Joyland Trio Deal

by Jim Hanas

  It was very difficult for Nanny, for my mum, to care for the three of us alone, although she was light three brothers and a husband, so, in some ways it was easier. She had such strong arms that could lift my body from the floor and clutch me to her soft enormous bosom. I stroked and kissed the long black curls of her hair as she marched around with me. She had the steady straight gait of a young woman, sure of herself in the absence of men. Except for the odd night we heard her crying on the dusty bed and we went to her together, crawling under the blankets, surrounding her with our arms and legs, I would have thought that life was fine without any daddies or uncles.

  One day she carried me around the market filling up my pram with groceries. I sat on her hip and helped her choose Cox’s Orange Pippin apples from the tilted wood boxes outside the store. She handed me the brightest ones and I squeezed them and smelled them and held them up to the sunlight. I was very serious and careful so I didn’t notice the woman following us from stall to stall. Nora was twenty or twenty-one. She was pale and round-faced, drab and thin, and lonely-looking. She threaded through the throngs of women always staying near enough to almost touch my collar. My mother became nervous, looking over my shoulder and clutching me too tightly as she pushed the stacked pram. I was hot and annoyed, so I cried out. My tears made Nora break through the last boundary between us. She touched me, stroked my head, and whispered. Mum recoiled.

  “Don’t touch my child,” she shrieked, “What do you want?”

  Nora took her hand way. She stared beseeching into my mother’s unrepentant gray eyes.

  “I only want to see the little boy,” she tried. “He’s so lovely. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  Natasha, I will never understand why Mum . . . I mean with you girls, I would never have handed you to a stranger. But I guess that those were strange days and the dynamic of the culture was very different without men. Mum says she trusted Nora; she felt sorry for her, and so she handed me to her and said, “There then, you can hold him for a minute while I choose some vegetables.”

  Close up, Nora’s clothes looked ragged. She held herself like a respectable woman, straight, and looking ahead, not down or away to some imaginary place. She wore a silver cross at her throat and she had a little Bible sac tied to her waist. But the hem of her skirt had fallen, and tears in her blouse were patched with squares from a sheet or pillowcase.

  “Have you got anyone?” Mum asked her softly. There were women who were simply abandoned in every city at that time.

  “No,” Nora lied.

  So we took her home, trailing us like a thin hound. And she belonged to our family until long after the war ended.

  We all wanted Nora’s love. Having someone new in the house made us cheerful but competitive. Brian and Joyce did cartwheels to make her laugh. Mum took in her old dresses and sewed new buttons on the front to give to Nora. I clung to her legs and rubbed my face in her skirts.

  Nora took care of us all, but I was her favorite. Nora adored me. She trailed her fingers over my cheeks and arms and kissed me anywhere she could. She used to sniff my hair and skin like the very smell of me drugged her. I was moved into her arms and we slept on the settee by the electric fire at night, and my sister joined my brother in the proper bedroom.

  Nora dressed me and bathed me with a towel dipped in water she warmed on the stove while everyone was still asleep. She played with me while Mum chased Brian and Joyce into the steel tub in the kitchen and dumped buckets of cold water over their shivering skins. She still carried me even though my mother insisted that I must begin to use my legs. Nora couldn’t bear to hear me cry, so she hid a cache of soothers in her skirts. Whenever Mum took one away Nora passed me another. She bartered her few belongings (a comb, a beaded purse with a hole in the bottom, stockings, and a book with a green leather cover) to buy us sweets when the rations ran out. I loved her ugly face, and the gentle manner of her rough hands. I loved to stand behind her and play with her hair while she whispered prayers, kneeling on the floor. I loved her breathy, parsley scented snore, and the hot security of being held in place under a blanket while I slept.

  But the neighbors were very leery of Nora. They warned my mother about taking in a stranger. No one had ever seen her before and that alone provoked fantasies of a foreign threat.

  On a rare sunny day Mum arrived home from the market whistling. She called to Nora and me as she emptied the string bags on the counter and sorted the groceries. She called again as she wiped her hands on her apron and set the kettle on the stove. She walked into the hallway to shout up the stairs, “Russell, Nora.”

  The house swallowed the sound of her voice. Frantic, she ran to the neighbors and asked if they had seen us leave. Door by door the search party gathered. They prowled up to the market, to my brother and sister’s school, to the bakery with my favorite jam donuts, ’round the pub with the extra large chips, through the burned-out wheat field outside the church, through the graveyard where my family was buried.

  Finally, in the distance, in the wet sand by the hare-lipped waves they saw us. We were sitting on the shore and Nora was holding a seashell to my ear. My mother felt her body awash with brutal shame. Nora had taken me to hear the ocean and coaxed me to imagine my daddy’s voice carried across the water and folded into a shell.

  I WAS THREE WHEN THE war ended and that’s when I first met my dad. On the day that he was to come home, Mum dressed me in my little man suit and put me outside to greet him. A tall gentleman in uniform walked up the steps. He ruffled my hair and began pulling stockings from his pockets until he found a candy bar. He pressed a piece of chocolate into my palm and entered my house. He walked into the living room and kissed Joyce, then Brian. He kissed Mum and held her hips and kissed her again. He nodded politely at Nora.

