by Alan Davis
Robin sauntered up, a sword-like leaf in her hand, and stood over Bruce, still fumbling with the shoestring. “Stop fighting, I’m back.” She pricked him playfully in the face. “What’s wrong, Bruce, can’t tie your shoe?”
“Cut it out,” he said. He grabbed her wrist and pretended to tickle her. “The tickle-beast! He’s here!”
“How immature.” Robin frowned. “You want me to call the cops? This is abuse, buster. One scream and they’ll lock you up, maybe for good. You know about inappropriate touching?”
Bruce raised his hands as though under arrest. “Hey hey hey/Aren’t we precocious today,” he chanted. “You win, high and mighty. You loved that tickle-beast once. But now Ms High and Mighty, just like your mother.” Lydia refused to fly off the handle. She sat on a bench half-obscured by ferns. The choices we make, one of her clients had said. “Maybe you’ve had a stroke,” she told Bruce, “maybe that’s why you’re like this lately,” but he wasn’t listening anymore. He had a knack for remembering details from the Vietnam era with clairvoyant precision, but otherwise going off into a fugue state or a mystical rhapsody until he didn’t know where he was, much less who he was. “Besides,” she said, “what would be so bad about living inside a glass paperweight? Lots of snow, a gingerbread cottage, everybody safe, and we could still look around.” A real life that’s far more real than what I want, said the low-pitched voice of another client, a short, stocky Norwegian woman. For nearly a year Bruce once rented an AP wire-service ticker so he wouldn’t miss any news about Vietnam. Every evening he’d setde into a beanbag chair with his headphones, a scissors, and reams of paper, all the day’s news. He’d cut-and-paste until midnight. Before he lost interest in the whole endeavor, he filled up four sets of neck-high filing cabinets with clippings and nearly drove Lydia crazy, the machine spitting out fifty words a minute day and night. You go on for the sake of others. Life is sacrifice. Her auditory hallucinations intensified. Sovereign solitude/ In the nude. “Live inside a paperweight and you meet the witch. Street art, though, that’s a different ticket,” he said, justifying his new obsession. “Live on the street and you understand lots of things, everything from AIDS to aliens, from Buddha to Jesus. The world is a circle and we’re back to square one, babe.”
Jesus Christ, she thought, where is my life? You’re abandoned for what you are, not for the role you play. Where is my life? What have I done with my life?
*
“NASCAR driving, baby,” Bruce said, finally swerving to their curb. “This is a pit stop.” Inside, Robin started humming “Yellow Submarine” and Lydia kicked off her shoes. “Parachute to safety,” Bruce shouted. He dropped his knapsack near the door. Lydia flopped into the love seat by the bay window. Someone else is inhabiting my body, she thought, someone I should know, and then slipped into her own fugue state, imagining a tumor, maybe in her lungs, maybe inside her heart. There was cancer everywhere and everyone was getting it. “I’m cutting loose,” Bruce screamed into her ear, as though it were a walkie-talkie. “I’m hitting the turf on the run. Charlie’s a rice field away. Give me air cover, gunships. Dust off! Sucking chest wounds, pelvic bones shattered, legs blown off at the hips!” He grabbed Lydia and pulled her to her feet. “I’ll save you, Li-dee-a! Incoming rounds! Incoming rounds! Keep your head down, sweetheart!”
*
“Why did you give me the name of a bird?” asked Robin at breakfast. “It sounds twerpy.”
“That’s why,” said Bruce.
“Bruce,” said Robin. “No teasing, or I’ll hide your teeth.” She turned a mischievous moon-face to her mother. “Guess who forgot the garbage?”
Lydia studied her bowl of cream of wheat and narrowed her lips. “Sorry,” she said sarcastically to Bruce, who smiled. In her husband’s dream-time, a house without garbage was unnatural. “Why not compost it?” he said. “Compost it?” she repeated. “Where, for goodness sakes? This is an apartment.” Bruce clicked his tongue and snickered. “Well, forget it, then, let the world go to hell. Besides, it’s not my place to remember the garbage.” Lydia crunched her toast, comparing her life to an Australian aborigine’s on a walkabout, something always dangerous around the corner. Downtown, she might walk through somebody’s cough and contract TB. The stuff was everywhere.
Robin, reading the back of the cereal box, giggled. Bruce figured out the movies, following the blips with his finger. “At 1:30 it’s Death and the Maiden. Jimmy Stewart defends a woman accused of shooting her family. I think I’ll watch that. At 3:00 it’s Mr. and Mrs. Bojo Jones. Two teens forced into marriage by pregnancy. Bad news, real bad news.” He summarized ‘Ryan’s Hope,’ his favorite soap. “So Ken decided to postpone his suicide until Barry recovered from Faith’s affair. And in ‘Guiding Light,’ Lucille tried to kill Jennifer but stabbed herself instead. Jennifer told the cops it was an accident, because she doesn’t want people to know about her other identity as Jane Marie. And because she cares for Amanda. She wants to protect her. But on the way to the hospital, Lucille told Amanda Jennifer tried to kill her and—“
“Her? Who’s her?” Robin said. “Amanda or Lucille?”
“Forget it. You’re just laughing. No appreciation for the better things in life,” Bruce said, grimacing in mock-anger. Robin gripped the breakfast table to keep from falling backwards, her giggles turning into deliberate, antagonizing horselaughs. “Of course I’m laughing, but not at you. At that awful crap. When did you ever get so sensitive?”
“Robin, watch your language,” Lydia said.
“Maybe I won’t go to New York,” Bruce said. “Maybe I’ll just lock us all away here until we suffocate or strangle each other. Maybe I’ll throw you in the oven.” “Don’t call me Robin, Bruce. I want another name.” Lydia remembered Bruce fiddling with his tie, tugging on it like a noose, arguing, over drinks, that Robin should call her family by their first names. “It’s a necessity of modern parenting, Lydia.” “Do we even have one opinion in common?” Lydia countered. “‘Momma’ or ‘Mommy.’ Maybe ‘Mother.’ That’s it.” That wasn’t it. “Mommy is Lydia, Daddy is Bruce, and Grandma is Claire. Who’s the baby?” he repeated at dusk a few days later on the lakefront. His fatigue jacket flapping, he tossed Robin in the air.
“The baby is, Lydia!” Robin had shouted. “No, Mommy! No, Daddy!”
*
“Two hundred thousand years. Remember that,” one of her clients said the next day. It was the amount of time it took radioactive waste to decompose to a safe level. Lydia stabbed her notepad with her pen. She worked for a foundation with a grant to find out whether monogamy has a future. With a narrow oily face and ears flush against his head as though greased back with Vitalis, her client talked about nothing but radioactivity, cancer, and corporate criminals. “Are there any other kind?” he mumbled on the way out.
After the interview, overcome by fall fever, she arranged a long lunch break, caught the bus to the zoo, and hurried to the small mammal house, her favorite refuge. Special lighting and sound-proof cubicles tricked furry animals into uncharacteristic daylight activity. She could enter moonlit lives oblivious to her trances. In semidarkness the three-banded armadillo, the bush baby, and the sugar glider would go about their nocturnal affairs. She could drift, let the past possess her, sit outside on a bench and write letters she would never mail. I won’t pretend to be someone I’m not, she would vow. I won’t see myself in too many eyes. But she also might slip into a trance and imagine the glass paperweight falling to the floor and breaking. Snow everywhere.
The building was closed. To replase brokunglas, read the sign. The wind was still high, though, and the day as sweet-scented as cinnamon. Winter seemed impossible. Groups of children in bright ski sweaters were chattering. Small mammals on field trips, Lydia thought, walking to the conservatory, where workmen were putting the finishing touches on a pine-scented Christmas display, a world of artificial snow and filtered light. This Christmas, she promised, we’ll decorate a big tree. Silver tinsel, frosted snowy l
ights. We can eat ourselves silly and figure out the movies together.
Giant dinosaur fern. A minute later, in the hot-house stuffiness of the tropical room, she stroked the full-lipped leaves of a rubber plant. Bruce doesn’t want to stay, but he doesn’t want to give me up. Tongue fem. She shook her head, flicking away sweat, nauseated by her insight. This can’t be happening, she thought. Curtain fern. There must be some way to make it all stop. Claustrophobia wrapped itself around her like a vine; she rushed from the green-stained dome to the curb. She wasn’t certain the oncoming bus would stop for her, but it did. Once inside, she fished out some change. The scowling driver, slumped low in his seat, eyes bloodshot, jerked the bus forward, slapping her against the coinbox.
*
Before Bruce left, he helped her move their things south to her mother’s house in Hyde Park. “Without me around,” he said, “you’ll be safe as a rock. Ice cream every night while I’m slaving away on the mad, gone streets.” Then, with a backpack full of clothes and a small suitcase of books and notes, he hoisted Robin, smooched Lydia and left, insisting against her wishes that he could hump it to the train. Alone, she continued the late-night walks they had taken together. Whistle clutched in sweaty fingers, she asserted her right to exist, refusing to heed her mother’s warnings. Why should she change her habits simply because she was terrified? She never walked far, maybe down the block to the Medici for a coffee or to the I.C. underpass. Its faded mural, barely visible in the dark, dared her to walk along the viaduct, the way she had done all over the city with Bruce, to another mural on the ghetto side of the University of Chicago campus. “You ever hear of the phoenix, Lyd?” Bruce would say. “That’s what these murals are. You ever hear of The Wall of Dignity? We’ve got to publicize that stuff so it can rise from the ashes.” In Hyde Park, they’d leave Robin with her mother and walk from Alewives and Mercury Fish on 55th to Rebirth on 60th. Bruce vowed more than once that he wanted a wife as devoted to the search for truth and social justice as he was. She took such vows as threats and forced herself to accompany him, no matter what the neighborhood was like, no matter the hour.
Her lakefront walks in the city near her office and the museums took her away from the pressure of people, of storefront displays, the pressure to buy something, eat something, say something to an occasional passing acquaintance. Her restricted evening walks also turned her inward. How cozy it might be to live alone again, she would think, have a flower and a bowl of fruit for company, lock the door and pretend nobody’s home when the phone rings.
*
“Lydia,” Robin said at breakfast, “you’re not paying attention.”
“Yes, I am. You were telling about your painting. About the dog that isn’t there.” Lydia smiled. “Picture of the Missing Dog.”
2.
Lydia was hungry enough to take a bite from the steering wheel but too frightened to park more than a block from the restaurant where she was to meet her friend Natasha, a familiar face from as far back as high school, and another woman. “A consciousness-raising event,” Natasha had said. “We’ll get drunk and eat whatever we want.” It took Lydia almost half an hour to find a parking space; the Near North was full of creeps. Just last month, some girl from the Bible school was raped and stuffed in an alley dumpster behind Second City. Jim Belushi on stage, impersonating a pervert, and that poor girl only a hundred yards away. Even the wrong kind of glance or an unintended nudge on a well-lit comer could be lethal. Hadn’t she read that every third person on the Chicago streets carried a gun?
Bruce would have stopped anywhere and hunched over like a grunt, oblivious to shadows, slapping the pocket where he carried a small spray can of drugstore burglar repellent. “Vietnam, Lyd. It’s all the Nam.” But Lydia stared exhausted into the glassy tabletop, ignoring the conversation, remembering a large sunlit calliope under oak trees she and Bruce rode on together somewhere. Where had they been, New Orleans on vacation, Milwaukee in search of graffiti?
Full of the jargon of a recent transformation to New Age connoisseur, Natasha was in constant motion, her black page-boy hair flipping about and her dark button eyes gleaming translucently as she quickly studied almost everyone in the restaurant. Hanging fems swung cozy above her head in nets of macrame. The lake was wet in the moonlight, Lydia thought, and frowned. Does that make any sense?
Rock music pounded into her forehead. Her internal word-buzz made response impossible. Always under surveillance, some half-conscious voice whispered. “Isn’t it nifty,” said Natasha, “for women to get together and astral-project?” “Yes, that’s certainly nifty,” said Pam, a thin bony woman with narrow lips. Natasha’s cheeks colored; her eyes lighted on Lydia, then skimmed an exhibit of photos hung above each booth. The snapshots were fashionably scrawled with dark crayon and heavy pencil. “We’ve got to create ourselves by talking,” Pam said. “Language isn’t a structure of ideas or regulations to be followed. One thing doesn’t have to lead to another. We’ve got to stand outside our condition and say what needs to be said.” “What I’d like to do,” Lydia replied, “is put everybody in a comfortable box, with cotton and newspaper, and keep the boxes in a safe fireproof place.”
Pam pursed her lips, an eyebrow cocked to hold back a sardonic thin-faced reply. “I know a place that can do that for you,” she finally said, leaning a little forward, her voice measured. “It’s called a mausoleum.” Stopping twice to flirt, a waitress swung her wraparound red skirt like a dancer, defdy avoiding a hand that yearned for her waist, and sashayed to the table with more wine. Lydia stared at her dessert spoon, irritation crawling into her forehead and nestling there, pinching the place where Natasha said everyone had a third eye. Her whole life sounded absurd, like one of her mother’s movies or small talk about Rush Week and European summers at the only college ball she ever attended, all the girls dressed in gold or silver strapless formals, their bustlines tinted by shadows and soft lights. Lydia had walked away from her date. At her apartment she had plunged into jeans and listened to Mahler all evening, so intimidated and outraged by the ball and each perfectly-placed kiss curl or corsage that she was barely able to be civil and apologize the next day to her date. I could be one of Bruce’s soap operas, she thought. Botched marriage, wretched job, phone calls to New York.
*
“Muhammed Ali got beat,” Bruce said on the phone. “Steve McQueen was so shriveled with cancer he looked pregnant.” She wanted to sip a mug of steaming coffee and savor the morning’s normal dreariness: typewriters clacking, the low hum of voices through paper-thin partitions. “What do you do, read old newspapers?” she asked. “What does any of that stuff have to do with you?” She stared from her tiny window overlooking the Loop, gnawing on Bruce’s remarks for signs of malice or spite. “Look, Lydia, come see me for Christmas. I want you here. New York is Andy Warhol, Chicago is Norman Rockwell. Come eat some Campbell’s Soup.” Shoppers in the street, dressed in rusk and autumn greens, held down skirts and finger-brushed hair in a losing batde with a brisk wind. “I love you, Lyd. Come east, come swim like a dolphin.”
*
Lydia rocked, alone on the porch swing, a pack of cigarettes and a lighter by her side, trying to inhabit the present like a richly-papered room with a view. Wind ebbed and flowed. Her mother’s old two-story house, nesded in a neighborhood protected by the largest private police force in the country, the University of Chicago cadets, creaked in counterpoint to rusty squeaking chains. She tried to let her thoughts seep into shady spaces between her nerves. Even on the commuter train from Hyde Park to the Loop each morning, her fear of strangers made her absent-minded. What was I thinking? she would wonder, distracted by the smooth electric click of the train, its familiar odor of vinyl and rubber, afterscent of perfume and perspiration. The stations passed with a squeal of brakes, an afterimage of wooden platforms, mile posts clicking past like metronomes.
*
“Lydia,” Robin said in the kitchen. She was munching on a piece of French bread. “All d
ay I’ve dealt with nerds, stupids, idiots, morons, imbeciles, dwarfs, and dufuses.” She caught her breath. “Even a turd or two. Let’s go somewhere, we can leave a trail of breadcrumbs for the birds to eat all up.” Lydia sipped her coffee. “You’ve earned a mouthful of soap with that language.” Robin leafed through the magazine on the kitchen table. “How to survive with a man. How to survive without a man. What to do with cellulite. How to know when he’s unfaithful. Danger signs of drugs.” She made a face. “Lydia, either you read that junk all evening or spend quality time with your kid. It’s a three-minute world, my teacher always says. Is that all the time you’re going to give me?” They decided on ice cream. Lydia’s mother was dozing in the love seat, her whitened hair sprayed with silver shifting light from an old movie. Standing near her, Lydia became giddy and leaned against the door frame. “Let’s go,” Robin said, grabbing her hand. Lydia felt like a refugee, arriving in time for the new era of television, of machines propelled through air by nothing but high-octane fuel, of computers full of private investigations. “It’s Humphrey Bogart,” she said. “Shouldn’t we stay and watch?”
When they returned, her mother had switched on the ceiling lights, something she rarely did, and stood next to her chair, facing the door, her arms folded across her chest. Through the window, streedight splashed and glimmered among unraked leaves. Humphrey Bogart, trench-coated, walked across the tarmac in the rain. “It’s Bruce,” Claire said. “You’d better call.” “Did Bogart kill somebody, Claire?” Robin asked. “What is it?” Lydia said, adrenaline pumping. “He’s in the hospital. The number’s next to the phone.”