The Cloud of Unknowing

by Mimi Lipson

  Another thing I learned about Smockey: he’d been born upstairs, at a time when working-class Italian women had their children at home. He had probably been taken down to the bar and shown off to his father’s customers before he even saw the South Philadelphia sky. One evening I brought someone in with me, and when Smockey went into his routine about unloading the bar, my friend asked for a tour of the upper floors.

  “There ain’t nothing up there now, but you can go ahead and look,” Smockey said.

  We found a jukebox on the second floor, and stacks of chairs, and tables too big for the bar downstairs, and a pile of disconnected swag lamps that must have hung over the tables—everything under a blanket of dust. There was a clawfoot tub in the bathroom, left behind after a casual renovation. I imagined young Smockey knocking down the walls of his childhood home, eager to banish the crepuscular gloom of his father’s time. I imagined flush years, and couples dancing, and after-hours poker games with Bimbo and Taffy. And I saw how Smockey’s world had closed up like a telescope. First he’d left his apartment on the third floor for a clean room at his sister’s house. Then the second floor of the bar had become too much, so he’d abandoned that too. Now, finally, he wanted to lock the front door and hand someone else the key.

  I moved away to a city where there were no old neighborhoods, or not in any form I could recognize. I drove through permanent sunlight, past endless iterations of the same strip mall, trying to find a bar where I could start up a tab and settle in. After a while, I stopped looking for a Smockey Bar and developed an appreciation for the cinderblock-and-stucco cantinas that were its native counterpart. Word came to me that Smockey had sold the bar. I didn’t mourn it, though, because I pictured Smockey with a fishing rod in his hand and a cooler of O’Douls at his side.

  And then, not long after that, Smockey died, and someone sent me an obituary—a tribute, really, written by another of his young customers. It was full of surprises. Smockey hadn’t moved to Florida. He was still living with his sister when he died. According to the article, he’d never even been farther than New Jersey, and he didn’t know how to swim. When he sold the bar, he hadn’t bought a bass boat: he’d bought a new Cadillac and parked it over by the barbershop every day, and he’d told anyone who asked that selling the bar was the biggest mistake he ever made.

  The Smockey name died with him. The old white sign with the block letters has been replaced by a giant, whimsical Schlitz can. The upstairs room is open for business, and they have music, and quizzo nights. And, in what I guess is a lunkheaded gesture of commemoration, they call it “The Dive.”

  Tomack

  Nancy and I are driving down the Ridge Pike spotting Ladies of Norristown: women with bowl haircuts and nutty eye makeup walking along the side of the road in mismatched footwear. The Pike turns into East Main Street as you approach the business district. Scratch-and-dent appliance stores, astroturfed tax offices, television repair shops. Nancy and I agree: a room above a discount store in Norristown PA is where we picture ourselves once we’ve exhausted all other possibilities.

  An old man in a paper hat dispenses cherry water ice through a window cut out of a plywood storefront. Next to the water ice stand is a nondescript bar, its door propped open to let in the June breeze. We stop in for a glass of beer. There are five or six barflies holding down the fort, and we get a few looks when we sit down. The barman tells us we just missed happy hour, which is funny because it’s 3:30 on a Tuesday afternoon.

  And now we’re waiting out the rush-hour traffic. After a while, a lady of Norristown comes over and tells us they thought we were soliciting when we came in. Nancy reassures her that we aren’t, and soon we’re all friends. I try, but I can’t establish whether they thought we were salesmen or hookers.

  Rush hour has come and gone. The old man with the paper hat is here now, and he’s showing Nancy a dream book. She’s earnestly explaining to him why he shouldn’t play the lottery. A number, she says, can never be due. A dream is just a way of talking to yourself. You need to make your peace with the water ice and the plywood window, or if you really want to take your chances, get on a bus for Philadelphia.

  The door flies open with a bang. A young man, maybe twenty-four or twenty-five, stands in the doorway with his arms spread in an enveloping gesture. He runs over to the jukebox and dials up a song: “Lovergirl,” Teena Marie. He peels off his shirt, takes a running start, and jumps up on the bar. Everyone ignores him as he twists and bends and pumps his fists. Soon, perspiration has pasted his lustrous black hair to the sides of his handsome face. When the song ends he jumps down behind the bar, puts his shirt back on, and holds out his hand to me: “Tomack’s the name. T-O-M-A-C-K. What are you girls drinking?”