  “Where is the little one?” he asked.

  “Why George,” Mum answered, “he was waiting on the steps for you. You must have walked right past him.”

  They came out to where I was and saw me staring, steady at the road. He raised me up as if I weighed what a kitten weighs. With me on his shoulder, he walked back into a house broken in by a family he no longer recognized.

  ANOTHER FEW YEARS PASSED AND Nora grew stout. Her voice became as loud as my mother’s, as loud as the dog barking next door. And then one day her brother arrived to take her home. He came to the door with dust on his shoulders and holes in the armpits of his jacket, and said who he was to her, not his name, and not his reason for wanting her. He looked as disheveled and angry as she had once looked ragged and lonely.

  I could tell that my mother had never heard of him. She made him repeat again what he said as if trying to catch him in a lie.

  “I’m her brother,” he said. “Get out of my way. I’m taking her home.”

  My mother stepped back from the door, dragging her toes. He walked in, took our silent Nora by the arm, and led her out of our lives.

  Months later we were sitting around the table eating dinner. Brian was playing spoons on his leg and Joyce and I were bickering when someone came to the door. My mother escaped us and walked down the hall.

  “Yes,” I heard her say. “Yes,” she said again. And then, “I see. Thank you.”

  I didn’t hear another voice; the message was delivered so quietly. She returned to the table and looked at her cutlery as if she didn’t know what it was for.

  “What is it, Eileen?” my father asked.

  “That was Mrs. Morgan,” she said.

  Mrs. Morgan had a phone and she took calls, when they came, for everyone on Rumney Street.

  “Nora’s dead,” Mum said.

  “Oh God, how did she die, Eileen?” my father asked.

  My mother tossed her hair and swung a look around to tell us that she could see our ears.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t ask.”

  “Who called to tell you?” Joyce asked.
>
  There was silence around the table.

  THERE WERE RUMORS AMONG THE children that Nora’s brother beat her and threw her out into the street. There were rumors that she threw herself down a stone staircase. There were rumors of incest, of illness, and of alcoholism. But there was no doubt that her warm arms and hands and lips and breath were gone forever from my person.

  I looked for her in crowds for years. I even went down to Tiger Bay alone when I was ten, because that’s where the lost sometimes were found, sleeping in the shacks with the prostitutes, or drinking on the docks with the poor black fishermen.

  The bay was almost abandoned. I saw no sign of evil men or women. I saw an old man with skin like an eel’s, dark, and so wet with the mist. His white hair was short and neat beneath a cap. He held a pipe with a bowl shaped like a gaping fish between his lips as he sat in a chair on the dock watching the solemn waves sloping in the bay.

  Because he must have sat there forever, I asked him if he remembered Nora, maybe he had seen her being dragged up from the water. The wind was loud and I didn’t know if he could hear me, so I shouted my questions. He shook his head, no, and then offered me a seat in his chair.

  I walked home for long wet hours from Tiger Bay, stomping in the puddled rain and chanting to myself between bitter breaths, “I will not accept failures; I will not accept death. I will not accept failures; I will not accept death.”

  Miles later, tired and undone, I fell into bed and slept off all my grief. There was never any sign of her in Cardiff and I don’t know where her brother came from that day he took her away. I forgot most of that old sadness. I guess that’s the reason I never mention Nora.

  Your mother is watching JAG on TV beside me. She says to say she loves you. I like the navy cardigan you sent me and I’m wearing it now. Someone told me I look like a big-nosed Cary Grant when I wear it. I hope you and your sister are taking care of each other. Try not to imagine the way Nora ended. It would embarrass her.

  Love you,

  Dad

  Pinhole

  THEY WILL ARGUE OVER BREAKFAST and so be pensive in the car as the wipers grapple with the sheets of rain and the defogger will be broken or at least useless. The landscape will wash away and reappear and wash away, making her think of that one shot she took of the flooded Seine, how flat it was so that the water seemed like something you could walk on and the trailing branches of the tree became like fingers stroking the changed space. Still, she will think, it didn’t work exactly the way she had expected. And then she will think that the camera doesn’t ever show what she sees, but only what it sees.

  He will put his spare hand on her neck under her hair to let her know that he still wants the day to go well. She will swallow and try again to close the stupid window on her side more tightly. It will be a good day, but they won’t know that until it’s almost over.

  At the gallery he will pay for their entry even though she snapped over the cereal that since it was all about her work she would pay. There will be a long discussion with a fat guard about the size of her bag and what it holds. The guard will look angry and then amused and then bored and then he will just stop talking, stop listening, and she will know that everything is all right. On the second floor, she will drift to the coffee stand and search for a peacemaking pastry. With two cups in her hands and a paper bag folded into her armpit and the heavy bag of equipment in her backpack she will be awkward as she weaves through the red plastic café chairs, and the coffee will slosh out of the rip in the lid, onto her hand, making her wince. He will see this and think emphatically, I love you.

