Babylon Rolling

by Amanda Boyden

  “I can feel them shrinking,” he says. “Really.”

  She supposes he refers to the multiple tumors. He speaks of an impossibility, but she can play along for the time being. He has always put a well-appointed roof over her head, if nothing else. “I am happy,” she tells him.

  “Are you?”

  How does he intend the question? Lately he joshes so much she does not know how to interpret what he says.

  “Are you?” he repeats.

  “Am I happy that you feel good tonight?” she asks.

  “No. Are you happy?”

  She did not anticipate such a deliberate question from her husband. They have moved through separate corridors for so many years of their married life that she has learned to expect nothing from him but inane banter. Small talk, as they say. After some contemplation, she tells him, “I think for you to ask me such a question when you attend chemotherapy appointments is unfair. Would you believe me to be happy right now?”

  “You should be,” he says, seeming to have hardly heard her at all. “There’s no time like the present. Live your life, Philomenia. Come here and give me a kiss.”

  What? “I beg your pardon?”

  “Come on. Your mother didn’t make it to sixty, Phil. Live it up. Live!”

  Her mother is not an allowable topic of discussion. This, too, Joe knows. The break in weather has provoked him towards impertinence. Philomenia frowns.

  “I know I’m not supposed to talk about it, but hell, you might well inherit what she had. Time is short, don’t you understand? Live life! There’s beauty in everything!”

  She has had enough of listening to the man who has lived a disrespectful life. She will not live life as he has, nor will she entertain his hollering any longer.

  “I am going to clean,” she says, standing.

  “I’ll help,” Joe says, sitting straight up.

  “You will not,” Philomenia says, righting the seams of her skirt.

  “I could if you let me.”

  She will not let him. Her watching hour approaches.

  Ed Flank exits his front door carrying both a glass and a bottle, Prancie sees. He has altered his pattern of behavior since returning from his evacuation with his children and the neighbors. Numerous times in the last weeks, she has seen him drink two and sometimes three glasses of his dark liquor on his porch at night. He does not seem to be enjoying his life in the same way he did before the threat of Ivan. His wife, Ariel, on the other hand, seems very light on her feet these days.

  Now Ed pours himself a drink and sighs loudly. Some months ago, Prancie carried one of the back garden’s Asian stools to the front porch. She can swivel on its ceramic top to view any of the neighbors without being heard. A number of times lately Ed has stared directly at her position for great lengths of time. In such circumstances, Prancie reminds herself that she cannot be seen and studies the man’s face for what must be occurring, or not occurring, inside his brain. She senses that he is having troubles. She could have predicted as much. She has predicted as much.

  Joe will be having surgery to remove an additional portion of his intestine and must enter the hospital the evening before the procedure. The timing means that Prancie is allowed the happiest of Thanksgiving meals with her friends at the Tokyo Rose. She deposits Joe early, mid-afternoon, promising to return the next morning. Aware that Philomenia wanted to share her cooking with others, Joe approved her budget for a full dinner.

  She has cooked since dawn. Her work will culminate shortly with the exodus of the bird from the oven. Twenty-five pounds will go quickly across the street, but she has other dishes. Pies, dressing, yams, mirliton casserole. She has decided to invite Shane to help her carry her fare when the time comes. She will not invite him into her home, since that might be perceived as improper, but she can place the covered dishes at the ready on her porch.

  She has chosen a casual dress that exposes her clavicles as well as her calves and knees.

  Cover your knees, Philomenia.

  “Cover your knees, Philomenia,” her mother told her.

  “Pardon?” Philomenia asked. She and her party guests celebrated her seventh birthday.

  “Place your napkin not only in your lap,” her mother instructed, “but cover your knees when you wear a short lower garment. It blocks any untoward viewing.”

  Philomenia looked around at her party guests in the backyard. Some girls had yet to come to the table, happier instead to make giant dish-liquid bubbles with the large wire Os the housekeeper’s husband had fashioned for the day. Why, on this of all days, did she need to behave properly?

  “Do as I say.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” She never knew to respond otherwise.

  Indeed, she still does not, although her visits across the street are beginning to arrest some of what has been unkindly described as her ‘unflinching formality.’ Those words came directly from Thirsty’s very own mouth. It is what she has decided to name Thurman. And shame on him for saying them. Still.

  In all her days since her seventh birthday, Philomenia has yet to expose herself to any untoward viewing while wearing a short garment.

  She allows Shane the pleasure of carrying over the bird under its foil hood.

  “It’s a thing of beauty,” he says for the second time. “Honestly, Miss P, this is the finest damn bird I’ve seen in years.”

  Prancie feels herself glowing. As they carry food across the street, Roy Brown waves to them from behind his oil barrel grill. The man must have strength the stores of which she cannot imagine to cook on the apparatus again.

  Sharon Harris deep-fried a turkey in her crawfish pot earlier. Prancie had been on her way to checking with Thirsty about utensils. Sharon said that she and Nate were going to attend the opening day at the racetrack. She proclaimed the appropriation of a most spectacular hat for the occasion from her sister-in-law. “It got a peacock feather,” Sharon said, and Prancie nodded and then smiled.

  Sharon would not quiet, however. “You been nice to those Tokyo people lately,” she said. “That nice.”

  Fortunately, Prancie had anticipated the day she would be confronted with her actions. “There is that adage about joining them if you cannot beat them,” Prancie said.

  “They’s that,” Sharon said. “How’s Joe?”

  “Tomorrow is the second surgery.”

  “He’s in my prayers.”

  “Thank you.” Prancie walked on, stopped, started, decided to change her path, and returned to Sharon. “Thank you. I will tell him.”

  “Hey,” Sharon said. “I know a lot about blood. You get me his numbers, I can tell you what’s goin’ on under his skin.”

  Prancie nodded, not immediately knowing why she had returned to speak with Sharon. Suddenly, Sharon’s suggestion made sense. Why not deliver blood test results to her neighbor? Joe’s doctors so often spoke in terms absolutely indeterminate. Sharon could help Prancie know just how many days they had before the inevitable.

  “White cells and what,” Sharon continued. “I know how to read ’em even if I’m still over at Delgado.”

  “That would be very helpful,” Prancie said. “Thank you. And happy Thanksgiving.”

  “Ain’t it about helpin’?”

  “Most certainly,” Prancie agreed even as she realized that what the woman offered was likely nothing more than a neighborly pleasantry.

  Now Prancie decides to find out how Cerise is faring since her skin graft. For to be social on Thanksgiving, as she has been reminded by Sharon Harris, is what the holiday calls for. “Happy Thanksgiving, Mr. Roy,” she says, gesturing with her shoulder to Shane to continue carrying the turkey into the Tokyo Rose.

  “Back atcha, Miss Philomenia,” he says. “Back atcha. Happy Thanksgiving for sure. We have plenty to give thanks for.”

  “That we do,” she says. “Tell me, how is Cerise managing?”

  “Well, she doin’ alright. She doin’ alright. Making her fingers work normal ain’t the easiest, but she
has two hands again without no bandages.”

  “Then it is a real Thanksgiving.”

  “An’ Joe?”

  “The second surgery is tomorrow.”

  “Bless his soul.”

  Prancie has no intention, but she need not tell kind old Roy that. “Is your family coming over?”

  “Any minute, Miss Philomenia. How you know? Any minute.”

  She shifts her large bowl of dressing to rest on the other hip. “And what goes on the grill today?”

  “Cherry making me do things fancy. She can’t stop watchin’ that

  FoodTV or what’s it called. I think she just trying to fuss with my cholesterol in secret. We got oysters she wants me put on the grill. On the grill! They get topped with something vinegary. And the shrimps, but she have me stickin’ ’em on skewers with no butter. And corn. She says it tastes best grilled. But the best part? She got some ostrich meat from Mandeville. Ostrich steaks! A teeny bitty ol’ thing of a turkey in the oven on purpose ’cause we got ostrich meat on the grill! How crazy that is, huh?”

  Prancie has long suspected that Cerise’s cooking would likely rival her own. Now she knows as much. Someday they should exchange recipes. Before they die, Prancie thinks suddenly. “It sounds delicious,” she says.

  She feels a presence approach from behind her. “Hello,” a man says. Prancie knows his voice before she turns.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Ed Flank says.

  “You? You kidding? You interrupt me the rest of your life, young man.”

  “I’m on the prowl for poultry seasoning. Do either of you have any left?”

  “Oooh! You don’t got your bird in the oven by now, you eatin’ at midnight, Rescue Man!”

  Prancie surveys the man from the side. He is still fit. He appears sober. “Hello, Ed,” she says.

  “Happy Thanksgiving,” he replies. “No. It’s for the basting butter. I ran out. I have more butter but no more poultry seasoning.”

  “An’ why I think you’s a vegetarian? You making a bird today like everybody else.”

  Prancie says nothing.

  “I try,” Ed says, “but I lapse on holidays. Sometimes purposely.”

  No doubt he lapses in other areas as well.

  “Sure. Cherry done got every spice known to man. And then some not known to no man.” Roy laughs hard at his own joke.

  Ed seems to find it equally funny.

  Prancie stands and smiles because she is expected to. She does not understand Roy’s joke. “Well, I am off to feed the masses.” She tosses her hand in the air to indicate the Tokyo Rose. “They would eat hot dogs, otherwise,” she adds.

  “That’s incredibly generous of you,” Ed says. “I’m sure they’re grateful.”

  Are they? Prancie cannot say, but it has become a thing more about her, as it were. This much she recognizes. She dances in her kitchen now four days a week. And, too, because they are not drinking on empty stomachs, fewer patrons have vomited on her yard in recent months. “Good bye,” she says.

  15

  Ariel and Ed wrap presents on their bedroom floor. Ariel can’t remember when she last attempted the task. Ed has his practical uses. A tube of green foil paper in his hand, he straddles a box not far away. They have maybe four hours tops before the kids wake up.

  “Miles has got to know,” Ariel says.

  “He does,” Ed says, the wrapping paper obscuring his face.

  “He knows there’s no Santa Claus?”

  “I had to tell him a couple of weeks ago.”

  “You didn’t think the subject was important enough to tell me?”

  Ed keeps wrapping. “When would I have done that?”

  “What? Has he promised to keep it a secret?”

  “Well, he’s Miles. We’ll see.”

  A cardboard wheel of ribbon escapes Ariel, rolling under the bed. “Don’t tell me some … some nothing, Ed. You’re here every day. I’m not. Do you think Miles has ruined Ella’s Christmas?”

  Ed shrugs and goes after the wheel. “Can either one of us stop him if that’s his intention? I asked him not to tell. But he’s his own person.” He hands the ribbon back to Ariel.

  Ariel is so sick of Ed’s Buddhist parenting she would like to cram a candy cane down his platitude-spouting throat. “Has she said anything?”

  “Who?”

  How can he not even know who she means? “Ella, Ed. Ella.”

  “She’s all about the Grinch this year. The Jim Carrey one, not the animated one.”

  And so? “What do the Grinch and Santa Claus have to do with one another?”

  Ed stops wrapping. “Are you asking me that question seriously? In a five-year-old’s mind, what do the Grinch and Santa Claus have to do with one another?”

  It’s in her contract that Ariel takes off both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. She wishes she had some work emergency, but even that wouldn’t alleviate her agitation. Henny has brought her family in for the holidays. Javier isn’t possibly available till the 27th, not that he’s even the actual diversion Ariel’s interested in. Life just comes at you, she thinks. At the moment, she has no idea what she wants. Maybe only that Miles has not told his sister that there’s no Santa Claus.

  Ariel feels her nostalgia for the holidays dissipating. She used to love them. Since she graduated from college, until they moved here, she collected glass ornaments, no permanent home in sight. Her long-term monogamous relationships, her hippies and her brokers and her lawyers and her musicians, none of them understood the boxes of ornaments. Ariel’s not sure she understood them herself. Boxes of Christmas tree decorations take up a lot of space in the back of a Volkswagen van no matter what. In a BMW trunk, almost nothing else will fit.

  Buddhists have a strange sort of appeal. Ed wooed her without wooing her. They, Buddhists, somehow make her think of vegans, although you can choose to eat meat if you want to when you’re a Buddhist. They’re not actually the same thing. Best Ariel understands it, when you’re a vegan, you lop off both extreme ends of the eating spectrum. Nothing animal, obviously, nothing processed or messed-with. She forgets, exactly, what’s on the other end of the spectrum. Sugar? Alcohol? She always wants to compare it to the color spectrum, but she never remembers what comes after purple on the wheel or after starchy vegetables on the lineup of food. The forbidden you don’t even know is forbidden.

  Ed was just, solidly, in the middle. Accepting of anything. Or accepting with an overriding conscience: do the least harm.

  Objectively, Ed is a score. Really. He’s attentive, procreating, a cook. Liberal. Tallish. He follows Ariel where she needs to go for her work. But, too, it’s as if the extremes of his personality have been sanded away on purpose. He has purposely sat his own ass under a gigantic sander and allowed his furious anger and crying joy to be abraded away. Where is his passion? Has she ever seen it? He was a Buddhist when they met, and when they met, nothing felt more necessary, more comfortable, more easy than dating a Buddhist. Still, she knows his beliefs have never been as simple as ‘Hey, whatever.’

  These days, though, she’s beginning to feel from Ed that it’s a ‘Hey, whatever, glad you’re home, and now I’m going to have a drink out on the porch away from you.’ He never really drank before.

  Ariel pulls off a length of ribbon. “Ella might not have a great Christmas if she finds out there’s no Santa Claus.”

  “Of course there’s a Santa Claus.” His optimism is not contagious.

  “Would Miles be so deliberately cruel? He knows how old his sister is.”

  “Oh, Christ, Ariel. Wait. Excuse me. How about ‘shit’? Does ‘shit’ work? Shit, Ariel, where have you been? You’re gone for more than work.”

  “So, we’re going to fight on Christmas Eve?” She gestures with the scissors. “I really don’t want to fight.”

  Ed scoffs. “We’ll make love then, not war. Right, Ariel? Isn’t that right?” His pointedness is ungainly, she thinks.

  They’ve had sex a couple of times lately.
It sucked, but Ariel believed Ed forced her to acknowledge the intimacy of the act, something she found stupidly difficult. After all this time—and he doesn’t know—why would it suddenly feel so hard to fuck her husband?

  “I just hope Ella gets to enjoy Christmas morning a few more years,” she says.

  “Nice deflection there, Ariel.”

  “You really want to fight on Christmas Eve?”

  “What’d you get me this year?” Ed asks.

  She’s had next to no time to shop, and he knows it. She got him a couple of shirts. They’re in a bag on the floor of her closet. “Why would I tell you that?”

  He rests the green foil roll on his lap. “Do you want to know what I want for Christmas? You didn’t ask.”

  She will not be sad tonight. She doesn’t have it in her. Why the hell is he pushing her? “What do you want for Christmas, Ed?”

  “You. I want you back.”

  “I’m right here.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  Ariel sighs and looks at the box she’s wrapping, an encased-behind-plastic hoochie fur Barbie coat with white go-go boots and a lavender glitter dress. When did Barbie go ghetto? When did Ed find the time away from the kids to buy this box of shit she knows he doesn’t believe in but bought out of love for their daughter, this box of shit Ariel knows Ella’s going to go nuts for?

  Ariel understands exactly what Ed means. She won’t acknowledge it in the slightest. She just can’t. She is her own person too. She doesn’t have to be only wife-mother, only mother-wife. She’s allowed to be an independent human. “Whatever,” she says.

  The lavender glitter dress makes her want to cry.

  Fearius, he the man in this group, no question. He and Taliqwa been banging what, five days now, but on New Years Eve, when Fearius hold whatever anybody need for smoking on top of holding Taliqwas ass in his hand, he the man. He wearin a new down coat with a hood trimmed out in real fur. A fat bottle of cognac in his pocket, advertising he set for the night.

  They there for the Mid City bonfires on the boulevard that get set blazing at midnight. The firecrackers going mad already, peoples everywhere, way more than a thousand, maybe like two, three thousand. Taliqwa and Fearius, and her four friends matched up in couples two n two, came over together in one of the moms borrowed Camrys. Taliqwas girlfriend pull a roller cooler with cold drinks in it. Taliqwa say she dont want to stay too long case she has to pee cause she dont like peeing in no grass.