“There’s jam no more! Look what I did!” I took him by his good arm and dragged him to the kitchen. It glowed like the Hope diamond.
“Well now,” Ted said. His bad arm hung at his side and his good arm hung around my neck. He looked at me. “Jesus, it’s like Gram was here!” I felt the horror and wonder of Gram.
“Clean house, clean mind! That’s what she always said!” I chirped.
“I gotta sit down, Mols, I feel like shit on toast.”
“Well here, Dad, come on over and sit down.”
We each sat in a living room chair.
“God, I’m hungry!” I said. “I’ve really been working!”
“Yeah, I see you’ve messed up my favorite T-shirt,” my father said. It was streaked with jam and sweat and Fantastik.
“Oh, I thought I picked an old one.”
“Well it is old. But I liked it the best anyway.”
“Dad, could you give me the money for the tickets?”
“Tickets?”
“The plane tickets.”
“Heh, heh, your sister already got it.”
“What do you mean she already got it?”
“I only got enough cash for one ticket, Mols.”
“But you said you’d pay our way!”
“I can’t afford to. It was my car.”
“But, Dad, it’s not fair!”
“Oh, Molsie, you got a nice job. You can pay your own way.”
“That’s not the point! You should have given each of us half!”
“It don’t work that way, Mols. Heh, heh, that Gail”—he smiled—“that Gail, she got to me right away. She got to me the first night before the car got fixed.”
“So that’s how they had all this spending money. That scumbag!”
“Watch yer language there.”
“Well he is a scumbag!” I was so furious I was blaming Jules instead of Gail. “We were supposed to all be together! You invited us! Everything was supposed to be normal!”
“Normal!” Ted laughed, holding his side. “Shit, my ribs hurt me when I laugh.”
“I’m leaving, Dad.”
“Well, I don’t blame you.”
“I’m calling the airport and seeing if I can change my ticket. I’m getting out of here. You’ve got a clean kitchen and I’m out of here.”
“Well, I don’t blame you,” Ted said again. He’d gotten up to head for the bedroom.
“Dad, don’t you want to go out for dinner?”
“Christ no, I’m sick as a dog.” He stopped on the way to the bedroom and picked up a Black Velvet bottle. “I got my dinner, honey.” Then he disappeared into his room and shut the door.
I listened for cars again, then called the airline and changed my flight, took off Ted’s T-shirt and put on my own Ajax-stained top. Oh well, no one would notice in the dark. I walked into the sticky night and took myself to dinner on the beach. Grouper and key lime pie. When I got home, the car was pulling out of the driveway, Jules and Ted in front, Gail in back. “Hey, Molly, we’re all goin’ out on the town!” Gail screamed out the window.
“Well not me! I’m just coming back from my key lime pie.”
My sister waved a joint. “Come on, Mol, don’t be a party pooper.”
“You’re the party pooper,” I said as I approached the rear window. “You’re the goddamned party pooper.”
“Come on, Mol, be nice, we’re on vacation!” Gail slurred.
“Yeah, be nice,” Jules said from the front seat. “Come on out with us, Molly. We’ll buy you a drink!”
Gail opened the car door. “Please, Mol,” she said, her eyes nearly crossed from the booze and the dope. “C…c…” she began, “copped from this guy. Cool guy, Mol.” She trailed off, then revived. “Got that Platinum Hash. I mean it’s way, way beyond Gold. You’ll love this hash, Molly.”
I half sat on the back seat, keeping the car door open. “I haven’t had stuff like that in ten years! I really don’t want any,” I said. There in the Florida night in my stained cotton top, I sounded as if I were wearing a tweed suit, a starched blouse, seamed stockings, brogues, and had just had my hair permed in rows of tight gray curls. I was the Nanny from another planet. And in the way of Nannies, I was Vengeance.
“How old are you, Gail?” I interrogated her imperiously.
“Twenty-eight,” she said obediently.
“When I was your age I was getting a divorce! I was supporting myself full-time! I was paying taxes!”
