by Lise Haines
“Before or after I eat this fried dough?” she said, staring me down.
“Both,” I said.
“But can you tell the hour of my birth?” she said, looking smugly at her friend.
“If you tell me your name,” I said.
Sor coughed to let me know I was heading out on a fragile limb. The friend tugged at her arm, eager to push on. But the beauty laughed and said, “Elizabeth. Don’t forget to include the time zone.”
I knew from taking tests in school that it was better to fill something in than leave it as blank as my mind was at that moment. And I knew from Uncle Sor not to overthink things and that sharp-minded types are often born in the late hours of the evening or early morning.
“Eleven thirty-three p.m. Central Time,” I said. “If I’m wrong, I’ll hand you a prize.” Her friend gave me a sour look. “I’ll give you two prizes,” I said, and Sor spit on the ground.
Elizabeth knit her eyebrows together, and then something seemed to change and she looked at me with a kind of wonder I wish I had a photograph of and said, “Aren’t you clever? Only off by a minute. Eleven thirty-four.”
I wanted to ask if I was really all that close when she said, “If you guess my phone number next time, I’ll let you take me out.” And then she and her shadow were off in the direction of the Tilt-A-Whirl.
“She’ll be back tomorrow without her friend,” Uncle Sor said. “Make the most of it. We leave in two days. And before you ask, no, that’s not her real birth time. She’s more like two in the morning. Maybe a painter. I’d say ceramicist, but her hands weren’t dry.”
That was a Friday and we were folding up Sunday night. I sat by the front of the booth on a stool all Saturday and waited. I looked at every face that went by. I didn’t wander off to get lunch and I skipped dinner until Sor brought me some. I doubt I peed all day. By late Sunday afternoon I decided my uncle was crazy and I had been an idiot. I considered leaving him halfway through the season to head home and face the regimented life my father was pushing. He wanted me to follow in his bootsteps and become a cop.
Just after the evening lights came up and the music whirred louder, Elizabeth walked up to the booth in a blue dress with her hair halfway down her back. She didn’t make me stand around guessing. Instead, she let me take her on all the rides. We had swallows from my uncle’s flask and we made out behind the haunted house. She told me she was going to study art in college.
I was thick with love as I unrigged the Chevy that pulled the trailer and drove her home. We stopped five times to make out along the way. Just before we got to her house she made me pull over and handed me a slip of paper and opened the car door and ran down the block. In the light from the radio I saw that she had written out her name and phone number with instructions on when not to call so her parents wouldn’t interfere.
My uncle looked over at me as I folded and unfolded that paper late that night. We were in the car, hauling the trailer and the scale and my lame heart down the highway. He reached over and handed me a stuffed animal from one of the open boxes in the backseat and said, “She took her sweet time showing up, so I was off by a day. But I always pay up.”
I worried that she’d pick me up and put me down. But she found ways to see me until we graduated, and I began to gain confidence in us. Eventually we made it into the same state college. She was accepted into other schools, better schools, but exerted her will so that we would be together.
When she became pregnant with Mona, I dropped out. That was our junior year. We went through some tough days, her mother crying on the other end of the phone, family members on both sides convinced we had screwed up badly. I told them Liz was going to stay in school no matter what and she would go on to graduate school because there was something godlike in the way she could sculpt.
I learned to take any kind of work I could get, stocking shelves in grocery stores, hauling drywall around, wiping down cars at the carwash, hosing out port-a-potties. But for all my efforts, I wasn’t earning enough to support a family of three. I was sitting out on the back porch of our tiny apartment one night in the miserable summer air, halfway through a pint, when Liz called me into the bedroom.
She was naked and six months pregnant. Our fan was broken in the corner. She asked me to get undressed and lie down beside her on the bed. I thought she wanted me to make love to her and I felt the whiskey travel to my groin. But she said, “Wait. I have to talk with you.”
And like most things where Liz was concerned, I went along. She asked me to close my eyes. “Lie still,” she said. So I did.
I broke into a sweat and she blew lightly on my face. “Now I want you to think about the things you know how to do best in all the world—no matter how small.”
I laughed, and she said, “No, that will be your reward. Now clear your mind. Let things just drift through.”
“I can change the oil in the car.”
“Okay,” she said earnestly. “What else?”
“I’m still pretty good at math. Percentages.”
“Keep going.”
“Map reading,” I said. “I’ve always been good with maps.”
“Yes.”
“I think I’m a little drunk.”
“You’re not getting off that easy,” she said.
“I can … I can guess your weight within three pounds …”
“And my birthday within two months. So you can read people,” she said.
“I don’t know that I’ve read myself very well,” I said.
“Pity fest tomorrow. Stay on track.”
“I miss that old guy.”
“You said Sor taught you how to tell if someone was sick and if they had money and …”
“And if they’d lay that money down.”
“All right. Good with percentages and maps, able to read people and see if they’re sick or not. I don’t know about the oil change. But you can tell if they’re going to pay up. …”
I could see her mind racing. There was a long silence, and I’m afraid all I could think about were the little sounds she made when I drew into her.
