Song of the Field Insects
Red rover, red rover
The summer’s over
Chk-a-chk mmmm.
By and by
Chk-a-chk mmmm
You too shall die
Chk-a-chk mmmm
Chk-a-chk mmmm
Three Young Men
Three young men stand in the moon-speckled shadow of a copper beech in the corner of the library parking lot. Light from a lantern on a post shines on the recently tarred pavement, which glimmers with a satiny black sheen. The young men stand out of the light, in leaf shadow that isn’t thick enough to keep out the moonlight. The tallest speaks, quietly and urgently.
“Here’s the deal. I walk across the lot to the door. Just out for a little walk minding my own sweet business. I open her up and go in. That’s all there is to it so listen to me. You don’t move and you don’t talk and you stay back here out of sight. Once I get in there I’ll let you know.”
“Where’s the key? You got the key?”
“Key’s right here. Don’t sweat the key.”
“We have to go across the lot?”
“You go straight across the lot. You’re not doing anything wrong, right? so you don’t look like you’re doing anything wrong. Just out for a little stroll, officer. Hey, smile: you’re on Candid Camera.”
“Anybody sees us, we’re dead.”
“Anybody sees you, you’re dead. Anybody sees me, I’m cool. But who’s awake, man? It’s one o’clock in the fucking morning. Just watch for cop cars and play dead. When I’m in there I’ll let you know. Like so. Then you walk. You don’t run. You walk. Piece of cake.”
Smitty walks briskly across the bright parking lot, looking straight ahead, to the dark green door at the side of the library. He opens a fist, revealing a brass key that glints in the yellow light from the bare bulb over the door. He inserts the key, turns, and pushes his way in. From the shadows he motions to Blake and Danny. They hesitate, begin to walk into the glow of the lamppost, stop in confusion. Danny breaks into a run. Blake walks fast, looking left and right.
“Real pretty, real professional,” Smitty says, shutting the door behind them. It is so dark they can’t see each other.
“Now what,” Danny says.
The Woman Who Lives Alone
I am the woman who lives alone. I have no husband, no children, no lover, not even a cat. Please do not think I mind living alone, in my old house, among my things. But on such a night, when the moon is a white blossom in a blue garden, it is good to walk outside in the back yard, and to breathe deep among the zinnias. You who lack the courage to live alone, do not dare to pity me. Only sometimes, on such a night, I would like to hear the sound of voices. We who live alone can grow funny in our habits, because there are no others to tell us about ourselves. Sometimes we put on only one sock. Sometimes we speak aloud, in the warm night air. How good it is, on such a night, to walk about in the yard, to smell the freshness of the grass. Surely there is no law against it.
The Moon and the Mannequin
The moon, climbing so slowly that no one notices, shines down on Main Street. It casts a deep shadow on one side of the street and an eerie brightness on the other, where the sidewalk is bone-white and the little glass windows of the parking meters glisten as if they are wet. In the store windows you can see far back. Moonlight shines on jars of olives and loaves of hardcrusted bread in the window of the Italian grocery. It shines on rows of eyeglass frames that cast long, sharp shadows on the optometrist’s wall, it shines on the brilliant white towel on the back of the barber’s chair and the glass bottles reflected in the glimmer of the barber’s mirror. It shines on the breakfast table with its four empty cereal bowls patterned with apples, on the folded shirts and striped neckties, on the white sandals of the mannequin in the department-store window. Moonlight lies on her cheeks, on her long fingers and half-parted lips. She feels the moonlight penetrating her fiberglass skin, soothing her, lulling her will; she feels a swooning languor combined with a secret excitement, a loosening of the rigorous bonds of her nature. Under the rays of moonlight, her hidden life is awaking. There is a tremor in her fingers; one hand bends slightly at the wrist. Behind her sunglasses, slowly her eyelids close and open.
