Anna wasn’t drunk. It took a lot to get her there because of her size. I was on my way. So was the man in the letter jacket. Now he was leaning his back against the bar and facing us. He had begun to mix with his friends again. They all seemed glad of it. Then I heard what he was saying.
“What a sow! Look at her. They shouldn’t let things like that out of the cave.”
Anna’s hand was tight around her glass. He was getting louder.
“Hey! You big sexy thing. Hey! Look at me when I talk to you.” Anna wouldn’t look up, but I did. He was quiet, weaving a little on his feet, waiting for Anna to look at him. He began chipping little pieces off his plastic cup, throwing them in her direction. The woman next to me was murmuring her disapproval to her husband.
“Somebody should round that fellow up,” the husband said.
The young couple watched the man in the letter jacket the way they might watch someone on TV. The three women next to Anna looked down at their hands.
The little pieces of plastic were collecting in Anna’s hair. I looked over at Baldy. He had decided he wasn’t going to do anything yet. He had a heart condition. The man in the letter jacket had chipped away his entire cup—started a new one. Anna’s hair was full of the pieces. She wouldn’t look up. People all around us were getting drunk. Perhaps it seemed this was just a part of it.
Anna clamped the table edge so hard there were white streaks on the top of her hands. I felt sick.
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
Anna pinned my wrist to the table. “Don’t go.”
I broke away, grabbed my bag, and pushed through the crowd to the ladies’ room. A woman was coming out of the stall. I shoved ahead of the other women in line, said, “Let me by. I’m going to be sick!” Closed myself in the stall, leaned over the toilet. Nothing would come. There was sweat in my eyes, my face was burning. I kept thinking about Anna and how she would bear anything—she would bear it until he was all played out. She had hopes for this town, thought she could rely on her own durability, just like she relied on that little stove to heat her house. I’m sure she believed it was just a matter of time before most of them stopped being afraid of her. But it was taking too long; it hurt her. It was hurting me, and reasons as simple as these are the reasons that make you brave.
Mime is an art of absorption. If one day I find that I imitate a rooster rather well, it means that somewhere along the lines of my life I have seen roosters and taken in the impressions they have made. But I mustn’t think too much about those roosters, not about why they lift their feet in a certain way or what they can see out of each side of their head, because all those thoughts confuse me and cause me to lose confidence in my particular talent. This has seemed excuse enough for my detachment. But there’s been another reason—I’ve been afraid that if I somehow let what I watched become a part of me in more than a superficial way, I would find too much there to absorb to know what to do with and it would hurt me.
I left the stall and pushed ahead of the women at the sink. I rubbed cold water over my face, dried it with my sleeve. In my bag I found my tin of whiteface, my grease pencils. The white spread quickly, changed my face to nothing. A girl in the corner said, “What’s she doing?” I put the little bit of red on my mouth, a long vertical line through each of my eyes. I pressed my bag into the arms of a girl in the corner and told her to watch it for me.
I moved through the crowd quickly, before anyone had a chance to really see me. I’d see surprise begin to register on a man or woman’s face; then I was past them.
The man in the letter jacket was still standing a few paces in front of our table. His feet were apart. He was pointing at Anna. His friends had backed away from him. His litany sounded frightening, even from a distance. My face was turned so he couldn’t see it. One of the girls at the table gasped and covered her mouth when I stepped up from the rung of her stool onto the table. “Hey!” he shouted. I stood with my back to him facing Anna.
The voices in the crowd were still rubbing together, like pieces in an engine. She looked up at me. With my hands, I made a square around my face. A face just for her. I made the sign for a tear. I gave my face the expression of great sadness, none of which could be said in words. It was all in my face, what I gave to Anna.
He was shouting into my back. I could hear him. As I looked at Anna, he seemed so weak compared to her. But I didn’t think so much about him. I wasn’t thinking about how some people need to be the master of their world—not just their life, but their little world and every perceivable object in it—and how that is another difference between people and animals. An animal would never just destroy something because he didn’t understand it. Or misunderstand it only because it was different, or because it was something great and beautiful, but not exactly the same as itself. Or how the difference can be as small as the difference between a man and a woman. But the differences were all there, and they made up the engine in that room, and that was the sound like a roar in my ears. I was standing, drunk, on a table in a Wisconsin bar. Not too drunk to know it, but drunk enough to do what I was doing. And everyone else was drunk. But I didn’t think about everyone else, how all of us in that room, including me, are unsettled by our own humanity, how we bleed it but can’t stand the sight of it.
So, I have to say again that, standing there facing Anna, I wasn’t thinking. I was a mime, on the edge of the diving board, poised for a backward dive. And when I had looked at her long enough, I was ready to take in the man in the letter jacket. He kept shouting. I could feel him behind me. But it really didn’t matter, because many of his traits I’d absorbed before I’d ever seen him. I mean they weren’t unique to him. I was ready to do him. As I turned, I felt I had his body now. And when I faced him, I was him; if a man could be a clenched fist with white knuckles that held nothing, that’s what he was. It was right.