“Insurance,” she finally said. “You could sell insurance. Quick, open your eyes.”
Before long her hair was falling around my face, her swollen belly moving back and forth over me, and I realized, in that way that I try and think of other things when she’s getting close, that she was right. It did seem like the kind of business where the more you could read someone, the richer your rewards.
Few things have come quick and easy in my life but twenty years later I was able to say we had a decent house in a pleasant neighborhood with a couple of fruit trees and a garage that we turned into Liz’s studio. She got all the way through graduate school, often with Mona on her hip. Her work showed periodically and a couple of the largest pieces sold—they were awfully big and expensive to make and move, so we were patient.
Our daughters, of course, were the real things. Lola was full of spunk from the start, walked early and could climb just about anything. She has her mother’s persistence, her eyes and her ruddy Irish skin. Mona made me think of a young Elizabeth Taylor when she was young, with intense dark eyes and hair. I’m afraid I’ve worried too much about our sleepwalker, though. And she only made it worse by staying up half the night talking with friends, but Liz told me I should leave her be, she’d grow out of it. She has her mother’s artistic nature, so maybe Liz read her in ways I couldn’t.
When I got laid off, I thought the world was over. I couldn’t find another spot anywhere. Employers wanted the younger guys. Suddenly I heard from an old friend who had been with the firm years back, a guy named Phil. Phil was the regional manager at a company on the East Coast now. We had known each other pretty well at one time and that meant he understood my record, my ethics, and what it is to support a family. He offered me a job in New Jersey.
Liz and I talked about it over several days. The plan was to let Mona finish out her year since she was a senior in high school. Th
is would give Liz time to finish up a couple of her bigger projects and organize. Mona would go off to college and Liz and Lola would move to New Jersey. This would put Liz close to the New York market. She seemed ready to take this step.
Things made sense until I woke up that morning, the car packed for the trip.
When I think about that moment, I wonder what I was driving away from. I knew I was letting my family down, that I was all out of magic. Or I had the kind of magic that turns bad.
Mona
Mom removed one of the grilled cheese sandwiches she’d built into a mound. She cut it into fours for Lola who was watching a show in the other room.
I asked my mother if she and Dad were still together. “I’d rather know,” I said.
“Did he say differently?”
She knew he was sending letters to me and she had tried not to probe. In the past, she simply reassured me. I watched her pull another sandwich from the pile and quarter it without really looking.
“He makes it sound like you and Lola are moving to New Jersey imminently. But imminently has been going on for months. And if he isn’t sending enough money, what are you moving on?”
She looked out toward the yard where one of her sculptures sat. She had been with my father since they were teenagers.
“He doesn’t fly in to see you. He doesn’t send you tickets to see him. Don’t cut my sandwich,” I said.
She looked at the pile and stopped. There was only one whole sandwich left. She took a measured breath. “We’re trying to save for the move.”
“There’s something you aren’t saying.” I picked up my photo bag, about to leave.
“Wait, you haven’t heard my news. You remember my friend Tom Watts—the one who does the ceramic pieces with those incredibly thin walls? It looks like he’s convinced an editor at Architectural Digest to attend my opening. With a photographer. I think our luck is turning.”
I just shook my head.
“I know. You don’t like the idea of luck,” she said.
“Not really.”
“I’ll do the eighth pour,” she said, setting her jaw. “I won’t leave anything to chance.”
“I wasn’t saying … I just meant you’ve worked really hard. It has nothing to do with luck. This is such good news.”
“I’ll feel more confident if I do the eighth.”
This meant she would have a new bill to pay at the metal forgers. Her sculptures required jumbo flatbeds, blankets and drop cloths, spools of industrial rope, crates and commercial cranes to move them. When I brought this up, she said, “Things have a way of working out.”
The night of the opening, she appeared to be right. Golden lanterns hung in the rafters of the gallery. They reflected my mother’s work in a striking way, magnifying everything she imagined to be true that night. She sold two of the smaller works within the first hour and had promises for more sales, the gallery owner taking a deposit on one of the largest pieces for a corporate client. A favorite of mine appeared in the magazine. We weren’t on solid ground yet but we could see solid ground floating out in front of us.
But this was 2007, and shortly after the magazine article appeared, the gallery called to say the corporate client felt it was prudent, based on current market indicators, to hold off acquiring any new art at this time. The subprime market was buckling. The economic crisis had begun. She received a kill fee. And like that, the gallery owner began to express doubt about selling her work. “Maybe when the economy picks up,” she said.
Mom had several pieces of mid-century modern furniture that she began to sell off. One Italian chaise, an Aalto, drew down two thousand dollars. After the new owners left with it she went up to her bedroom to lie down. The chaise had been her grandmother’s.
In time we were turning and looking before taking a seat to make sure a couch or chair was still in place. She embellished the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears to keep Lola from worry, saying, “The chairs are out for repairs.”
I was out roaming one evening with a 28mm lens on my old digital SLR. When I came in and started up the stairs to the second floor, I heard Mom on her speakerphone. I assumed she was talking with Dad. The light from her bedroom pooled on the carpet in the hall and I sat down near that pool and listened. Lola was already asleep.