  “The stars are available tonight,” I say to Nancy as we stagger past the padlocked plywood water ice window. What I mean is that the dim lights of Main Street are too feeble to reach the starry dome above. Nancy considers this and replies, “I think Tomack used to be my dental hygienist.”

  Catch of the Day

  Pinky’s New York Deli is not in New York, and it’s not really a deli either. It’s a coffee shop in a long, dark room. The chairs scrape unpleasantly on the brown quarry tiles, and the square tables are arranged at an angle so the waitresses can squeeze between them and the Plexiglas-topped half-wall separating the dining room from the kitchen. Under the glass on each tabletop is a cutout of a smiling fish that says, “Catch of the Day.” The catch of the day is always chipped beef.

  It would be depressing, except that there seems to be a tacit understanding to the contrary between the Pinky’s staff and the collection of old ladies and neighborhood johnnies and lunch-hour nurses who cheerfully patronize the place. Really, everything about it seems like communal gesture, an agreement, a temporary installation. It’s a restaurant now, but you get a feeling that it could be a travel agency tomorrow, and that yesterday it might have been a shop where an old man in a toupee repaired travel alarm clocks and electric carving knives.

  We take our lunches at Pinky’s—Suzy, Bob and I. We’re working down the street in a vacant row house. There are no windows in the house—just thick, opaque plastic sheeting that heaves in and out like a bellows in the November wind. We wear two layers of long underwear, two pairs of gloves, etc. We had a propane garage heater, but the fumes were giving us headaches, so now we use a little electric space heater. It has a digital readout: 25 degrees, 39 degrees, 46 degrees . . . it usually plateaus there around lunchtime, and we put on yet another layer and run to Pinky’s.

  On the walls at Pinky’s are posters with illustrations of Hollywood legends in iconic settings. There’s one of Mount Rushmore where, instead of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln, it’s Bogart, Monroe, Dean, and Presley. The theme continues on the menu, because Pinky’s is really only a New York deli inasmuch as the sandwiches are named after celebrities. The corned beef on rye is a Stan Laurel, and the grilled chicken is a Hallie Berry, and so on. We parse the menu obsessively. Why is the veggie melt a Woody Allen? Why is the egg salad a Fred Astaire? Sometimes I think I see a pattern. The plain steak hoagie is a Frank Sinatra and the cheese steak hoagie is a Sammy Davis Jr. A minimal pair. But then . . . why is the turkey burger a Lucille Ball while the turkey cheeseburger is a Yul Brenner? We wax Talmudic over our menus and luxuriate in the warmth.

  There are two lunchtime waitresses. One is cheerful and pretty and wears her hair in a high ponytail. The other waitress we call the Troll. It’s unkind, I know, but there you have it. The Troll is short and powerfully built. Her brown hair is shoulder length but bristle-short on top with a slightly longer fringe across her brow. She has two large rabbit teeth, completely visible even when she’s saying “water” or “bulkie roll.” The sheer volume of her front teeth seems to muffle her speech. Her eyes are thick-lashed, deep-set, surrounded by bruise-colored rings that remind me of something I heard about people getting black eyes from scuba diving. Her only expression is one of blank surprise. />
  They usually have a newspaper at the front table—the one where the cook sits on his cigarette breaks. I grab the Lifestyle section on my way in, because I like to do the sudoku. Today, the Troll is our waitress. Suzy orders the chicken rice soup. They make a wonderful chicken soup, with dill and turnips, which you can get with either rice or noodles. Bob orders a Rock Hudson—that’s a cheeseburger—and I go for a soup/half-sand combo, chicken rice with half a Julie Andrews (turkey, Swiss, coleslaw and Russian dressing). When my Julie Andrews comes, I open it up and sprinkle my potato chips on top of the coleslaw. I bite down into the spongy rye and feel the satisfying crunch. I suppose you could say that we are regulars. Who knows what nicknames they have for us?

