by Abby Frucht
At home, still out of breath from walking so fast, I pour oil in a frying pan and turn on the burner while Charlie unpacks the shopping bag.
“Where are they?” he says.
“What?”
“The tortillas.”
“What do you mean, where are they?”
“I mean they’re not in the bag.”
“How can they not be in the bag? We paid for them. You must have already unpacked them.”
We hunt around in the kitchen, peering into cabinets and the freezer. Charlie turns the bag upside down and shakes it. Then he pokes a hole in the bottom and looks at me.
“She forgot to pack them,” he says. “Call the supermarket.”
“They’re closed,” I say. “They had to unlock the door to let us out, remember?”
“Call anyway.”
“Hello,” I say, on the telephone. “I was just down there shopping and the cashier seems to have forgotten to pack my tortillas so I was wondering if you would let me in to get them… No … No?… I’d like to speak with the manager… You are… Well, what am I supposed to do?… I don’t have anything else. I just went down there to get my dinner and just because your goddamn cashier forgot my tortillas I have to… I said just because your goddamn fucking cashier forgot to pack my fucking tortillas I have to fucking starve. Your store sucks. You go home and have your shit-ass dinner while I … He hung up on me.”
Charlie is leaning forward on the couch, his elbows on his knees, twiddling his thumbs. “I’m hungry,” he says.
“I should call right back and cancel our order for the turkey.”
“I didn’t even know you ordered it.”
“I didn’t,” I say. “I thought you ordered it.”
“Let’s not talk about it now,” says Charlie. “Let’s get a pizza.”
There are three pizza parlors in town, one of which we never go to because the owner exploits his employees, and one of which never puts on enough cheese. Fred’s Pizza is a block up Main from the supermarket; it has a mural of the Eiffel Tower on one wall, some photographs of tree squirrels on the other. Centered on each table is a candle in a red-tinted globe. Fred works within sight of the tables, tossing the flat rounds of dough into the air. All the way down Main Street, our stomachs rumbling, we share visions of the spinning wheel of raw dough, the platters of shredded cheese and sliced mushrooms, the flat black rings of sliced olives, ribbons of green peppers, pastrami stacked like silver dollars. We don’t speak. There are rows of beveled jars of hot peppers and Parmesan and oregano, in the air the smells of sausage and meatballs and garlic. It is suddenly cold—under the street lights our breath clouds up.
A few steps away we can smell it, not the usual smell but something horrible, lime and decay, a smell dug out of the earth. There’s a sign on Fred’s door: SEWER BACKED UP—COME BACK TOMORROW.
Hunger is like mirth, the whole body pumped full of helium and let go.
“We’re about to starve to death,” says Charlie, “and you’re laughing.”
I follow him back up the sidewalk. For a while we trudge along with our hands in our pockets and then Charlie says we’ll have to take the car to the Burger Chef, two miles north. He knows how much I hate hamburgers, and I know how much he hates to use the car, so we’re even. We have to search the house for the car keys, which are nowhere. We empty drawers, turn the pockets of our blue jeans inside out, check the pegboard in the kitchen and under the mat on the fire escape. When we lift the couch cushion to look underneath, somehow we end up lying on top of one another on the box spring but it doesn’t last—we’re too hungry. At last I find the keys in the cookie jar.
“You put them there,” says Charlie. “You drove last.”
“I did not. I would never put the car keys in the cookie jar. You drove last. When we went to the laundromat and it was raining.”
Charlie shrugs. “There’s no use arguing with you,” he says. “Because I know I’m right. And you know it too. You just won’t admit it.”
“You are not right and I won’t admit it,” I say. “You can just go eat your hamburgers without me.”
“Okay,” says Charlie, and he’s out the door before I’ve even put my coat back on. I have to run downstairs and wait three minutes at the end of the driveway before he turns around and comes back for me. The radio is on. They’re playing Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, which Charlie knows is my favorite song. It seems perfectly clear that if they hadn’t been playing Maxwell’s Silver Hammer he would have kept right on driving, up to the Burger Chef by himself. I don’t know whether, once there, he would have bought me a hamburger. Charlie drives with one hand on the steering wheel, the other flat on his thigh, one eye on the road, the other on the gas gauge. He is thinking how every ounce of pressure on the accelerator brings us further from the grace of a full tank. If everyone drove like he does, he is fond of saying, there would be no gasoline shortages and hence no wars.