It was her brother, Hal, the high-end banker who sat on several boards, drove a Mercedes or two and fed regularly on pate. She often expressed her confusion that they had been raised by the same parents in the same house.
I was about to get up and head to my room when I heard him say, “I’ve gone over that.”
“You can’t be serious,” she said.
“Have I ever not been serious?” he asked.
Maybe he meant to say, when giving advice. But Uncle was a cheerless soul, and his second wife, Margaret, was worse. My mother choked up rather than answer.
“This is about the housing bubble,” he went on. “You need to sell the house and find some practical work while you can. If things go as badly as some of us think we could all be underwater. My money’s tied up or I’d buy one of your objects to help out. You know, if Margaret had any eye for art.”
Normally my mother would have said, One of my objects? in a pointed way. It troubled me that she had gone mute.
“You’re absolutely certain?” she said finally.
“Have I ever not been … ?” That unsaid word filled the house like a gas leak. It was a good thing we had learned to avoid matches.
Mom met with a Realtor a few days later, set some potted plants in bloom around the front steps, and trimmed the hedges. Our property was a little odd, and Mom wasn’t sure how the sale would go. The small house had once been the butler’s quarters on a large estate, but it and the tall barn-like garage that could store up to six cars had been split off and sold as a parcel years ago. She decided to keep the price low. The crash wasn’t in full play yet, but she wasn’t taking any chances. After paying off two mortgages, we leased an apartment in Rogers Park in a far northeast pocket of Chicago. Without a proper space to work in, it was clear that she would have to quit sculpting cold turkey or find someone to lend her studio space. She made a stream of calls. It was unfortunate that she worked so large. Mom said something romantic to me about the benefits of a fallow period though I saw her smart.
We left our keys in the kitchen where Dad had tossed his.
The new place was a one-bedroom apartment at the top of a three-story walkup. There were six apartments in all. The L ran along the back side of the building causing a noticeable trembling and a high, piercing sound every few minutes, and the parks appeared to be full of junkies. She had looked everywhere. It was either this or head into a spiral of credit card debt.
“You’re taking the bedroom,” Mom said as we looked around.
Standing by the bedroom window, I could see the faces of passengers looking our way as if they hoped to catch someone fighting or hooking up or breaking down or shooting up. But I didn’t complain about the location of my room. I would be the only one with a bedroom door. “Lola gets the living room,” she said. “And I’ll take the dining room. I can use the highboy and the two Japanese folding screens to make a little privacy.”
I was having a hard time hiding my anger at all this sacrifice. “I’ll take the dining room,” I countered. I turned to face her but she shook off my signal.
By late afternoon we had looked through all the boxes marked Lola and hadn’t found her dolls. Starting down the stairs to check the car, I stopped when I saw a guy backing out of one of the two first-floor apartments. He was pulling a T-shirt over his head, clearly in a hurry to be somewhere. When he turned and saw me, the voice of an old man came from inside the apartment.
“Ajay! Ajay! Do not forget to lock the door!”
It wasn’t the work Ajay had done on his body that pinned me to the stairs. I didn’t care about things like that. But it was like bumping into someone with the same features as a lover or old friend—he had a fam
iliarity I didn’t know what to do with. He smiled and I found it hard not to smile back and that made me feel even more peculiar.
Returning upstairs, I told Mom I had forgotten the keys and would go down again shortly. I mentioned seeing one of our neighbors—this guy on the first floor who seemed nice—and then I got back to work.
I was surprised when she brought him up late in the afternoon. The weather was burn-in-hell August. We had no AC, and we hadn’t found the box with the tower fan. She kept saying, “Maybe the movers stole it.” And probably by the time we were completely unpacked there was no other way to account for the missing items. She had found the movers on the cheap. But I doubted a tower fan would have done much good. The heat from all three floors rose steadily and came to a dead stop in our unit.
As I unpacked Lola’s picture books, I lingered over one I had read to her a hundred times, Bye Bye, Baby: A Sad Story with a Happy Ending. Lola was on her raw mattress on the floor, dropped into a steady nap. We were still looking for her circus bedding. She told us she wouldn’t sleep on anything else. I had no idea how we were going to get the bed frame assembled. It was one of those Swedish products with a million pins and bolts and one small Allen wrench.
Mom stood in the opening to the dining room. I looked up at her face, streaked with sweat. No one had alerted us that the super would leave old food crusted in the refrigerator and cabinets, rat droppings under the sink, a broken toilet roll and towel bar in the bathroom. All of this, Mom said, was to be taken care of along with the promise of fresh paint in all the rooms, and we got none.
She too had run into the first-floor neighbor on one of her trips up and down.
“He has the look of a drug dealer. Ignore him if he tries to talk with you. Avoid any eye contact.”
“That sounds kind of … racist,” I said.
“Don’t go there,” she said. She knew I was trying to drop this guy as a subject, but her face lit up. “We’re in a high-crime area, that’s all I’m saying.”
“But this is where we live now,” I said.