  The front door swings open. Another regular enters, stops up front to pick up what’s left of the newspaper, and sits at the table next to us. He is slow-moving, swaddled head to toe in grey and black scraps, carrying his house with him in a duffle bag. He unwinds the shirt that covers his face and stuffs it in his pocket. His right eye is frozen and cataract-clouded, but when he fixes you with his left eye, you can’t look away. It is clear, intelligent, impersonal and steady. We call him Odin.

  “No one working here gets to tell my soup about rice.”

  Odin talks to himself constantly in a low voice, almost a whisper. It has a quality, though, that cuts through the layers of white noise, so you pick up words and phrases and sentences almost without realizing it.

  “ . . . lock you up or knock you up . . . ”

  Sometimes you aren’t sure if it’s Odin talking or just some mote of synaptic dust drifting around in your skull.

  We stretch out our lunch hour as long as possible. We order coffee refills and quiz each other on the menu until the inevitable can no longer be forestalled. No plumbing in the row house, so we make our final visits to the toilet, which for some reason is as cold as a meat locker. We pass Odin on the way out.

  “Tax-deductible piece of shit.”

  Outside, Bob says, “Did you hear what he called me?” Suzy and I try to distract him. He’s quiet all the way back to work, brooding.

  At work, we listen to a radio we found in the basement. It’s a tabletop set in a handsome wood-look cabinet—the kind you used to see on the reception desk at the dentist’s office. There’s a logo next to the speaker: “Eazy 101,” topped with a little rainbow. And an on-off button, and a volume knob, but you can’t tune it. It only gets one station, which used to be muzak but which is now a lite-rock station called B101—“the Bee.” We listen to the Bee all day. It’s like a game of Billy Joel chicken. Bob has less stamina than Suzy and I do, and he sometimes finds he has to go work in another part of the house. I’ve learned that Suzy has a savant-like capacity for remembering song lyrics, and song names, and all kinds of other things she doesn’t especially want in her head. I’ve also discovered, to my great surprise, that I have a favorite Sheryl Crow song. It’s the one with the poncho and “pray for mosquitoes.”

  “Hello, ladies and gentlemen,” says the Troll today, momentarily blowing our minds. “Do you know what you’d like?”

  We notice that the high-ponytail waitress isn’t working. In her place is a young Mexican or Central American woman with a shy smile. We ask after high-ponytail.

  “She, uh, ain’t working here no more.”

  While we wait for our food, we confer in whispers. Suzy thinks the Troll has been promoted and is feeling her oats.

  “They’ve created a monster,” warns Bob.

  “A monstrous lobster, a slobster, a sob sister,” murmurs Odin.

  On the way back to work, Suzy says, “Someone’s got to take the Troll down a peg or two. Maybe sneak up behind her with a sockful of nickels.” She stops suddenly and looks up, stricken. “I can’t believe I just said that.”

  As November turns into December, the Bee turns to all-Christmas programming. We stick to our guns through “Rocking around the Christmas Tree,” through the Boss’s live version of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” through every conceivable treatment of “Little Drummer Boy.” The row house gets colder, our backs get stiffer, and our lunch hours expand. I’ve been finding the sudokus increasingly difficult. Eventually, I give up and turn to the Daily Jumble.

  Today at Pinky’s we stare at our menus for what seems like an eternity. The Troll stands over us, looking impatient in her blankly surprised way. She is wearing a sweatshirt that says, “Stroll For Epilepsy.” Finally, we all order Rock Hudsons and she goes away.

  “Listen,” says Suzy.

  Sim-ply ha-ving awon-derfulchrist-mastime . . .

  It’s the same Paul McCartney song that was playing less than an hour ago on the Eazy 101 radio.

  “But wait. Did you notice what the last song was?”

  “‘Silver Bells,’ Mariah Carey.”

  “Gloria Estefan, actually. Just like on the Bee. What are the odds of that?”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t Mariah Carey?”

  Suzy shakes her head. “It was Gloria Estefan,” she says with joyless certainty.