The Children Wake
In rooms with windows looking out at moonlit yards, in beds with covers picturing bears and ballerinas, the children begin to wake. Through the summer screens they hear dim music rising slowly and slowly falling, a dim and distant music, calling. What is that dim music? The children push the covers back, swing their legs quickly over the bedside. Their eyes are alert, their heads tipped slightly to one side, on the smooth skin between their eyebrows faint lines of concentration appear.
Stillness
Janet’s yard is absolutely still. It looks to her like a painting of a yard at night: BACK YARD: SUMMER NIGHT. Or maybe it’s called GIRL IN WINDOW, WAITING. Only an idiot would stay kneeling at a window on a summer night, waiting, and for what?—not that there’s anything better to do. She wonders if she’s visible from down there. The yard is bordered on the right by a tall hedge that can be trimmed only if you stand on a stepladder. At the bottom the stems are thick, like tree branches, with spaces to crawl through. To the left is the garage, the long side in shadow, the front white-brilliant in moonlight. The back of the yard is bordered by a stand of evergreens, spruce and a few Scotch pines, behind which a wire fence separates the yard from the next yard. And after that: another yard. Yard after yard, little rectangles, stretching to the end of town, stretching all the way across America. Maybe you could duck through hedges, climb fences, pass sandboxes and baseball bats, and one day, pushing through the last hedge, suddenly—violins, please!—the Pacific. And all the lovely summer life of yards: kids playing tag, badminton nets, barbecues, people lounging around in aluminum folding chairs, beach towels drying on the porch rail, night voices drifting up to your window. But now the yard is still—asleep—bound in a spell. In front of the trees, not quite belonging to them, is the big old silver maple, tall and thick-trunked. From one high branch hangs a rope swing. Most of the wooden seat is in shadow, but an edge catches the moonlight. But the swing can never swing, and the girl in the window can never turn her head, because they’re both trapped in the painting. Everything is motionless, so motionless that it seems to Janet that motion is being held back, as if the yard has taken a deep breath and is trying not to let it out—at any moment an accident will happen, a telltale movement will take place. Or maybe the yard is filling up with stillness, a stillness that will become greater and greater till finally it brims over. At the window Janet waits, afraid to move.
The Man with Green Eyes
William Cooper, twenty-eight years old, known as Coop to the guys at Big Mama’s, sets his beer glass carefully down in the exact center of the scallop-edged paper napkin, rises unsteadily from the red leatherette seat in the booth, and raises his fingertips to his temple in a salute that takes in the bartender, the guys in the booth, the crowded tables, the brown and red and green bottles reflected in the mirror behind the bar, the pewter steins hanging from hooks, before he turns on his heel and makes his way out to the street. The air is warm, almost hot, but with a touch of coolness wrapped up in the warmth, and the strangeness of it strikes him: the night air warm and cool, the sky dark and bright— there’s a thought there somewhere, if only he can stop things from turning. Coop passes the lit-up window of Curtis’s Electric Supply, where he glances at the porcelain table lamps with pink shades, the glass-paneled lanterns with black-enameled frames, the neat packages of wall switches and socket mounts. At the drugstore he looks at the far lightbulb shining on the pharmacy counter, sort of pretty back there, before he pauses at the cardboard cutout of a blue-eyed blonde in a white bikini. She’s always there, night after night, holding up a bottle of soda covered with big drops of moisture. Her teeth are whiter than the bathing suit, her tanned shoulders are glossy as new baseball bats. Her breasts, the size of
kickballs, seem to be smiling too. She’s friendly, available, everybody’s favorite girl, high school cheerleader in cute white skirt, life of the party, a million laughs, Miss Popularity, a real knockout, man is she built, get a load a that, check her out, but Coop is disdainful. She is nothing compared to the lady he loves, the high-class lady who doesn’t offer herself to every passerby but holds herself cool and aloof, out of reach, a little high-and-mighty maybe but that’s all right, a woman has to protect herself. In the window he sees his own dim reflection staring: coppery hair, green eyes, red-cracked whites. He looks quickly away and sees himself looking quickly away. Guilty, yer honor. Coop crosses a side street, glances down it at the power lines above the railroad tracks, and continues along the sidewalk on Main. He passes the window of volleyballs and basketballs, the window of pens and leather notebooks, the window bathed in cool blue light showing a poster of a tropical island with a palm tree, a flamingo, and a woman in an orange bathing suit lying on her stomach on white sand with one leg raised at the knee. Now that’s more like it, Coop thinks: a woman alone, a woman with secrets. But he’s getting closer, already he’s crossing another street. The blue mailbox shining in the light of the corner streetlamp makes him think of a gigantic moneybank. As a kid he had a tin moneybank shaped like a mailbox, never saved more than a dollar. Story of his life. He passes the barber shop and the Italian grocery with its basket of twisted bread. As he comes to the first window of the department store, with its breakfast table set for four, he takes a deep breath, trying to calm himself.