“I’m all twisted up in the strap from my bag, Mol. Here, hold my drink while I untwist myself.” She shoved a whiskey sour in my hand. “And don’t eat my maraschino cherry.”
“I’m not going to eat your goddamned cherry! You took all the plane ticket money from Daddy and gave it to Jules!”
“Now just a minute, Molly,” Jules said from the front seat. I was scared of Jules. He was the kind of man who slung people over his shoulders for fun.
“And where the fuck have you been!” My voice was a special kind of hissing ice.
“I don’t need to make excuses to you!” Gail exclaimed innocently. “You’re acting like an asshole!”
“Close the car door, Mol, we’re all goin’ out on the town now, honey,” Ted said placatingly.
“Let’s all be friends, now,” Jules said.
“Chill out for Chrissake,” Gail said. She reached for the whiskey sour, but I held it back. It was gold in the streetlight with its maraschino dot. I held it above my head. Then I threw it in her face, watching it stream in slow motion till it hit her nose and cheeks and neck.
“Jesus Christ I’m going to kill her!” Gail screamed and opened the door on her side.
“Why should I take care of you! You’re twenty-eight years old!”
“Hold me back, Julesie! I’m gonna kill her!” She was grabbing at the air, but I was standing on the other side of the car. Then I was moving toward her, as if to give her something to grab. Jules was out of the driver’s seat and leaping over the hood of the car to hold her. He was pinning her arms and she was struggling to hit me, poking the air and crying now, the tears rolling down her cheeks. Ted was hanging on to the passenger’s side front door.
“Shhh!” he called. “My neighbors are gonna hear you!”
“The neighbors!” Gail and I said simultaneously in astonishment. “After all the times you screamed in front of the neighbors,” I said to him.
“You’ve got to be kidding, Teddy!” Gail exploded, then went immediately back to sobbing.
“You better stay away from her,” Jules warned. “You don’t know how she gets when she’s like this.” He was holding her from the waist and rocking back and forth with her.
“I’m gonna kill you!” she screamed again at me. He was cradling her loosely. She could have broken from his arms, but she stayed in them. “Hold me back, Julesie! I’m gonna kill this bitch!”
I stood about four feet in front of them, just short of swinging range.
“Get in the house!” Ted was trying to hustle us in, but we weren’t moving. Gail was thrashing her arms and Jules was swaying back and forth and I was stuck to my spot by the back of the car. Ted was pinching my arm.
“You lied!” I said. “You took the ticket money and you lied!”
“You went to college!” she said suddenly. “You got married! You have a job!” she accused me.
“You could go to college, too! You could have a job!”
“Fuck you.” Jules had let go of her. She was backing out into the street.
“Yer gonna get hit by a car, Gailsie,” Ted warned.
Jules was going after her. She turned and ran toward the beach.
Ted tugged on my arm again and I went into the house with him, still clutching the empty plastic cocktail glass with the remains of the sour.
“Don’t you want supper, Dad?” I asked him. “Can you order in down here? Do they have a takeout place?”
“I don’t want nothing to eat,” he said dully, slumping in a chair.
“Wow,” I said.
“Wow is right.”
“I can’t believe you’re worried about your neighbors after all these years, Dad.”
“People change.”
“Polly doesn’t think so. She thinks people never change.”
“Polly.” He spat her name. “I wanna keep my little place here, Mols. I don’t want no trouble. Look here, I’ll try an’ send ya the money.”
“No you won’t,” I said stonily. “I’ll get on a plane and you’ll get drunk and you’ll think that you have better uses for your money than sending it to me. You’ll probably even send it to Gail.” My voice came out of me like a paper ribbon, flat and tearable.
“You threw that drink right at her!” Ted said, almost admiringly.
“I can’t believe I did that.”
“You shouldda done it a long time ago.”
“I gotta pack, Dad. The cab’s coming to get me at ten. My flight’s at eleven-thirty.”
“Yeah, it’s probly good for ya to get out of here.”
“Do you think she’ll come right back?”
“Nah, they’re in a booze hall by now. They ain’t coming back right away. I’ve still got this bug, Molsie. I’m lying down. Don’t lock the door when ya go. Those two ain’t got keys.”
