot could understand.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Cancer. It was fast, which I suppose is for the best. Now I sit alone in here and stare at the flowers on the wall.”

  “They’re beautiful.”

  “Between you and me, your Papa’s art could never compare. I’m sure I’m prejudiced.”

  “I didn’t know Papa was a painter!”

  “I can’t imagine how that snuck by you.” She looks up at the paintings as if they might move. “Your papa preferred portraits and landscapes. He loved to paint your grandma too.”

  I remember the painting of hands in the living room of Mom and Dad’s house. “So that’s my legacy. Silence. A pair of hands.”

  “Oh, you know that one!”

  “She could’ve told me. Someone should’ve told me.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that your grandma might have been quiet this whole time because someone else was saying ‘shut up’? Have you ever tried to tell a story at the same time as someone is saying shut up?” Mrs. Bird cocks her head. “Sometimes we inherit things and we don’t even know it. A way of holding our hands when we concentrate. Or sometimes we inherit an enemy. Not really our own. It got slipped between the silverware and the grandfather clock. An uninvited gift.”

  “You mean like Montague and Capulet? It still decides our fate.”

  “Do you really need an enemy that badly?” she asks.

  “No, but I’m willing to accept the human condition.”

  “I was willing to accept it too, until it killed the one I love. So I thought maybe you would wonder about that as well.”

  I look at her. Tea in hand. Face almost polite with her teeth on my jugular. I say, “I do wonder about that, as you say. But I’m losing the correlation here.”

  “Correlation?” She wrinkles her brow up. “Blank is to hatred as understanding is to love?”

  “So I’m supposed to say, it’s okay, Grandma, you got your green card and dropped my mom off like an unwanted accessory and went on your merry way to America. You deserve it.”

  “No, Madeline. You don’t say anything. You listen. You stop telling the story they told you, and you listen.”

  I get it now.

  She softens, her brow relaxing. “I don’t know why, but that’s the hardest thing to do.”

  Mom is always waiting. Up early in the morning, at the kitchen table in her bathrobe reading the Times. Up at night doing the dishes when I walk in the door, after two years or a shift at the restaurant down the street. I never say goodbye. And she waits. Why won’t she talk?

  The walls talk to me, and it seems like my ancestors aren’t happy either. We know one sure fact about Mom’s mom: that she disappeared. The others, researched, photographed, hang on the wall like pinned bugs. My Gypsy grandma hovers in the air, not bold like a monarch but more like a no-see-um, tiny yet persistent.

  She’s actually a demigoddess, like in Greek mythology: the product of some goddess lustfully manipulating a mortal. She can’t die, but she feels the pain of age the same as the rest of us. It’s torture, really, to be old and sick but not die. Before she aged she was free to experiment with her supernatural powers, to cause power outages dancing on the wires and bring a gust of wind to match every angry thought I had. She sang in my ear without remorse, the anger and the hidden wish. Sometimes I wanted to whack myself, just to get her out of my head.

  Papa thought she was human wh
en he made love with her, but then she turned back into a small, sleek, furred animal and ran away.

  Grandma is actually part of the ground. Every step I take, I touch her. Sometimes I stomp my feet, just for spite.

  On the other hand, I could have nothing to do with her, just like Grand-mère said.

  Grand-mère, my great-grandmother, performed briefly as Grandma’s mother-in-law. After Grandma ran away, she took on the role of Mom’s mother. Look at the way Grand-mère stands in this picture. I remember it exactly. Like she was raised walking with a book on her head. Did that straight back help her when she lost her children? There must have come a moment, somewhere, when she curled up, maybe alone in a dark room in her empty bed. Or maybe the thing held itself taut for years, and then sprang when we least expected it.

  Mom, in a pinafore, stands close to Grand-mère as a friend approaches with her child. The other one, plump with a thin head of blonde hair, wanders the room, looks under the chairs and smiles at each grown-up to see what will happen. Mom frowns and stays close, not because she doesn’t want to wander but because she knows she will be bad if she does. The other girl comes right up to Mom, her feet unsteady on the tile, and reaches out a chubby hand to grab Mom’s pinafore. Before she or Grand-mère or the other girl can react, Mom has lunged forward and bitten the girl on the arm. A bright swelling erupts immediately to the surface, like a kiss made with lipstick. No one knows quite what to do. Later it will turn blue and ugly, Mom will get the switch and be bad again, even angrier. But right now, the brilliant red shape unfolds on the girl’s arm, full of textures, an artwork almost that she’s created, out of some dark part of herself.

  Grand-mère could have been Mom, and Mom could have been me, the same exact scene unfolding thirty years later except a spanking followed instead. And all the while, whichever scene you play, that missing Grandma hovers, her shadow over us both.

  When I was a girl, I lied about what I wanted. The lie was that I wanted to be perfect because I love myself and my life. But as a teenager, I woke up one day and realized I was fat. The scale didn’t tell me that. The doctor didn’t either. Only my own reflection, leering back at me, roundness I couldn’t stand and folds of skin that I never saw in Seventeen magazine. My body became the next act of perfection, alongside every paper I wrote, each careful note I plucked on the harp, the words I swirled around inside my mouth and chose before I let out a sound.