Haverstraw Speaks
Haverstraw sits on the worn maroon couch with its faint shine on the curve of the right arm. Beside him on the lamp table a glass of ice water rests on a cork-bottomed coaster with a white-tiled top picturing a blue Yankee clipper. Beside the glass is a cereal bowl filled with pretzel sticks. Across from him, on the brown armchair, Mrs. Kasco sits with her legs tucked up, her fuzzy red slippers lying on the rug. She holds a cigarette in her right hand and a glass of red wine in the left. On the table beside her are a lamp, a green glass ashtray shaped like a leaf with a stem, and two books: an old hardback copy of Jennie Gerhardt with a faded title, and a fat library book called The Arms of Krupp. A rattling floor fan blows directly at her, stirring her kimono and fluttering the blue smoke that drifts to the ceiling. Through the trembling smoke Haverstraw sees the stairway banister and the old bookcase in which he can make out a broken-spined Modern Library Giant edition of Studs Lonigan and two volumes of The Decline of the West. On top of the bookcase, cutting into the line of the balusters, an Unabridged Webster’s, Second Edition, lies open, one side higher than the other. A red eyeglass case rests in the valley where the pages meet. Mrs. Kasco’s brown, intelligent, slightly prominent eyes behind her blue-framed glasses are watching him intently as he speaks.
“What bothers me I guess is the lie of it all, I mean the inevitable lie of the form itself, since the second you say ‘I’ you’re immediately separating yourself from the person you’re claiming yourself to be, am I making myself clear, so that the ‘I’ which is supposed to be the sign of authenticity is really the most devious pronoun of all, nothing but a ‘he’ in disguise, a ‘he’ with false beard and mustache. Because when you say ‘I’ you’re no longer the ‘I’ you claim to be, but someone else, a stranger spied on by your present self, separate, severed, estranged. Am I making myself clear? I sat down. What can it mean except The stranger sat down, the one I once was but no longer am? And so I protest against the false intimacy, the pretense that this alien ‘I,’ this stranger, is putting you right there, at the moment of the act. But even aside from that, aside from that, there’s the worse problem of reporting anything with even a shred of accuracy, a shred. Hopeless. Because the slightest act, the lifting of my left pinkie, is accompanied by a thousand thoughts and sensations, which surround it like a, like a, hell I don’t know, a halo, or no, say a suffusion, an emanation, and without these sensations you’re writing abstractions, generalizations, do you know what I … Take nouns. Every noun names a class. It’s a summary, a blur. But my bed, my chair, my window, these are as precise as my whole life, do you follow me. And so it’s hard, I keep losing the thread, what with the lie of the ‘I’ and the lie of the noun, the awful simplifications that pass themselves off as memory. Memory! What do they mean by memory, anyway? That passage I read you by what’s-his-name, remember? about the araucarias. You look at the araucarias, all the intricacies of their leaves and branches are impressed on your retina, you see them with absolute authority, but the next day a slight blurring is noticeable, in a week you remember the trees but without that intensity of exactness, and in a year? Ten years? And that’s true of all memory. So what is memory after all but an act of forgetting, of omission. And so there’s nothing but loss, falling away, carelessness, oblivion. Lies, all lies.”