  And then John Cougar Mellencamp, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” and then Andy Williams, “Winter Wonderland,” which (Suzy insists) is the exact set they played on the Bee. Does Pinky’s have the Bee on some sort of tape delay? Suzy asks the Troll what station they’re listening to.

  “Uh, it’s just a station,” she says. Suzy looks suspicious.

  “Mannheim fucking Steamroller,” says Odin. “Nickel socks.”

  “We must have heard him wrong,” I tell Suzy after lunch. But she’s shaken.

  The Troll is ascendant, the tape-delay mystery continues, and day after day, Odin sits piled up on his chair like a human antenna, like a transmission tower.

  “Julie Andrews. Lena Horne. A cup a cup a cup a cup a cup.”

  Today I can’t seem to warm up. I avoid using the bathroom for as long as possible. Why is it so cold back there?

  “ . . . rememberememberemember . . . ”

  Also, I can make no sense of the Daily Jumble. In the cartoon clue, a man lies on a psychiatrist’s couch and the doctor says, “You have to make this choice. Do you _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ?”

  I decide I’m coming down with something and take the afternoon off.

  The rest of the week is a fever dream. When I return to the row house on Monday, Suzy has given up on the Bee until after Christmas and Bob has rejoined her in the front room. They’ve doubled up the window plastic, but still the space heater struggles to break 40 degrees.

  We throw in the towel—it’s not even 11:30—and stagger over to Pinky’s, where the tail end of the breakfast crowd is lingering over their eggs. The air feels tropical. The cook sits at the newspaper table, smoking, bathed in radiant light. In here, Christmas—the Bee?—still wafts through the air.

  . . . putting up reindeer, singing songs of joy and peace . . .

  I don’t see the Troll.

  “Oh, I can’t believe we forgot to tell you,” says Suzy. “Last Thursday, Bob heard her being yelled at in the back—just getting completely reamed. She must have gotten too big for her britches. Anyway, she was gone on Friday. We think she got fired!”

  I’m unprepared for it. I actually feel a lump in my throat as the shyly smiling Mexican or Central American waitress appears, ready to take our orders. The front door opens and in walks Odin. He comes to a stop at the next table, turns toward me, unwraps his face. His commanding eye locks down on mine. He says, to me, unmistakably,

  “Cry me a river to skate away on.”

  And they come, tears.

  KITTY AND ISAAC STORIES

  Safe, Reliable, Courteous

  Kitty falls into a deep, instant sleep outside San Bernardino as the bus labors up the Cajon Pass. The whine of the engine invades her dreams. She’s trapped in the cargo hold of an airplane. She’s engulfed in a swarm of insects. She’s crawling on hands and knees through an air-conditioned tunnel.

  When she fights her way back to consciousness, she finds herself w
edged into a fetal position with her head jammed into the carpet-covered wall. It’s still dark out, and the bus is idling somewhere. She sits up and looks out the window. They’re in a concrete bay outside a depot. A line of people waits under the fluorescent lights: a young woman holding a sleepy child in pajamas; two box-shaped Mexican men wearing brightly colored knit shirts, their pants sharply creased; and, towering over all of them, a skinny white kid with a nylon gym bag. He looks about Kitty’s age, or maybe a few years younger—eighteen or nineteen. He has frizzy, shoulder-length hair. He wears paratrooper pants tucked into engineer boots, and a leather jacket that is much too small for him, exposing several inches above his wrists. The door sighs open and the line shuffles forward. Kitty lies back down and pretends to be asleep, and by the time they reach the interstate she’s drifted off.

  When she wakes again, the bus is flooded with light. They are traveling across a high plain. Her neck hurts, and she’s very thirsty, having forgotten to bring anything to drink. She takes a fat paperback out of her backpack: The Executioner’s Song. On the cover is a flat western landscape at sunset. A silhouette of power lines vanishes into darkness. Kitty plans to lose herself in the book while they cross the vast interior of the continent, but now she’s distracted by the glare outside her window. She traces an overpass to a distant town and tries to imagine living in one of the white ranch houses, a mile or so beyond the highway. After a while her eyes go out of focus. She falls asleep again.

  An angry voice from somewhere in the back of the bus jolts Kitty awake: