by Thea Lim
He stares down at them for a moment. He flicks the polyester petals, but they stay firm, epoxied to the stem. He clears his throat and he starts the engine.
It takes a long time to get out of the parking lot; everywhere they turn, a large group is waddling across their path. They get stuck backing out of their spot, turning out of their lane. At the final exit, they get stuck the longest. The tourists seem to think the car is not a car, but a rock to be brooked, as if by a stream. A crowd of twenty seniors cross, each of them slowed down by fatigue, or conversation, or the desire to stop in the middle of the road, and look around.
They gaze at each other without speaking, hearts in their mouths. He tucks the plastic blossoms under the passenger-side visor. He reaches over her; their clothes brush. She breathes in deep his smell, like paper and salt cut with something sweet, like a street in summer after it rains.
The fake flowers remain there for the rest of the car’s life. Even when the stalk falls each time someone opens the visor to block the sun; even when Frank’s friends complain they ruin the look of the car; even as the two of them take this car and head towards the South, before the year is out.
One June night Norberto didn’t come home. At first she didn’t worry. Often she took the evening crossing, and he the night. Being married was not such a burden after all, since they only spent an hour together each day. When she got in, she lit a fire in the pit. It was too hot now for the woodstove. This was their routine: the first one back made the coffee, so their hour could begin the moment they were both home.
She woke up close to midnight. She had fallen asleep against a log, its imprint on her neck. After ten p.m. there were no more crossings; the boatman went to sleep. Norberto would not be home tonight.
In the morning she jumped up and went into the hallway, where he had wedged a cot among the sundry goods, but the cot was empty.
Without Norberto and his place to live, she could not finish her bond in ten months’ time. Was he lost somewhere? Was he hurt? He was such a big, soft fool, anything could have happened to him.
After work, she walked to Moody Plaza. She hadn’t been back since her eviction. She visualized getting to the store and not finding him there, so that she would be prepared and not panicked when it happened. It was really summer now and the atmosphere was sopping. By the time she got there, she was slick with sweat and her breath stung coming out of her chest.
She was not prepared for the old smell, unchanged though everything else had changed, and she had to work not to see herself crossing the lobby and going up the stairs, that echoed girl, forever lost.
A group of tenants was gathered around a display of preserves. As soon as they saw her, they knew she didn’t belong.
“Are you looking for something?” one of them said.
“I need to find my husband.”
The people parted, and there he was, at his tidy old desk in the back. But his face was greenish and his eyes were bloodshot.
She went to him. “Are you sick?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I came to find you.”
They were whispering, because of the nosy tenants.
“I’m fine. Go home. I’ll meet you there.”
“But what’s happened? You’re coming home?”
“Yes, of course, you moron.”
The tenants goggled at him, astonished that their dumpy superintendent had a secret young wife, who he kept so poorly.
She waited for him at the Bolivar Roads, and the first time the boatman departed, he said, “Are you sure you don’t want to get on this one?” The second time, he said, “This is the last one, and it’s going to rain.” She climbed aboard. He had the boat untied when Norberto came running up the dock. Norberto leaped and landed so heavily, the boat sank a foot before steadying, the other passengers toppling and groaning.
“She’s been waiting for you,” the old man said.
“Sorry, dear.” Norberto put his arm around her. His sweat stank like liquor. She moved away.
It started to pour, right as they got in the front door. She put on the kerosene lamp.
“Should I make a fire in the wood stove tonight?” she asked.
“Whatever you want.” He disappeared down the hall.
After a day of dread, fury now came strangling up.
“Where were you last night?” she shouted.
He didn’t come back. She marched down the hall.
He was in the back bedroom, a tiny box for a child or a maid, moving stock in the dark.
“What are you doing?”
He jumped. The rain pelting the roof had muted the sound of her coming.
“Nothing.”
“Are you drunk? You don’t drink.”
“What does it matter?”
“I was worried about you.”
“We have no agreement I report to you every night.” The drink sharpened something in him, instead of blunting. “A slave at work and a slave at home. Where do I do what I please?”
It was an accusation that did not belong to them. It must have been said before, in this house, in another of Norberto’s lives, dormant in the walls until it was reanimated by anger.
“You called me a moron. In front of ten other people!” O-1s, she wanted to say.
He sat down on a low stack. “Is this a real marriage now?” He acted as if she was the problem one.
His weight displaced the top of the stack; a pamphlet for a fitness center announcing a grand reopening in July of ’79, a children’s board book, and a folded letter fluttered to the ground. The letter caught her eye, and then the processes of her mind stalled. The letter was written in her own handwriting.
Norberto started, but she was faster than him. She grabbed the paper, worn at the folds. The first few lines: Dear Frank, How to write this letter? I’m coming to you. It was the letter she had written to Grape Street months ago, and given to Norberto to post.
White rage billowed over her.
“What if the letter got to him and you heard he was dead or married or some such?” he said. “There’d be no reason to find him, you wouldn’t need to help me anymore. I couldn’t risk it.”
“Why did you leave it out for me to find?” Her rage, unhinged and unstable, lighted randomly on his sloppiness.
“It felt like a sin to throw it away.”
She ran back down the hall.
“Where are you going?” he cried.
She picked up a bundle of newspaper. She lifted a front page that said: Sadat Visits Israel and began to tear.
“What are you doing? Don’t!”
She ripped it in half.
“I need that!”
She split the string that held the bundle, tearing the skin between her thumb and forefinger. The next headline read: Virginity Tests on Asian Immigrants at London Heathrow. She clawed the page into two.
“Stop, stop, stop.”
He folded himself up on the couch, resting his big head against his knees. He moaned, a sound rising out of his throat of its own accord. It was a terrible noise to hear from an adult. It stopped her. Something had happened. Something worse than this moment.
“Why didn’t you come home last night?” she asked.
This time, he told. He had submitted the wedding paperwork as he should have, six weeks ago. He sent it to his fixer, who sent in the whole package for them, with the results of a forged pregnancy test and ultrasounds. He was supposed to hear back from the benefits office after four weeks. He’d heard nothing. He sent notes to the fixer through his contacts, but no response. The fixer had disappeared. In a panic, yesterday, he went to the benefits office himself. They said they had no record of his application. He gave them his middle name, he gave them her name, he even gave them his name spelled wrong. But they had nothing.
“How much money did you give your fixer?”
“Everything I saved since I started working for TimeRaiser.”
It took her less than a split second to calcula
te that she would be all right. So long as he let her stay living here. But he had lost a near-decade. More than her bond, two times over.
“All my photos. I put them in the application. The fixer said I would get them back. But they’re gone.”
She crossed the room to him. When he moved towards her, she let him kiss her cheek with his mushy mouth, because he had lost everything, and here was something kind that she could do. Then he pressed the plane of his fingers between her back ribs, and her lungs lifted like a lid. All of the memories of love, buried deep in the tissue of her spleen and coiled around the fibers of the muscles that carted her hips, came unlatched. And now she had to wrap her arms around his neck and hold on, because she was being borne forward upon a flood.
It took her a moment to see that he had undone the top button of her coveralls. “No,” she said. “No, no, not that.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
“I don’t want to do that.”
He kept trying to get at her third button, but the coveralls were poorly made, the button too large for the hole. “No,” she said. She wedged her elbow between their bodies and shoved against his breastbone.
“Please, please. It would be only once or twice. You wouldn’t have to keep the baby. Once you have it, I could keep it, and you could still go. You could still go home. I can’t go on like this Polly. I’m powerless. I got no leverage.”
She screamed. She tried to get her knees up so she could kick him in the chest, but he pinned them underneath him.
“This is why I didn’t come home. I knew I had to do this, but I didn’t want to. I’m not like this. Other guys did this. But I never did. Not in all those years.”
She slammed the heel of her hand as hard as she could against his jaw, but he was dense and heavy, and he held her down with no trouble at all.
“I have no choice. If I do this, I’m free.” Tears rolled down his cheeks and dripped onto her face.
His knee dug into her thigh. Her eyes were tearing and the light split; she couldn’t see. The kerosene lamp was just there, on the kitchen counter. She could reach it. But what if it killed him?
He jammed his forearm against her windpipe.
She writhed her hand free and she scrabbled the lamp into her hand and the hot glass seared her palm and she smashed the lamp across his back.
He reared up, screaming. His hair was on fire. She rolled to the floor, smacking her forehead against the coffee table. For a moment the color of everything faded, and then she got up. She fell down the front steps. She ran flat out, not thinking, until she realized if she followed the road he’d find her easily, and she staggered into the fields. There was so much rain that all she could see were the weeds lying down before her as she crushed their bases with her boot. Something was in her hand. It was a raincoat that she must have grabbed as she fled. She fumbled it over her arms and the hood fell into her eyes for a second and she crashed into something vertical so hard it knocked the wind out of her. Sand was in her mouth. She had run into the bottom of a dune. In her confusion, she had run diagonally. She did not scream. She put her hand over her mouth so that she wouldn’t scream, and staying as low to the grass line as possible, she inched up the dune to find out where she was. She was disoriented and nothing was where she thought it should be. But then she found the road, then the abandoned mailbox, and then his house. It was almost a mile away. It was not on fire, but there was no light, not lamplight nor torchlight nor any show of life. She looked for leaping flames. She listened for footsteps slapping through the puddles. She was aware of a choking desire within her that he not die. She wadded up the collar of her raincoat and shoved it into her mouth, and then she screamed. She lay against the dune and waited for signs of life, but when the refuge of rain and night started to dissolve, she had to go.
* * *
Summer evenings, the women of 4A1 lined up their buckets in the shade at the back of the containers, out of view from the gawpers on the road, and sat eating turnip slices with a touch of salt, and talking to each other.
Polly appeared at dusk. In the morning she had walked from the dock to work, as she always did, following the way her feet knew. After work she walked the twelve minutes down Church Street, and when they saw her coming, still in her raincoat when the sky was dry, they got Cookie.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?” Cookie said. Polly shook her head. Cookie pressed no further. She knew what it might cost her to recount it. Cookie rinsed Polly’s hand with her bottle of water and Mary bandaged it with some rags, boiled for this purpose. They gave her a gardening glove to wear over her wounds so she could still cut tiles at work.
“Come sit with us. It’ll do you good,” Cookie said.
Polly could follow Spanish a little now. She knew tú and yo, the basic action words, and the names of places, and she could get the sense of a story from the rising and falling of the voice.
“Why are you here? What happened to your house in the woods?” Polly asked.
“We got raided for sanitation violations. Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” Cookie said. But she wrapped her arms around her chest and poked out her chin, mournful as a turtle, her buoyancy tinged blue.
“Maybe there’s another house you could take?” Polly suggested.
Mary shook her head. “We won’t try that again.”
They listened to the story being told. It had something to do with work, a sleazy foreman. Every now and then, Cookie would reach over and pat Polly’s hand. But everybody was on one side and Polly was on the other. She had always felt that way, but now it had actually come true.
They folded a tarp up for bedding and put it on the floor between the wall and the last bunk in the row, where she’d be least likely to be discovered. But she couldn’t stay long. There would be an inspection soon enough, and if they got caught, they’d all be fired.
She did not sleep for nights, waiting for Norberto to come. After three nights, she knew he must be dead.
All her life before had been imagined. Frank and Donna were people she had dreamed. She could not eat. She could not stop crying, but she could do it without making a face or a noise, and maybe it just looked like she had a cold. She could not stop thinking about Norberto, all alone under the coffee table, burned or blue. His tragic, stupid life, and the evening they went out in the rowboat.
At work, she tried to be a machine, her desires and her employer’s desires finally in alignment. Hours divided into jobs, jobs divided into tasks, tasks divided into operations. It was like climbing a rope, hand over hand, out of a hole, leagues deep in the earth. Walking up the catwalk after lunch, she looked out the window and saw Norberto in the weeds on the other side of the fence. She only registered what she had seen four steps later. It took a struggle to go back.
The glass was blown out, the window just a hole in the wall. She stood adjacent to the opening, her back to the outside, and then she rotated very slowly, so that a slice at a time came into view. With every degree pivoted, she thought she’d see his head. He was not there.
There was nothing beside the brewery, just an empty lot with waist-high bull nettles. She must have hallucinated the man.
Yet this vision ruined her ability to be a machine. Now every time she passed that window, she could not help but look, a twitch that spoiled the groove.
Days later she saw him again. Again she plastered herself against the wall and pivoted, and at seventy degrees, she saw his face. He was looking right where she was, but he showed no sign of recognition. She wanted to wave for his attention, but she could not.
He walked away.
She ran—down the catwalk, across the old loading dock, into the empty lot. Nettles bit into her pant legs. She turned and turned, trying to see in every direction at once. Nobody was here. Only that rough sky and the mangy weeds just trying to get by. She was losing her mind.
Any day, someone would report that Norberto had not turned up to work. They would go to his home and find h
im dead on the floor, burned to death or asphyxiated, and they would look for his wife. She couldn’t run away. If she ran, she would have to cross the checkpoints, and that would make it even easier to catch her.
Five days passed, then a week. Then it was ten days, twelve days, and then Cookie found her son.
* * *
It was a telegram, by way of the TimeRaiser office, responding to hers. Cookie’d found his address through the Demographics Center. It said he was coming Sunday evening.
On Sunday afternoon around four p.m., those with the day off started to put out the buckets for party seating. Mary presented her prize possession, an old tin platter with a Santa Claus pattern, and they organized mulberries from the roadside bushes and pieces of tomato, and placed the platter on a bucket in the center of the circle. When Cookie arrived from work at five p.m., she clutched her throat and made like she was swooning.
“I want everyone here when he arrives,” Cookie announced, “so we can all be happy together.”
Polly marveled at this. If she were Cookie, she would not have been able to bear being out in the open. As it was, Polly was overcome with nerves. She had to sit quietly with her back against the wall.
“Do I look like an old woman?” Cookie kept asking. “I’ve lost a lot of weight. I don’t want to scare him.”
“Don’t even think about that,” Mary said fiercely.
Some kicked around a soccer ball. A group of three women screamed every time a vehicle on Harborside Drive approached Thirty-Seventh, starting with a low rumbling when any car, bus, or pickup rolled into view. As the vehicle ate the distance to the intersection, their voices built and built to a scream-pitched peak. Then the vehicle would cross Thirty-Seventh without slowing, and their voices washed away. Neighbors poked their heads out to see the source of this screechy disturbance.
By six p.m. they were starting to fidget. Diana kept time on an overturned bucket while a chorus of the older women sang Mexican folk songs—“Cielito Lindo” and one that Cookie translated as advice from a rock on how to be king of your own destiny, even if you have no money.