“Surely,” wrote my favorite poet, George Herbert, “if each one saw another’s heart…all would disperse, And live apart.” After I looked into the hearts of Ted and Gail, I fled. “All would disperse,” George said, the poet who had a Saint’s Day all to himself in the Anglican calendar. To live apart was a way of having heaven, a calm place, or at least a way of avoiding hell, a jammed place.
I had to focus when I returned from Treasure Island, yet nothing focused me. I could barely wheel a cart down a supermarket aisle. To survive I invented a rigid routine: rise at 7:30 A.M., make breakfast, be at my desk by 9:30. Go out for lunch at 12 sharp. In those morning hours I pored over my poems, turning the chaos of our lives on Pilgrim Road into the comforting grid of suburbia. The lawns of June, I wrote, flush with the walks and white/driveways of town….smooth, regular as the rules of a fresh white card pulled from the box of a new game….Those geometric boundaries that might have chafed others felt as good as tight bandages on a broken limb. If I was broken, the lines set the bones, then acted as a cast. Art was not like life—it was the way to life. Inside a poem, I could mend.
And in the afternoons I sent my poems out to magazines. Somewhere, there was an editor who would hear me. An adopted literary child, I was determined to find my birth family. I buckled down and dispatched a manuscript of poems to publisher after publisher—and one day read the statistics on the likelihood of getting a first book published, then sank to my knees and wept in the middle of my mint green shag rug. Ben Peters stopped by with an armload of zinnias to find me wetfaced among my groceries and fashion magazines on the floor, poring over the wicked chart in a poets’ newsletter.
“You can’t let that bother you!” he declared. “You might as well read a horoscope than that crap!” He picked up Mademoiselle. “Here, here’s our sign, Cancer.”
“This is too desperate for words!” I whined.
He read the horoscope and was silent.
“Well, what did it say?”
He silently passed the folded-over glossy page to me. “Read the second sentence,” he said.
“ ‘You could even have a major publication in your field,’ ” I read aloud.
“Well, that’s a lot better than the chart that made you cry!”
It was. It was better. It was the best. Two weeks later I got a notice that I had been runner-up in a poetry book contest. So what. That didn’t mean publication. But they had extra money at the press, and they were publishing my book, too! Would I please sign the university press contract and make sure to fill in the title?
After three days of carting the contract around in my purse, I did. I wrote in block letters, the monastic truth according to George Herbert, the priest of a green country parish: AND LIVE APART.
In a sweat, I locked my apartment door—then unlocked it, dashed to the bathroom, locked it again, ran to the car, checked for the files, the shorts, the sweaters, the radio, the books, and my manuscript of poems. I had intended to leave at 9 A.M. but now it was 11:30 A.M. I would have to drive without stopping in order to make it before the art colony office closed. OK, I won’t pee, I thought.
Halfway there at a highway rest stop as the shadows lengthened, I had to call and say I would be late. I wasn’t to worry, the person who answered said, the keys to my little stone house would be waiting in my mailbox in the art colony farmhouse. All I had to do was to get there before dinner ended. But it was well after dark by the time I got there, and dinner had long been cleared away. I took a deep whiff of the farmhouse kitchen—a century of apple pie. It smelled like La Grange. There were the keys to my studio, just as they said, plus a map to my little stone house. But the dirt roads were unlit, and I got lost twice before the sign with my house’s name loomed up.
Exhausted and hungry, too frightened of the dark and the woods to unload my car, too tired to unpack, too tired even to wash my face, I wept on the unmade bed, hardly noticing that the fieldstone studio smelled of firewood and pine. A sudden fear had dropped down on me: I wasn’t a good writer, why had I come here? Why was I so unprepared—I didn’t even notice restaurants on the way, where would I eat? When I switched on the porch light, a swarm of mosquitoes dive-bombed my hair. A layer of dust shone on the bookcase in the light of the lamp with the unbalanced shade. Untalented, unfed, and unhinged: a rustle in the leaves near the porch. “Who is it?” I shouted. Before I could find out I threw myself in the car and drove back to the farmhouse.
It was empty—no, there was a light from one room, and sound from a television. I peered into a tiny TV room. “Brooklyn,” said the man with the charming accent in the wing-backed chair, “a show about Brooklyn, where I live when I’m not here, won’t you sit down?”
God, I was starving. Did he know a restaurant nearby?
“They will all be closed by now!” he exclaimed. “This is a tiny town! They all close by nine o’clock.” It was 10 P.M.
“Well, I guess I’ll have to go to bed without dinner.”
“No! Impossible!” Somehow he got two syllables out of no—no-ah. He pronounced impossible as impossibile—im poss ee bee lay. Yet his English was fluent and intelligent.
“Oh, well, really, it will be all right.”
“No! Impossible!” he repeated. “We must get you some food. We will storm the kitchen. We will break the window and the lock. We will get in there and get you some nice chicken. We had lovely chicken for dinner.” When he moved in his chair to gesture, his movements were fluid and easy, though his body had a barrel-chested bulk to it. At one moment he curled house-cat-like in the chair, at another sprang panther-like toward me in hungry gesticulation.
I really was starving, but I didn’t want to get caught breaking into the art colony kitchen on the night of my arrival. Then two young women appeared in the doorway.
“Tilla!” they both whispered.
“Anna! Linda! This is a new guest who has not had her dinner, she has arrived late, and this is a disaster! There is no food for her, not even an orange!”
“Hi”—one of them extended her hand—“I’m Anna.” She was small and slender, thick hair in a dark, extravagantly cut bob.
“I’m Linda,” said the other one, not extending her hand. She, too, was small and slender. Each one was dressed in a T-shirt and black jeans.
“Two of my nieces,” the man they called Tilla said. “They are helping me with a program I am doing.” He was ushering us from the TV room, through the dining room, to the path outside the kitchen.
“Darlings Linda and Anna, we have to get this guest her dinner. She can’t go to bed without eating! You are tiny, Anna, maybe you can wiggle through the kitchen window.”
“So what’s your name?” Linda ask
ed.
“Molly.”
“What an unusual name,” Tilla said. “My name is Tilla, Tilla Szabo. My name in Hungary is Attila, like Attila Jozsef, our great poet, but no one in America knows this name.”
“Oh yes, I know the poems of Attila Jozsef! Are you sure we should be breaking into the kitchen like this…?”
“Are you crazy?” he asked imperiously. “You are hungry. You must eat. This is the most basic human instinct. You deny your instincts?”
“Look, I don’t want to cause trouble here…”
Though I supposed he was a guest, Tilla seemed to be an authority in charge. “Trouble! You are without food. You have driven on the horrible New Englandish roads and you have come here in the night and they have given you only keys.”
“And no bed linens or towels.” I sulked.
“Do not change the subject from hunger! My body tells me when I am hungry I must eat. That is that. I eat when I am hungry, sleep when I am sleepy, dance when I must dance. This is the way artists must live. Rules are not for such basic things. And who cares about rules when the body says it needs something! Now, Linda” (he pronounced it Leenda), “you will stand under the kitchen window, and Anna, you will hop on her shoulders and raise up the window.
“Sshhh!” Tilla warned. “Some staffs might be around.”
“Staff! Really, I don’t think we should be doing this…”
“You have no more say in this,” he responded.
We were under the kitchen window.
“Hey, Tilla,” Linda whispered, “how come you never broke into the kitchen for us?”
“What’s so special about her?” Anna challenged, as she climbed onto Linda’s shoulders. They were both amazingly agile. I couldn’t have gotten someone balanced on my shoulders in a million years.
“Tilla!” another voice whispered from large bushes in front of the house.
“Sshhhh!” he said. I recognized her as she came into the light cast by the window: a famous novelist, dressed exactly like the picture that her publisher printed on book after book, in a shapeless black muumuu with a long necklace, a gigantic piece of handcrafted jewelry, afloat on her bosom.
“What are we doing?” she asked him.
Paradise, Piece by Piece Page 15