“We’re catching up with each other.”
Sylvia walks into the room naked, wet from the shower, and shrugs, comically, once she notices Inez on the phone. Inez watches a trail of moisture slowly ease down her lover’s neck and over her left breast, as she explores the closet again.
“When will you be home?” Jake asks.
“I don’t know. I may stay for supper.”
“Don’t do this to me, Inez.”
“I’m not doing anything to you.”
Sylvia returns to the bedroom, wrapped in a short robe now, the sash tied in a bow. She winks at Inez and puts one end of her sash in Inez’s hand, then backs away slowly.
“Look, I’ll be home a little later,” says Inez, watching as Sylvia’s robe falls to the floor.
“I need you, Inez,” he says.
“This will give you a chance to sort things out with your father,” Inez says. She gently slips the receiver onto its cradle as Sylvia places one knee on either side of Inez’s pelvis and leans down, brushing her nipples against Inez’s belly, her hair showering Inez with delicious drips. I N the Chronicle this morning Inez had read about a construction company in San Bruno that could build a fully viable air-raid shelter in your backyard in three days. Inez remembers this now, as she lounges in the dusk light listening to a Frank Sinatra record. She laughs out loud at the thought of the construction crew descending on one of her neighbors’ yards and digging a big hole. Inez has no interest in having an air-raid shelter in her yard, no interest in trying to protect her family from what they can’t be protected from. All she wants is the shelter of this apartment, the friendly squeal and bright bells of the cable cars outside, the smooth gangster crooning “Witchcraft” and dear Sylvia at the stove pulling together a quick supper. No husband, no children, no father-in-law, no violin, no history. A suspended moment in which nothing outside of the realm of this little apartment exists.
Inez, as slothful as she’s ever been in her life, sits in Sylvia’s kimono on a stool in the kitchen watching her talented friend braise lamb chops and steam a pot of Uncle Ben’s rice.
“All we do is eat,” Inez says.
“Eat and make love, the measures of a life well lived.”
“Who said that?”
“I did.”
Sylvia, in an orange apron and nothing else, is somehow fetching with a jack-o’-lantern emblazoned on her chest.
“You make a rather skinny pumpkin.”
“Yeah?”
“That apron’s meant for a plump girl with a fat behind.”
“Do you wish I had a fat behind?”
“No, I like your behind the way it is.”
Sylvia adds crushed garlic to her creation, then circles behind Inez and peels the kimono off her shoulders, threading her hands under Inez’s arms to cup her breasts. Unlike Jake, who grabbed and squeezed, Sylvia holds onto them gently in a kind of communion.
“You’re going to smell like garlic,” says Sylvia in her ear.
“I don’t care.”
Sylvia kisses Inez on the corner of the mouth then slides her tongue into Inez’s mouth, the lamb chops sizzling in the skillet. Sylvia groans and returns to the stove.
Inez rolls her head around naked and woozy. “I smell like garlic,” she says.
“Yes, and how do you like your meat?” Sylvia says, blowing Inez a fat kiss.
“Rare.”
toy soldiers
BY the time she arrives home, the kids are in bed and the old man’s asleep in his new quarters in the TV room. Jake’s left a terse note on the kitchen table:
Everybody’s tucked in. Had to run out to a labor meeting.
Don’t wait up.
J.
Inez tries to picture the woman that Jake’s laboring with. A bottled blonde or a redhead? Beside Jake’s note is a fat, unopened envelope from Napa State Hospital. Her sister. She doesn’t want to open the envelope. She hasn’t seen Bibi for a few years. She stopped going up to Napa after her last visit. That was 1958. So what’s new? she’d asked Bibi. Tell me how you are. How about the food here? It’s all right, you can complain. Do you want me to talk with your doctor? Don’t you ever want to get out of here, Bibi? But Bibi didn’t answer. She glared at Inez for half an hour, refusing to speak.
Call it survivor’s guilt, call it sheer cowardliness, this is the part of Inez’s life that she’s most ashamed of. And Bibi has made it worse by forgiving her. Bibi is without guile. She sends cards that she’s pasted together during craft class. Lovely things, really. Collages made out of scraps of fabric. How she gets these materials is hard to say. The staff must know her history as a dressmaker and bring in the scraps for her pleasure. They’re kinder to her there than Inez is.
Inez takes the cards out of the envelopes when they arrive, admires the crooked beauty of the collages and forces herself to read the notes inside. Then she takes a kitchen match to Bibi’s cards and drops them in the fireplace. How can Inez respond to a woman who no longer exists, who’s nothing more than an arched and crinkled filament of ash?
But this fat envelope from Napa State Hospital troubles her. Is Bibi dead at age forty-five? Businesslike, Inez slices open the envelope with a paring knife. No card. No curious quilt of fabrics. But a sheaf of small sheets covered in Bibi’s tiny, precise script. Inez considers burning the missive before reading it. That would be the purest approach. Instead, she reads it slowly as if the message has come from some divine and lucid source.
Dear Inez,
How are you? How are the children? How is your handsome husband? I think of him a lot. Not that way. I’ve taught myself not to think that way. No, I think of Jake because he’s funny. I remember him as being funny. Is he still funny? I wonder what it would be like to live with somebody who’s funny.
Believe it or not, we’ve heard about the missiles in Cuba. At least some of us have. We saw President Kennedy on TV. What a good-looking man. The sta f here didn’t know what he was going to say, so they let us watch, at least those of us that they don’t worry about much. The stable ones. Inez, can you believe anybody regards me as stable? It’s all relative, they tell me. Next thing you know, they’ll say we’re all relatives. They don’t pay so much attention to the radio here. It’s on all the time in the rec room so I listen to the news bulletins. I know what’s going on.
Are you scared, Inez? I’m not scared, but then I don’t have much to lose. You have a lot to lose. When I hear violins on the radio I think of you. They don’t play much real music on the radio here, but pop music with strings. 101 Strings. The music is meant to calm us. Sometimes when they play 101 Strings, I try to take away a hundred strings so that there’s only one left, one pure violin. But mostly I hear them all.
Sometimes I sit down to the piano in the music room. The piano’s no good but I can’t really play anyway. I play the little bit of Bach that I know. The beginning of the Largo from the Harpsichord Concerto in F Minor. But it’s not very good. Sounds sti f. Like toy soldiers, marching in line over little puddles. That’s how I thought about it one day—my fingers were sti f like soldiers. Somebody showed me a game to play with my hands in case I get bored, but I never play it.
Here’s what you do with your fingers in case you get bored: you start with your pointer finger on one hand and go down the row of fingers on your other hand and back again, starting with the pinkie. You can say it out loud, or you can say it in your head. Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, whoops, Johnny, whoops Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny. That’s how I sound playing Bach on the piano. Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, whoops, Johnny, whoops Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny. Except I think of it as Johann, Johann, Johann, Johann, whoops Johann, whoops Johann, Johann, Johann, Johann.
I think about Mama. I wish you could remember her. She was beautiful.I think of her playing the piano. I remember how her beautiful hands rose away from the keys with a little flourish at the end of a piece, but I can’t recall the sound of her playing.
Mama was proud of that
piano—the Baldwin baby grand. Sometimes she let me help her clean the keys. We did it with milk, little cups of milk and a rag. She called it milking. “Let’s begin the milking,” she’d say. “Don’t use too much, just a little dip. We don’t want the piano to smell bad.” I’d start on the top keys and Mama would start at the bottom. “Meet you at middle C,” she always said. That’s one of my happiest memories. There were so many keys, I thought we had all the time in the world. That was before I knew about all the things that could go wrong in a little person’slife, in a little person’s head. That’s what Mama called me sometimes—a little person. A little person doesn’t slurp when she sips her soup. A little person eats over the table. A little person doesn’t whine when she’s supposed to take her nap.
The piano here is not so nice. It’s called a Kimble, which seems a funny name for a piano. Nobody’s taken care of it very well. It’s gone out of tune and I don’t think it will ever be back in tune again. I think about that a lot—the piano being out of tune. The piano should be in tune. We need the piano to be in tune more than other people need it. This piano is not well-tempered. If anybody else around here loses their temper, they get more medication, but not the piano. The piano has been allowed to lose its temper forever.
Sometimes I want to ask them for a cup of milk and a rag so I can clean the keys. But the thing that stops me is that I’m afraid they’d think I was crazy. That’s a joke we say around here—what if they think I’m crazy?
Sometimes I wonder, Inez, will I ever see you again? Will I hear you play the violin before the end of the world? I don’t really think it’s coming soon—the end—but I see fear, sometimes, in the eyes of the people who work here. That scares me. I used to see Mama crying all the time. There’s a nurse here named Rose Carlentini. I love Rose. She’s sweet to me. The fear isn’t really in her eyes, but in her mouth. She’s held her lips funny since President Kennedy made his speech. Her lips look like they’re holding a pebble in place and that pebble is her fear. But what do I know? Maybe she’s holding a cube of sugar in her mouth and it doesn’t have anything to do with fear. I’m giving this letter to Rose to mail for me. She said she would, but maybe I am only writing to myself. That would be all right. Maybe Rose will read the part about her. One time Rose said: “Maybe Inez will come and visit and bring her violin. Then she could play for us.” I laughed for a long time after Rose said that and then she said: “On the other hand, Bibi, maybe she won’t come, or maybe she won’t bring her violin.”
I told Rose that you are very busy, but that you are thinking of me. I think that’s true. I really think that’s true, because you and I had the same mother and father, even if you didn’t know our mother. We grew up in the same house and told each other secrets. But, no matter what you do, Inez, I love you and don’t believe the world is coming to an end.
Your sister, Bibi
Instead of building a pyre to burn Bibi’s letter, Inez curls up on her bed and reads the letter once more. If it were possible for Inez to coil herself so tightly on the bed that she suffocated, she would do it now. If only she could cry. Instead she remains in her sturdy body, which, if she didn’t intervene, would likely go on until she was eighty, the troubled conscience within the body glowing like a polluted sunset.
Inez closes her eyes. Just a few hours ago she was happily in bed with her lover, but now it seems like a frivolous entertainment, a child’s game played as an adult, a dream that she recalls only in its barest outline. Yet her mad sister, whom she hasn’t seen in several years, is so present that she might as well be tiptoeing around Inez’s dark bedroom, guided by a luminescent needle, trailing a length of thick, black thread.
Although only five years older, Bibi had been her mother. Nobody had looked after Bibi. No one could have guessed that she needed looking after, a woman-child with so rosy a disposition. Bibi shined more light on Inez than anybody had. Never married, she’d seemed content to live with their father. She cooked for him and sewed for him and searched for his car in the downtown streets when he forgot where he’d parked it. When he began to truly fail, she fell apart. A gifted dressmaker and seamstress, she could no longer be left with a needle and thread because she’d sit quietly and sew her fingers together. Inez discovered her one day, after their father had been put into a home, sitting in his bedroom rocker, blood everywhere and a bemused smile on her face.
“What happened?” Inez screamed, running in circles around her sister. Bibi held up her left hand, delighted. Inez couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Thick black thread was strung through each of her fingers down to her thumb. Her hand had become a web.
“I’ve finished,” Bibi said, “a perfect white glove, Nez.”
At the hospital, after they’d given Bibi painkillers and the stitches had been taken out and she’d been bandaged, after she’d been given a shot for tetanus and wheeled to the mental ward, where Bibi and Inez sat for two hours waiting for Bibi to get admitted, Inez asked her sister why. “Why, Bibi? Why did you do it?”
“I needed to,” her sister said. “And now I’ll have to do it again.”
“Why?”
“Look,” she said and held up her undamaged right hand. She spread her fingers wide. “The minister says that if we are true believers, our bodies are nothing more than vessels for the Lord to fill. We must become gloves. Jesus fits us perfectly if we make a place for him. I was making a place for him.”
When Bibi spoke, her eyes brightened. She held her head high. She was on her way somewhere. Not a churchgoer until the last few years, Bibi had started going every day. It seemed an innocuous enough activity. Inez had even begun to wonder if she’d found a boyfriend there. Inez pictured a tall, oafish, religious bachelor who’d lost his parents as well. But, no, her sister had simply gone mad.
Inez did her best not to panic in the waiting room. “If I weren’t able to spread my fingers,” she said, “I couldn’t play the violin.”
“Nez, you aren’t meant to sew your fingers together,” Bibi said, all-knowing. “You already have the Lord, Inez. He comes to you through your music.”
Inez wanted to scream, The Lord has nothing to do with me or you. Inez looked at her sister in a glazed wonder.
Bibi lifted her bandaged hand and considered it for a moment. “I’ll have to try again,” she said.
As Bibi spoke, the fingers of Inez’s left hand ached right through the calluses. Don’t leave me, Bibi. Even though she and Bibi were the only ones sitting in the small room with baby-blue walls, they were kept waiting ages. They could hear a boy wailing beyond the doors; he sounded like a German shepherd with a human vocabulary, demanding and insistent.
Inez had put in a call to Jake at his office—he was supposed to meet them as soon as he finished with a client. Where the hell was he? Soon, Bibi would be brought in to speak with a psychiatrist. Soon she would be taken away. She was perfectly calm; Inez was the agitated one. Inez stood up and started pacing. What were they going to do with her sister? The wailing voice of the canine-boy seemed to be coming through the heating vent. Inez had words with the broad-nosed receptionist. What the hell’s taking so long? The receptionist looked at Inez as if she were the crazy one.
Bibi came up to the desk to calm her down. “Why don’t you come and sit down, Nez?”
“You certainly have a lovely voice,” the receptionist said to Bibi.
“Why, thank you.”
You would have thought the two of them were at a tea party.
“If you think about Jesus,” Bibi said, after Inez sat back down, “you have to believe he’d have been happier to have his fingers sewn together than to have a huge spike driven through his palms.”
Inez took a long look at her sister. She had a beatific smile on her face. She seemed thrilled about the idea of being crazy.
“Do you think about Jesus much?” Inez asked.
“Yes, but no more than I should.”
It was at this point that Jake Roseman burst through the swinging doo
rs and looked around wildly until he noticed the two of them, sitting right in front of him.
Bibi let out a screech of hilarity. “Jake.”
Jake’s big head of black hair, just beginning to show gray, was all windblown. Inez was surprised by his fake red bow tie clipped to a wrinkled oxford-cloth shirt. His black corduroy sport coat was hopelessly frayed at the elbows. Never could a man look so beautiful and rumpled at the same time as Jake Roseman.
Inez took Jake aside to explain what had gone on, then he came and sat beside Bibi. He took her right hand in his. Inez tried to give the two of them a little room but stayed close enough so that she could hear what they said. Jake bowed his head. Bibi had always felt great affection for Jake, and he was fond of her.
“How do you feel now?” he asked in a low voice.
“Just fine. They gave me some painkillers.”
“If you do something to yourself that requires painkillers, then you’re doing something wrong. You shouldn’t be causing yourself pain.”
Bibi nodded respectfully.
“Inez says you want to sew the fingers of each of your hands together.”
“That’s right.”
“Then you’ll not be able to sew anymore.”
“I’ve done enough sewing.”
“You’re tired of sewing.”
“Yes.”
“You know there’s a way you can quit doing it without sewing your fingers together.”
“I know that, silly.”
Jake tried another tack. “What do you plan to do with your hands once they’re all sewn up?”
“Maybe I’ll be a Jewish wife,” Bibi said.
Was she joking for Jake’s sake?
Bibi lifted her right hand from his, and, together with her bandaged paw, cupped both hands in front of her face and rocked her head back and forth.
Not long before, they had invited Bibi over for a Shabbat dinner. At times, Inez played at being a Jewish wife on Friday nights, even though she never had any intention of converting. It was something that started after Anna was born, a sacrilege probably, her doing this, but Jake got a kick out of it. After she’d done it a couple of times—blessing the candles with a made-up mumble and with her hands cupped in front of her face as she’d seen Jake’s mother do—Inez found that she liked it. They had a little ritual in their lives, false as it might be. Their small daughter sat fascinated at the table. The illusion of the perfect family was in place. After a couple of months of it, complete with homemade matzo-ball soup and bad Jewish wine, they invited Bibi over to share in the ritual.
Beautiful Inez Page 21