The boy behind the counter at the Burger Chef has an erection. He’s a tall skinny kid and so agitated that when Charlie says, “We’ll each have two large cheeseburgers, an order of fries, and a Coke,” he brings us two burgers, one fry, and one Coke.
“No,” says Charlie gently. “That’s two each.”
The boy returns with two more burgers, two more orders of fries, and two more Cokes. He bills us for everything.
“Let it go,” I whisper to Charlie. “The poor kid’s really distracted.”
“I know,” Charlie says, and we eat it all anyway.
Venus has gone down, sunk behind the middle school across the road from our building. We can see, through the sloped glass of the windshield as we park, the flat stretch of black sky over our roof, several stars, the clarity that accompanies cold weather. Upstairs I open the refrigerator and look inside. There is a list on the door, of things I need to buy for Thanksgiving, and I’ve forgotten to cross off the cranberries. My mother sent the list, as a guideline, she said, but I’m adhering to it absolutely. Next to the word “Turkey,” in parentheses, she wrote “Twenty Pounds.” I am worried that when I call the store in the morning they’ll tell me it’s too late for a twenty-pound turkey and that I’ll have to make do with a ham. I would not be trusted with a holiday again. Charlie has come in and is sorting through the coupons in the coupon drawer, arranging them in piles. He does this every so often. The pile on the right is made up of coupons which have already expired. He flips through it once, to see what we’ve missed, and throws it away. The remaining pile he divides once again, into foods and nonfoods. On top of the food pile is a coupon advertising twenty cents off on a jar of Presto spaghetti sauce.
“We’ll have that tomorrow,” I say.
“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” says Charlie. “I have to go to dinner at what’s her name’s house.”
“Who?”
“Some student who invited me to dinner.”
I close the refrigerator softly and look at him.
“I couldn’t say no,” he explains. “She’s suicidal. It says so in her files. And when she invited me over she said she had this great recipe for chicken and if I didn’t come she’d kill herself. She said that. What could I say?”
“You could have said, No—if I come over my wife will kill me.”
“I’ll say that next time,” says Charlie.
This has happened before. Each time, I’ve felt a small explosion in my chest. It makes me sad. Some fragile-hearted student sets a table for two and cooks dinner for my husband. They all make chicken, because it’s cheap and easy and there are so many things you can do with it. They are all slightly myopic, like Mary, or a little weird and artistic, like Lorelei, or they have fine bones and bad tempers, like me. Sometimes I wonder, is there anything left? And how do they know she’s suicidal anyway? Has she scars on her wrists? Rope burns under her collars? Do they have to pump her stomach periodically? Or does she simply go around saying things like I have this great recipe and if you don’t come up and try it I’ll kill myself? And
what does she look like?
“What does she look like?” I ask.
“Who?”
“Forget it.”
“I’m about ready for bed,” says Charlie, and he stands close behind me, his chin resting on top of my head. He lets all of his weight go and just hangs there swinging his arms. I lift them up and put his fingers, one by one, into my mouth. I suck on them greedily like a baby.
“Go then,” I say, because I want to watch the news on television. Our government, it seems, has approved funding for construction of the B-l bomber. Our president has said that we need not concern ourselves, that the bombs won’t fall on us. I don’t know what he’s thinking of, but listening to this, and to Charlie in the bedroom already snoring, I feel suddenly prepared for anything that might happen in my life.
Peace and Passivity
For a moment it looks as if Susan might fall. She is making her way down the steps, which are narrow and flimsy and made of metal like a fire escape. Snow has fallen through the night, in huge wet flakes that beat against the roof and windows, so the steps are treacherous. She has slung her bag over her shoulder and grips the railing with both gloved hands as she makes her descent, kicking the snow from each step with a vicious swipe of her foot. With each kick there is the sound of an avalanche, a roar followed suddenly by silence. Another roar, another silence. Susan grits her teeth. Her determination might strike Tom as heroic if it did not make him sad. She refuses to use the front steps, which are inside, well-lit, and carpeted, because the downstairs neighbors, whom Susan and Tom haven’t met, have not cleaned up the mess their dog made on the carpet a day ago. It smells. Susan won’t clean it up herself, on principle, and Tom certainly is not about to clean it because, well, why should he? He is watching her now, from the kitchen window. The metal stairs run flush with the house at a steep diagonal, and he can see her as she passes. She doesn’t know he is there. She thinks he is asleep. He pretended to be asleep and then, when she stepped out on the landing to lace her boots, he climbed out of bed and went to the window. He was touched by the fact that she took care not to wake him, that she dressed in the dark and shut the bathroom door before brushing her teeth. But he really wanted to see if she would kiss him goodbye, even though she thought he was asleep. To kiss a sleeping person, Tom thinks, especially if that person is your husband, is an act of faith and devotion, a form of prayer. So he lay there making grunting dream sounds and waiting. He felt like someone standing on a highway with his thumb out, waiting for a car that would not materialize.
Now she loses her grip on the icy banister and slips. There is a moment of terrible uncertainty: will she fall, or won’t she? This is all Tom feels, the tension of the moment, but he feels it in his chest, in the region of the heart. He feels it as love. He reaches out as if to steady her, but his hand smacks the window, and by then she has regained her footing. She is a big girl, five seven, bigger than Tom. He is often reminded of a statue, a figure carved by an artist so in love with the male form that he endows even women with the attributes of men. She has broad shoulders, a wide back, a tight waist, and smooth hips. Her breasts are high and firm, like the pectorals of a body builder. Her thighs, when he lies between them, grip and rock him, and her flesh itself is of such substance that he cannot feel her ribs, or her heartbeat, through it. Lately he finds himself concentrating on her most delicate features, her lips and eyebrows, those two blonde tapered arches, with a nostalgia as acute as that felt by someone staring at a photograph of an absent lover.
Now she is sitting in Jeremy’s car in the parking lot, drinking coffee out of a thermos. It must be coffee, because it is steaming. The car’s interior is brightly lit. Everything else is in darkness. It is five o’clock in the morning. How long has Jeremy been sitting there, in a lit car with the engine off, freezing his butt? Tom doesn’t like Jeremy. He calls him Germie. He doesn’t like a man who wears a tank top in the middle of February and rolls his rs when he says “Roberto.” Roberto is Germie’s lover, a tough cookie. It is clear that Germie is complaining about Roberto right now, because Susan is shaking her head and patting him maternally on the shoulder. If only Tom could hear her. How does she phrase her sympathy? He doesn’t know. He could be on Mars, looking down at her.
The night before, just as the snow was beginning to fall, they had driven to the mall to get Tom some underwear. He has been putting on a little weight, and he read in Ann Landers that tight underwear can cause sterility in men. Susan made a joke, about cheap, effective birth control, that stung him. She agreed to go along on the condition that while he was in Sears shopping she would stay in the arcade and circulate her petition, against a buildup of the U.S. military presence in El Salvador. In Sears, he bought the underwear and a bag of milk chocolate stars. He ate them before going out to meet her. She was sitting on a bench, gesturing and talking to a child in a stroller. For a minute Tom thought she was trying to get the child to sign her petition, but then he saw how miserable she looked and that she had crumpled the petition into a ball. “If there’s a war,” she was saying to the child, “and your daddy goes away and never comes back, it won’t be my fault.” The child giggled. Susan shrugged and got up.
“First of all,” she said in the car, “I’ll bet you nine out of ten of those idiots in there never even heard of El Salvador much less Alexander Haig, and then the manager comes up to me and says if I don’t stop soliciting he can have me arrested. Soliciting! Then I asked him if he would sign anyway, as long as I had him interested, and he crumpled it up. I could have him arrested.” She was driving a little crazily, skidding on turns and braking so suddenly he had to brace himself. “I got six pairs of Fruit of the Loom,” he said, in an effort to calm her. He unwrapped the package and held them up, but she wasn’t paying any attention. She was swearing at a driver who had passed and cut her off at an intersection. “Goddamn ignorant asshole,” she said.
Tom stared at the labels on his underwear, at the tiny bright clusters of fruit. It hadn’t always been like this; when they were married, a year and a half ago, she was still in school, in classics. At night she read Latin aloud in her study, a corner of the living room she had roped off with a tapestry. Often he would creep up behind it and listen, barely breathing, his cheek brushing against the coarse grain of the cloth. Her voice was husky and melodious, and the strange fluid sounds of the dead language filled him with awe. He confessed to her once that he did this, that he listened, that her facility stunned and moved him. She seemed put off. She began to read in a whisper. Later, as she became more and more political, as the El Salvador thing became, as she put it, an imperative, he blamed himself.
Home from the mall, she announced it was bedtime. She said Jeremy would pick her up at five in the morning and they would drive to Chicago for the workshop and rally. Tom hadn’t known anything about a workshop, It was one and a half days long, she explained. It was organizational. Tom said he thought she was already pretty well organized; wherever he went he saw posters with her name and number printed on the bottom. People called, and she directed them to meetings, arranged car pools, and raised money for speakers. She was hardly ever home. When she wasn’t home and the telephone rang, Tom didn’t answer it. He was tired of the words “El Salvador.” El Salvador was two thousand miles away. When Susan said this, two thousand miles, she made it sound like next door, like she could look out the window and see it. She was increasingly preoccupied. She had lost her sense of humor. He joked with her now. “Don’t do anything with Germie that I wouldn’t do myself,” he said. Susan yanked off her socks and climbed into bed and curled up facing away from him. She was flexing her feet, arching them, then pulling them taut. The pressure of her toes against his thigh aroused him, and he turned to her and began making love to her, coaxing her. He felt some resistance, but he had learned to recognize in it an aversion not to himself but to pleasure, as if her pleasure were a slap in the face of the world’s pain, so he kept on. Her face was wet. When she came finally it was with a vengean
ce, with a hoarse grieved sound like a battle cry. Her eyes were open, staring past him. He bent closer and whispered. “Peace,” he said.
Now she and Jeremy have driven away. The apartment is cold; the heat was turned low for the night. Under his bare feet the linoleum is gritty. He can go back to bed and sleep until work, or he can put on a robe and slippers and drink coffee in the kitchen with the television on. What kinds of shows are on so early in the day? He switches on the set, and stands in the chilly darkness waiting for the picture. At last it appears, a gray aureole rimmed with black, a bull’s eye. He turns the volume up until the room hums with static, with an otherworldly sound like an intergalactic message. For the first time his nakedness begins to get on his nerves, and he goes into the bedroom and puts some blue jeans on, and some boots, and his leather bracelet, and then he flops down on the bed and falls asleep. He is wakened by Good Morning America in his kitchen. He has left the set on full volume. The noise is enough to blast the cockroaches out of the walls. Sure enough, a door slams below and the new neighbor comes charging up the steps and starts banging, on the door. Tom doesn’t get up right away. He will wait until the yelling begins, so he will know what to expect, a man or a woman. It’s a woman. He goes into the kitchen to pour himself a glass of orange juice, and then he carries the orange juice into the living room and opens the door. Before him stands the neighbor he has never seen. She has dark hair parted on the side and pinned carelessly in back like a flower. She would be pretty if she were smiling.
“It’s seven o’clock in the morning,” she says. “Could you turn that down please?” Tom admires her control. He can see that she is on the verge of some kind of collapse. She could be the lady in the Anacin-3 commercial, except that under her robe she is naked. He knows she is naked because otherwise she would never have buttoned her robe so meticulously; it has tiny pearl buttons from bottom to top, like those of a bridal gown. “Please,” she begs. Someone on Good Morning America is yelling about bed-wetting. Tom has to think fast. He puts his finger to his ear, smiles, shakes his head, puts the finger on his neck, shakes his head some more, and opens his mouth wide. The neighbor squints. Her confusion is charming. She peers into his open mouth as if searching for a clue. Tom can see the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. She is twenty-eight perhaps, older than Susan and smaller, naturally. Her face suddenly brightens. “Oh,” she says. “That’s loud. Loud.” She accompanies the word “loud” with a grandiose gesture toward the kitchen, and then she claps both hands over her ears and says it again. “Loud.”