“Well, but hold your horses here. Aren’t you leaving something out?”
“Oh sure, sure, you mean my debt to society and all that dead Marxist crap.”
“You could do a hell of a lot worse than read a little Marx, my friend. It wouldn’t hurt you one little bit to think about class, about class values.”
“All I ask of society is to let me paddle my own canoe.”
“Right. Perfect. And who do you think rents you the canoe? Who gives you permission to use the stream? Where does the money come from that lets you do your paddling? But listen, I meant something else. You were speaking about memory.”
“I don’t remember. That’s a joke, by the way.”
“You said there’s nothing but forgetting. But what about those little sharp memories, we all have them. I forget say a whole summer, but I remember one teacup—the chip near the handle, the tea stains along the rim. So it’s not true, exactly, what you say.”
“But don’t you see how that just exactly supports what I’ve been killing myself trying to say? You admit the blur, the loss, a whole summer gone, I mean you might as well not’ve lived at all, good-bye cruel world!—and up rises one lousy teacup, one pathetic little crummy teacup, which only by contrast seems a miracle of precision. But in itself it’s— it’s nothing, a rough sketch, a blur, you don’t see it at all, not in anything like its full marvelous detail, it’s just a few broken bits washed up on shore after a shipwreck. Or it’s like one of those characters in Dickens. You know: red nose, stiff collar, chalky shirtcuff. Nothing but that. All the rest invisible.”
“But you see that character. You fill him in.”
“But that’s the point! You fill him in. You fill him in with your imagination. That’s just exactly the godforsaken point. You fill him in. Memory keeps turning into imagination. The world—the fact—the actual—keeps slipping away. Memory is impossible. The whole enterprise is doomed.”
“And you really believe that? That it’s hopeless?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.”
Chorus of Night Voices
Come out, come out, wherever you are, you dreamers and drowners, you loafers and losers, you shadow-seekers and orphans of the sun. Come out, come out, you flops and fizzlers, you good-for-nothings and down-and-outers, day’s outcasts, dark’s little darlin’s. Come on, all you who are misbegotten and woebegone, all you with black thoughts and red fever-visions, come on, you small-town Ishmaels with your sad blue eyes, you plain Janes and hard-luck guys, come, you gripers and groaners, you goners and loners, you sad-sacks and shlemiels, come on, come on, you pale romantics and pie-eyed Palookas, you has-beens and never-will-bes, you sun-mocked and day-doomed denizens of the dark: come out into the night.
The Dolls Wake
In the attics of the town, the dolls begin to wake. These are not dolls in the freshness of their youth, the dolls who dwell in children’s bedrooms, but old, abandoned dolls, no longer believed in. They lean back against boxes of old dishes, sit slumped on broken-backed chairs, lie face down on attic floorboards. Unremembered, unimagined, unenlivened by the attention of their owners, they lie drained and em
pty, stiff as dead flowers. But on this summer night, when the almost full moon wakens sleepers in their beds, the dolls in their long slumber begin to stir. The cloth doll with yellow yarn hair and painted blue eyes sits up and smooths her rumpled apron. The one-eyed cuddly bear looks about. The dusty elephant raises his trunk, the Dutch doll with hard-lashed eyes glances toward Little Boy Blue, Columbine flutters her eyelashes and turns away from Pierrot, who sorrowfully bows his flour-pale head, while in the puppet theater the hook-nosed man with very black eyebrows and a very sharp chin stares at the girl with blond braids and a turned-up nose, who steals a glance at the blue-eyed drummer boy stirring in his sleep and dreaming of a high tower, a forest of thorns, a princess slowly opening her eyes.
Enchanted Night Page 2