  The elevator to the top of the gallery will be impossibly long and silver-colored, and the view of the city from the glass wall so broad, so lovely and wet and brown that she will forget her plan to photograph a painting from the point of view of another painting on the opposite wall or else to photograph a busy room from a central bench so that the numerous drifting gazers barely register as ghosts walking through each other and the paintings and sculptures become the real occupants. She will remember that shot of the statue preparing to fly through the window, and how, when everything is still, as it is in a photograph, then everything is equal.

  The paintings will still be there to look at each other in another photograph. There is always more time. More time, but not more speed, the speedy get lost in her photographs. When everything else in a day tells her that she must get it together quickly — find her keys and the map and sort out lunch and return her father’s call and step onto the metro before the doors close — the camera will remind her that the messy details pressing for attention in the present evaporate almost as soon as they emerge. What is left behind will be a window into the brain of time. Because the camera will see things as if through the eye of a nautilus, the camera will be the companion who best reminds her that humans are only one kind of thing.

  Looking back at her when she sits on the stone steps beside her camera — opens the shutter, and lives quietly as it looks — is a beach, a horse in front of a castle, a tower reflected upside down in a drop of rain, a cow turning his head, the cherry trees, so decorative over the satin river, the contrast of pointy modern buildings and the circles on a ceiling. What is it to be inside a set of walls? she will ask herself. And of course the camera will see people, but only when they stop and are still together for a little while on a bridge. The camera will show her all the things that look back at her, will wipe away the grease of errands and smooth the fractious popping culture until what is left is what was there the longest, what will still be there after she closes the shutter.

  Later, when the box is opened it will be a gift. Just like the gift of discovering that the man she met by accident when she was halfway between decisions who will continue to argue with her sometimes over breakfast. But he will be waiting for her as the next paper in the next box is exposed, as she changes styles and loses things, when she is messy and when she is sad and when she is funny and when she is brilliant. The camera and he will be there as the bright world is exposed.

  Happy

  IN THE PICTURE THEY LOOK happier than they were and so, in a way, what the picture shows is that they were happier than they were. The sunlight shines through triangular gaps between her arms and her body. The cheery little dog pants and turns its head so that its face and tail are white blurs that speak of motion. The sound of cars along the highway on the other side of the wall is represented by a missing rock and a streak of color in that gap. The heat emanating from the rocks that was so painful against his naked shoulder can only be detected in the sweating glass he holds against her hip. The recent election and its scandals appear in headlines across the displayed papers and magazines on the cart that is only halfway in the picture and at the first specific distance where one would not expect to be able to read the letters except for the boldness of their print. A regression in fashion drapes her hip to thigh in navy fabric. She turns her knee inward because she is unsure of how this bathing style suits her legs. Her too-hard-smile, which usually makes her neck look strained, is softened by a thin smudge on the lens. His smile, never more than a grimace, has been caught at a pleasing angle, and seems more than usually true. And so they both appear dreamy and the age they ought to be. The memory card is full of shots of glittering water, seagulls that barely show against the gray sky, and fields and other vehicles caught in the oblong reflection of the side mirror. Out of superstition one picture remains undeleted after a year. The strap has never been used and remains folded in the inner pocket of a jacket hung on a coat rack in the lobby of a restaurant where they ate last week. The manager has the same jacket and has not yet detected the difference. The manager’s wife is dying from cancer and he plans to tell her tonight that he wants to bury her in the cemetery where his mother also lies, where she fell after years of the same kind of silence. He counts receipts and remembers his mother as she appears in old photographs in striped bathing suits, all one piece, th
at begin at her neck and go almost to her knee. She also turns her knee in when she feels exposed, either because of a boy speaking or because her skin is uncomfortably hot. Her somber dog sits miraculously still and so appears clear in photographs taken with a little black box called a Brownie. And one day when her granddaughter comes to visit, chattering nonstop about wanting to join a girl’s club, she says, we used to have cameras called Brownies. The little girl frowns not knowing how quickly time passes or that this moment like most moments of every life will slip away unrecorded.

  Unhappy

  AFTER HOURS OF FOCUSING ON the broad edge of the two headlights and assuming there is a road ahead, after hours of the radio singing, “I Am a Mountain,” or some such thing, suddenly there is a rise in the road, a turn, and the little town appears like a cup of light grasped in the two hands of a giant.

  I compare the quiet restaurant with a list of similar ones in my head, find familiar the worn runner of carpet from the door to the bar, the man in the plaid shirt behind the wooden bar, setting up the small, dishwasher-scratched wineglasses, the yellow wall lamps and wooden chairs and empty deuces, the sweet underage waitress who is likely the daughter of the cook.

  “Did you hit something?” she asks.

  I choose a seat in the corner by a window and sip at fresh decaf coffee. Stare out at the parking lot under the strands of Christmas lights draped between lampposts. An elderly couple, long-haired and thin, huddles at the base of one lamppost. The woman is crying and the man, with his awkward hands, pats her back and strokes her hair.

  “The kitchen is closing,” the waitress says. “If you want to order now.”

  I choose between the homemade chili and something with gravy. Behind me a family settles into a table.

  “Knock knock,” says one child to the other.