I hadn’t seen anything after I had turned on the man. In that moment my vision had reversed, like a movie camera turned into a projector. I became a short film of his miserable life. I became handsome, gave myself a letter jacket, stood in the center of everything, just the way he did; and then slowly, I became ugly, just the way he was, the way a lot of us are. The engine sound died. No crowd, just one man screaming—a faraway call like an angry crow’s. The air was being pushed out of me. I felt faint, then weightless.
Anna said he had lunged for my legs. She had picked me up by the waist and carried me out the backdoor of the bar. She carried me to an abandoned pickup, which was leaning against a wet telephone pole. She pulled me up with her into the back. I had to hang over the side to vomit something that had been creeping up my esophagus. I coughed and cried, came back to where Anna was and punched her in the chest. She laughed and put her hands around my shoulders.
“That was good,” she said.
I was still crying. “When are we going to be happy, Anna?” I was trying to find a place in the truck bed to lay my head. And I think I was trying to find a way to ask her forgiveness. But all I could say was, “I hate the rain. It feels like it’s been raining for weeks.” Sometimes I cry like that when I’ve been drinking and when I become too much a part of the world.
Now I’m sitting in the car in front of the Waupaca County jail. And I’m waiting for Anna. For a moment I had a fantasy that she might come back down those steps as an average-sized person, and I tried to imagine what would be different about the way we were together. But I realized that was a trick I was playing on myself, as usual, making things simpler than they are or even should be.
Mike’s in jail because he and some of his friends went back to the bar to fight for Anna. The man in the letter jacket had already vanished before he got there. So they ended up fighting with everyone, making it into a kind of free-for-all. Anna says he feels like a jerk. But I think if he had the option, he would have made a life-size sculpture of Anna as beautiful as a Michelangelo and set it up in the middle of Baldy’s and Mary’s. I know how it feels to want to show every
one exactly what is so hard to see.
Those who were in that crowd at Baldy’s and Mary’s will be talking about this for weeks. Most of them will say the man in the letter jacket started it. Some will think it was me, or they’ll think it was Mike. No one would blame Anna, but many are angry with her without knowing why. “My God! She’s a human being,” my grandmother used to say. It was a refrain we heard so regularly it stopped having meaning. And as long as she was out of our lives, in some other place, the enormous fact of her couldn’t hurt us. But the fact has always been in us.
And whatever is happening with Mike, Anna still intends to show me the zoo. “I’m so tired,” I’ll tell her, “and don’t feel like looking at another thing.” But I know her heart is set on showing me these places. The leaves are still dripping down the windshield, gathering one by one in my view, and it’s all silence here except for that dripping. She tells me that the kids have painted everything on the zoo grounds bright colors, the picnic tables and even the tree stumps. We’ll see lions, she says, peacocks, reindeer, the heroic elk.
SUPERSTITIONS
Franees slept in her clothes. This was a recent practice she had adopted from Jimmy after finding him one morning under his covers outfitted in his miniature army costume. As he popped out of his covers and swung his weedy legs over the bed, his sister was further puzzled to see his feet still shod in his little army boots.
“Jimmy, they’re muddy.”
He had looked at his dangling feet and reached down to flick a piece of dirt encrusted in the soles of his boots.
“Why did you wear play clothes to bed?”
“I always do.” He hopped off his bed and began tapping his boot against the bedstead, causing the mud to flake off in a pile on the floor.
“Well, I know you didn’t always. Why do you want to?”
“Simple, Franny, that way I’m ready to play as soon as I wake up.”
Now for the last three days, Frances had slept in her red Buster Brown shirt and her light blue cutoffs. As she meandered into wakefulness, she found a specific comfort in fingering the familiar clothing.
It was an early June morning, a week into the summer vacation. Frances held on to her sleep even as the sun came into her bedroom and lay across her forehead like a warm rag. But when the light became so bright that she needed to cover her eyes with her arm, she woke up and rolled onto one elbow so she could rest her chin on the window ledge by her bed. She blinked her eyes. From two stories up the grass looked wavy like water.
Frances turned from the window and looked around the squareness of her room. Reassured that she had gone no-where else in the night, she slipped out of her tight covers from the top. This was another time-saving trick Jimmy had taught her. He theorized that little kids who got in from the top and out from the top never had to make their beds. “Just punch the pillow and that is that.”
She stood for a moment by the bed and looked out at the day-to-be. In the sky two swallows spiraled erratically downward. They looked more to be falling than flying. Away from the window she turned to face the half-open door.
She closed her eyes and touched her fingers to the wall just above her bedpost, then walked like this, eyes closed, her one hand guiding her along the wall out of her room and down the hall. She was apprehensive as she brushed on toward the attic, because if she were to find it had been left open, it would be a bad sign that she couldn’t change. Her hand hesitated at the doorway molding as a draft wafted over the little hairs on her wrist. The door was open. She passed her hand over empty space, making believe there was a door there. This didn’t help, and the panic she had dreaded surged up from her stomach, making her run blindly down the hall until she was at the opening of the stairway. She bent over to feel where the first step began and sat down on the landing. Her eyes were still closed, she pressed them against her knees, and the pressure created white lights under her eyelids.
This ritual of the blind walk through the upstairs hall was one Frances had adopted herself. She had not taught it to Jimmy because it made no sense. Just as it made no sense to be afraid of an open attic. It was something she had begun, and now she was compelled to continue.
Frances sat at the top of the stairs with her eyes pressed against her knees. Something bad was going to happen, and there was nothing she could do about it. She was trying not to think about the attic, and she wished she had never made up the rule. She muttered aloud, “I just made it up. It’s silly, so nothing can happen.”
Frances found no one in the kitchen, but she heard sounds indicating that the others were out of bed. Her father was at work. Her mother was in the sewing room in the basement. She could hear the steady whirr of the machine, and then it stopped, shortly to be replaced by the sound of scissors snipping. The racket of cartoons was coming from the TV room along with Jimmy’s shrill giggles. Frances chose a firm banana from the bunch on the counter and went to join her brother.
Frances once heard her mother confide to Mrs. Benson that Jimmy was hyperactive. Her grandmother called him high-strung. Frances liked to watch his green eyes when they danced on the wake of one of his ideas. His freckles, too, they danced. Or it seemed to Frances, at least, that they moved about on his face, and as long as she needed to blink she would never be sure.
Jimmy’s black hair was controlled by some strange static that caused it to stand up in little tufts, always, as if he had just taken off a wool stocking cap. His father would wet it and comb it, saying, “Kiddo, we are going to train your hair to stay put.” But half an hour later Jimmy’s hair would be sticking up all over again.
Frances believed that Jimmy had more God-given life than she had. It was the bravery that made the difference. He had more life to risk than she had, and she stayed close to him for need of the bravery.
Of the two, Frances thought she was the stronger. She was tall with the dark skin of her Indian grandmother. Jimmy was fair, his skin translucent, the veins lying close to the surface. He was slight and smaller than he should be for his age. Sometimes she would use this against him and say, “I’m ten and you’re a puny eight-year-old.” But that was only when she felt the least brave in the face of him. The times she did feel truly stronger, she said nothing. Sometimes as they sat arm against arm on the sofa, and he looked ahead distracted by the TV, she would trace the veins in his fine hand with her finger, and that quiet tenderness would come over her. She would move closer to him and cover his whole arm with her own, laying her brown hand over his so each of her fingers covered one of his, and nothing was left exposed.
His energy overflowed the confines of his body sometimes, like popcorn popping out of a pot too small. On the day that the Bensons’ cat had kittens, Jimmy had come running up the back-porch steps where Frances and her mother sat trimming rhubarb. He stopped, breathless, on the top step, making little hops and shaking in the shoulders. He opened his mouth but could only stutter, “The, the ca…c.”
Their mother said, “Now, Jimmy, calm down.”
He made a short whistling sound through his skinny nose and tried again. “Th…th…th….”
“Jimmy,” their mother said crossly. “Stop. Think about what you are trying to say.”
Then he did stop, stopped hopping; he stopped shaking, while his eyes ceased to dance and rolled back as though to see what he was trying to say. He fell then, crumpled down like a kite that lost its wind. His tremors began before their mother reached him, and she hesitated as though she was afraid to touch him. Frances looked down from the top step at her brother’s closed eyes. She could see violent movement beneath the faint blue skin of his eyelids. In a moment he was calm. When he opened his eyes, they were dull, duller than the time he had been sleeping and Frances had peeled his eyes open to see what was in there.
Jimmy took two different pills now to control his seizures. Their mother kept the bottles stored in a square Tupperware container up in the kitchen cupboard next to the Kool-Aid packages and the Green Stamps. Twice Frances had climbed on t
he counter to look at the pills. She took them out of their bottles to touch them, and the second time she almost took one, but she decided against it and put them back.
Jimmy didn’t have any more big seizures. But once in a while he had a little one, and he would nod over his dinner plate. He’d snap his head up just in time and then just go on as though nothing had happened. Sometimes his eyes would close while he was watching television, and if Frances saw him, she would wonder how much he had missed. Jimmy himself seemed the least concerned about it.
Their mother worried, and she let Frances know that it was the daughter’s job to worry when the mother was not around. So Frances put this worry in the back of her head with all her other worries. Though, after a while, she did not think specifically about his seizures, the fear she felt that first day she had seen him lose himself hovered in her dreams—dreams of reaching for him before he fell into some blackness and out of her dream. Her nightmares were forgotten in the daytime, but she began to feel more irritated with him, concerned about his uncontrollable ways. And he didn’t like it when she cared so much, called her “Bossy” and “Miss Big Business Beeswax.”
Frances leaned against the TV room doorway. She peeled her banana and watched her brother’s back. He sat forward in the rocker, his boots just touching the floor. A large bowl of cereal was perched on his knees. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew what he looked like. His eyes were opened wide, absorbed, connected to the action on the television, and his mouth was the part of him eating cereal, eating vigorously. Sometimes he would forget, laugh at the cartoon, and milk would dribble out of the corner of his mouth.
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