The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

by Deborah Eisenberg

  I went and sat on the small balcony that overlooked the garden. The air lapped against my skin with an unfamiliar silkiness, and scalloped rings of mountains surrounded me like ripples. Here and there, I could see softly rounded churches, with spires and crosses. My mother had been ill for so long that all time had flowed toward her death, and I feared that all time would flow backward to it as well. I had become thirty-four waiting for my own span to be placed over that fulcrum—an irrevocable placement.

  Down below me a small white rabbit nosed out among the plants and zigzagged out of sight. Its pink eyes and the pink lining of its ears looked particularly sensitive to pain.

  I noticed that my nice traveling skirt was already wrinkled and ingrained with dust, and a wave of sorrow engulfed me, as though I’d betrayed something placed in my care. This was only the strain, I understood, of the last weeks—the extra hours at the hospital, the extra hours at work to justify the time off I knew I would be taking, the funeral arrangements, the ordeal, especially, of sorting through my mother’s papers and disposing of all the little things my mother had acquired over the years for one purpose or another, now also dead.

  How thorough my preparations had been! My mother herself, though, had been utterly unprepared. For close to twenty-five years her life had consisted of little more than the miseries of a slow degenerative illness, but as her future declined in value and her suffering increased, her fear increased also. She had feared death greatly, and life clung to her like a burning robe.

  I thought with sudden fury of the doctor who stood with me in the hospital corridor only a few days ago. He had been unprepared as well, and he looked helpless, like a little boy all dressed up in a doctor suit. Yet he must have known for a long, long time that sooner or later he would have to face someone the way he faced me that day, and say those things.

  That night my sleep was shallow and unpleasant, and when I woke I had the queasy sensation of having been brought up short, as when one steps from a boat onto fixed ground, and that was how I remembered that I was finished for good with trips to the hospital.

  Just as it occurred to me that I would have to plunge into an unknown universe merely in order to obtain some coffee a man with a trim silver beard appeared at my door. “Good morning, good morning. I’m Norman, your evil landlord,” he said, holding out to me an armload of roses.

  “Thank you,” I said. The flowers, still richly furled and heavy with droplets of water, were a living, modulated, faintly sickening salmon color.

  “Vase under the sink,” Norman said. I judged him to be in his late fifties, and he would have been quite good-looking, I thought, except that his face seemed to have been stamped by a habit of geniality and then left unattended. Despite his jaunty white clothes, he seemed uncomfortable.

  “My wife would have done a real arrangement for you,” he said. “She has quite a flair for it. Gardening, too.”

  “Did Mrs. Egan do the garden here?” I asked. “Sandra,” he said. “Well, she doesn’t do too much now. We have the boy handle it.” Norman wandered over to the window and peered out, shading his eyes. “I suppose one gets tired of things.” I remained standing, anxious to get on with my day.

  “It’s a shame,” Norman said, turning to me. “Used to be, when we first moved in here, you could see the mountain from this window every day of the year. Sacred, you know. Of course, this whole area was considered special—conquered over and over again by different tribes till the Spanish came and grabbed it up. Cities right on top of other cities down there. But—it’s fascinating—every one of those peoples used the same big pyramid up on the mountain to worship in their own way. Splendid ruins—Sandra and I used to take picnics…”

  I squinted out the window. “Oh, you can’t see anything today.” Norman dismissed with a little wave the blue sky and dazzling sun. “All kinds of industry now mucking things up. People coming in from the country—crowding, pollution, that sort of thing.” He sighed. “Anyhow, nice to know you’ve got a view, eh? Whether you can see it or not. Well…” He put forth a mild, formalized version of a chuckle. “But we still love it. And, please—if you need anything, I hope you’ll ask. There are always so many little things one doesn’t quite know what to do about. One expects things to be one way, but then they turn out to be—not to be just exactly the way one expects.”

  “Yes,” I said, from the depths of a sudden fatigue. “Perhaps you’d know where I might be able to buy some coffee.”

  “Coffee,” he said. “Well—coffee. They’d have it in town, of course. Dolores handles that sort of thing for us. Oh, yes,” he said, misunderstanding my look of surprise, “we’re very lucky with Dolores. Down here we don’t like to be very, very formal”—he winked at me—“but Dolores came to us very young. Husband disappeared—you know the way they do—and Sandra taught her everything.”

  “Really,” I said.

  “Well, we were in the restaurant business, you see. We had lovely establishments. New Orleans, Dallas, Cincinnati, Fort Lauderdale—all over. And in every one of those places we had a wonderful, cultivated clientele. Sandra and I always personally oversaw everything. Oh,” he said. “I brought something else for you.” He handed me a little book. “This might prove useful. And remember, don’t feel shy. If you have questions, or you need something, you just come right downstairs and ask.”

  “I don’t suppose I’ll be bothering you often,” I said, taking the opportunity to discourage further visits from him. “I’m really just here to—”

  “Of course,” he said. “You’re young and adventurous. You didn’t come here to hang around with a couple of old—a couple of old…people.”

  Young and adventurous, I thought irritably, as we went out together; young and adventurous. But as I closed the door behind us, I glanced back into the room, and I felt as if I’d been slapped. With the jars of cream out on the bureau, it was true that the place looked like a girl’s first apartment, like the apartments my college roommates had gotten for themselves when we graduated and I’d moved back in with my mother.

  When I opened the front gate, the town I’d driven through only the day before took me by surprise, as if my imagination had perversely reconstructed a fleeting hallucination. The concave whorl of tangled streets lay below me in a glaze of sun, and I wound downward, baffled by the high walls. How quiet all the people around me were! They spoke in low voices, and averted their heavy-lashed eyes as I passed by. Even the children made hardly any noise. Trucks and motorcycles and an occasional flustered chicken provided all the sound.

  At the base of the town, I found a small square, and although I was anxious to do a few errands and get my bearings, its lacy little white iron benches looked so ceremonial and expectant that I felt obliged to sit down for a moment. I chose a spot in the shade of a broad-leafed tree and surveyed the odd patch of a park around me. Paved walks threaded through it, and it was dotted with tiny tiled fountains. Heavy prismatic beams seemed to converge on it from many different suns, giving everything an exaggerated dimensionality in which it was impossible to judge distances, and in the very center was a band shell, confected from curls of iron and pearly glass, whose dome rose above the leaves of nearby trees. Around the edges of the square, people who looked like dolls in costumes, with black yarn hair, sold things: painted toys, hardware, bursting red fruits, clothing, hideous stuffed dogs, or masks—a fantastic, impossible catalogue of items. Aromas of ripe—overripe—fruit, and dust, and some kind of peppery cooking oil swirled lazily around me.

  It was hot. I looked at my watch and was dismayed to find that it had stopped. What ought I to do? I thought, standing hurriedly. But I forced myself to sit back down and relax. I opened the little book that Norman had given me—a compilation of phrases in English and translation which the author seemed to consider indispensable to travelers:

  This dress is too long (too short).

  " " is made to fit badly.

  It is badly made.

  That is more than
I can pay for this dress

  (basket) (rug) (bowl).

  No, thank you, I do not want it.

  Good. That is a fair price.

  “Is it something unpleasant that you read?” I heard, and I looked up to see a man standing over me. He seemed so close, in my alarm, that every detail of the medal lying on his exposed chest looked immense: the hair around it and the skin, glistening with sweat, appeared magnified.

  “No,” I said to the large white teeth above me. I snapped the book shut and walked off on trembling legs.

  Soon I had gotten myself back under control, and I paused to see where I was. Next to me an opening in the street wall gave onto something that appeared to be a sort of general store. Inside, past dusty cases of beer stacked along the buckling aqua-colored wall, I found coffee and other things I needed. At the counter, two almond-eyed little girls painstakingly picked what I hoped was the correct amount of coins from a heap I put in front of them. Supervising this proceeding was a large woman in long, ruffled skirts, who grinned at me. I was painfully aware of being the absurd tourist, and I stared at the woman, who only grinned with greater gusto.

  It took me quite some time to find my way back to the square, where I stood looking helplessly at the streets that twisted up in a funnel around me. Eventually I managed to identify my route back, but at its mouth a row of women now sat, wrapped in shawls, and as I approached they stretched out their hands without glancing at me. There was no way to avoid them. I divided my change into equal portions and distributed it among the women, being very careful not to touch them.

  The first thing I saw when I opened the door to my apartment was my heartless line of creams and lotions on the bureau. I quickly put the jars into the medicine chest, and then I examined the packages and cans of food that Norman had provided. Later I lay down to read. But instead of holding the book, I was rising up to where I saw myself asleep. I dreamed of a cool, dark sleep that was ruptured almost immediately by noisy intruders who disputed and harangued for hour after hour in many guises and landscapes. Several times during the night they drove me into the solitude of wakefulness, at the boundaries of which they waited, shrieking and bobbing, until I was weak enough to be captured again.

  In the morning I woke to see my few purchases of the day before on the bureau, where I’d left them. How odd this light made everything look—the coffee, the sugar, the soap—like menacing little idols. And later, when I opened the gate onto the street, I once again experienced a little shock, as if the town, simmering below me in the dusty gold, had just materialized to greet me.

  I was determined to get a good start on the day, so I headed right down to the square, where I remembered having seen a news kiosk. Most of the publications for sale turned out to be comic books devoted to slaughter and tragedy, but there were several magazines with interesting pictures. I paid the older of the two boys who worked at the kiosk, while the other, who must have been around seven, stared at me, his face an upturned circle with a point at the chin.

  In the heat of the afternoon, when shutters rolled down over the shop doorways, I inspected the restaurants and cafés that faced the square, but they were filled with roughly clothed men, drunk even at that hour, and foreigners speaking English or German at an arrogant volume. Sorrowful vendors circulated among the tables, and there were flies.

  Persisting, I discovered a restaurant in a little courtyard that looked clean and quiet. After I settled at a table near a blossom-clogged fountain, I realized that the restaurant was part of a hotel, whose guests—small, ancient people in dressing gowns—spoke a language I did not recognize. I managed to order something from a young waiter, who encouraged my clumsy efforts with unwelcome enthusiasm, but when my meal came, steaming and covered with an assaultive spicy sauce, I could feel that the expression on my face replicated the one I had so often seen on my mother’s when she confronted her tray of trembling sickroom substances. I watched, humiliated, as the wizened diners around me ate hugely, with evident enjoyment, and I reminded myself that if I were in Chicago I would have no trouble obtaining a nice, crisp salad and a refreshing glass of iced tea.

  Norman was on his terrace when I returned, chatting with a man and woman who seemed to be about my age. The three of them sipped from frosty glasses, and a small boy squatted nearby, barking menacingly at a baleful setter. “Stop that, please, John-John,” the man said.

  “Oh, he’s all right,” Norman said, smiling at me in greeting. “Mister’s used to children, aren’t you, Mister?” The dog yawned with pleasure as Norman scratched his ear. “Mister and that old bunny rabbit belong to the people next door, but they like to come visiting.”

  “Excuse us,” the man said as the boy sprinted off in tight circles, spluttering like a balloon releasing its air. “I’m Simon Peter Murchison, and this is my wife, Annette. And that dignified personage now disporting himself in the compost is our firstborn, John-John.”

  “Would you believe it?” Annette said. “We bought that little shirt in Florence for him.”

  “Don’t be in a rush, now,” Norman said. “Won’t you sit down and have a drink with us, please? Dolores—” he called.

  “Where has our son picked up these habits?” Annette smiled, inviting me to marvel with her.

  “Yes, we’ve been all over since he was born,” Simon Peter explained loftily.

  “For pleasure?” I asked.

  “For a pittance.” He chuckled in the direction of his drink. “University salary.”

  “How nice to have a field that takes you around,” I said obediently, as I craned to read his watch.

  “History of Ecclesiastical Architecture in Colonial Countries,” Simon Peter said. We all glanced up at the silhouettes of crosses that stood out on the peaks around us, black against the shining sky.

  “These are so delicious, Norman,” Annette said, accepting a fresh drink from Dolores. “What do you put in them?”

  “Oh, just about any kind of fruit you can think of. And then just about any kind of alcohol you can think of.” Norman winked at me.

  “Are you teaching here now?” I asked Simon Peter.

  “I’ve picked up a semester,” he said. “But essentially we’re based in Europe for the moment.”

  Annette turned to me. “Do you know Europe?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You should,” she said. “You should try it. The things that are good here? They’re even better there. Of course, prices have really soared since we first went. But now here, even with the devaluations, prices are a completely different thing than they used to be. We’re priced right out now, on Simon Peter’s salary.” She cast a sour glance at the house. “You’ve certainly found yourself a bargain.”

  “I’ve just come for a short time. Besides,” I said deliberately, “I inherited a small amount of money.”

  “There,” she said. “You see?”

  “Anyhow, we’re glad to have you with us,” Norman said.

  “It seems like a wonderful place for children,” I said.

  “In many ways, yes,” Simon Peter said with a vague judiciousness. “In many ways I suppose it is. At least they’re happy enough.”

  “These children here can afford to be happy,” Annette said. “They’re spoiled rotten.”

  “Well, anyway,” Norman said.

  “No, it’s a shame,” Annette said. “I know these people. My parents came here every winter until I was twelve. These people are sweet, kind people; I grew up with them. They don’t want to hurt anyone—they’re Indians. But they’re so irresponsible. They keep having children and having children—they just can’t be taught to stop. And there isn’t enough food, there isn’t enough money, and so they starve. And now these people have become dishonest. You used to be able to leave them to take care of your house while you were gone, with all your silver or anything. Now they’ll steal your wallet right on the street.”

  “They’re a fine people, really,” Norman said to me. “For the most part. And
the little ones are darling.”

  “John-John,” Simon Peter called warningly to his son, who towered over a plant from behind which the rabbit peeked out, twitching.

  “No, I love these people, Norman,” Annette said. “But you can’t trust them anymore. Well, everyone has to eat, of course. I understand that. But they breed like—” Annette glanced with annoyance toward the shrubbery, where John-John now crouched holding a rock—“like I don’t know whats.”

  “Well,” Simon Peter said, “the climate’s still perfect.”

  “Have you been up to the mountain yet?” Annette gestured toward the empty sky.

  “I’ve really just arrived,” I said.

  “We’ll go while you’re here,” she said. “There are some very good market towns up there. You can still get the most marvelous textiles and ceramics for practically nothing.”

  “How nice,” I said. “Well…” I felt I had spent enough time on these witless marauders. “I really must be going upstairs now.” As I stood, I realized how potent Norman’s drink had been.

  “Will anyone stay for some supper?” Norman asked.

  “Don’t you wish Mommy would let you?” Annette said to John-John. “Thank you, Norman. We wish we could.”

  “Well, please come back soon,” Norman said. “Sandra will be dying to see you both.”

  “Hush now, honey,” Annette said to John-John. “We’re saying good night.”

  “She’s due in at the end of the week,” Norman said. We all looked at John-John as he tugged at Annette’s hand and loosed a descending wordless whine. “Sandra.”

  “Well, isn’t that wonderful, Norman,” Simon Peter said, frowning.

  So this was what was meant by “traveling,” by “taking a vacation”—these unnavigable currents, this sudden immersion in the lives of utter strangers, their thin, dreadful lives.

  That night sleep came for me like a great ship sliding between the dark sky and the dark water, and it bore me off to a territory that I recognized with horror, as I lost consciousness, from the night before. My dreams coiled and merged until I could no longer sustain sleep and woke exhausted, tossed by a shrill crowd onto the bed where I found myself.