by Maria Flook
Roger said, “Look at this place fill up. That’s proof enough for me.”
“Proof? What proof do you mean?”
“These folks must be getting something out of it. All it costs is a little of their free time.”
“I’m not going to any revival,” she told him. She turned around in her seat to look at his face. “Roger? Just tell me something. What exactly is a revival?”
“It’s an hour in which to reinvent God’s love.”
“You want to do that? Reinvent it?”
“Don’t worry, Ronnie, it’s like riding a bicycle. You’ll get right back on it.”
“You get right back on a horse, not a bicycle.”
“There’s a table of doughnuts in there big as a double bed. Cake doughnuts.”
“Cake doughnuts? So you’re telling me you’ve gone in there already?”
“You know, cake doughnuts. And good coffee.”
He stood outside the car waiting for Ronnie. She didn’t budge. She crossed her arms. She pulled down the visor mirror and looked at her own face to avoid looking at the blazing tabernacle, or whatever it was. Roger went around to the passenger window and dipped his head level with hers, but she didn’t respond. He shrugged and walked away. He waited to hold the door for another couple before he entered the big glass room where people were hugging and chattering as if before a wedding. Ronnie pushed the visor away and watched Roger sidle up to the refreshment table, but she couldn’t see what he was choosing for himself. More cars pulled into the parking lot, and she watched the families file into the building. One woman was dressed in a cloth coat with big oversized buttons, big as vanilla cookies. Some of these cookie-buttons were broken in half. A young teenaged girl wore square-toed dowager’s shoes like the out-of-date pairs sold in thrift shops. Ronnie understood that these were poor white people if she ever had seen poor white people. She didn’t like being forced to watch this kind of parade. Then it occurred to her, she should go get Roger and make him drive her home. First she would have to go find him, and she recognized a familiar panic. She felt it the same way each time. The idea of God hovering, waiting to see what she decided. Her desire to be on the inside with Roger instead of on the outside was the reason why people fell into all kinds of strange midnight societies. This feeling of being left alone.
Ronnie found him in the second row of folding chairs. He had placed a doughnut, her doughnut, on a small square napkin and rested it on the chair beside him. He had saved her a place. His bold assumption, that she, too, would join the circus, made her angry. She sat down beside Roger and bit into her doughnut. The white sugar clung to her lips and she rubbed the napkin over her mouth. She thought she was going to choke on the dry cake.
Ronnie didn’t know anyone. Yet she seemed to recognize faces, she felt as if she knew these strangers. She recognized that these men and women had lived in their world within her world, and were, of course, not strangers at all. They forced this idea into her head by the way they smiled at her, nodded, winked. They appeared to recognize her. She hated Roger for bringing her there, back to these relations whom she had ignored for years. A hot torch of song erupted, suddenly, from the makeshift pews. Ronnie recognized the hymn. The folding chairs with their cheap vinyl seat cushions did not have the comforting effect of the polished maple benches of her childhood church but seemed to mirror the working-world adult life in which her faith was lost. Her stunned face, as she avoided people’s eyes, only seemed to perpetuate the group’s collective desire to organize an intervention on her behalf. Roger was beaming. He opened his arms to present Ronnie to the onlookers as if he had just reeled in a beautiful fish, still writhing gloriously on deck.
If it really was Roger riding through the cemetery now and again, Ronnie was glad he didn’t stop and get out of the car. If Roger was born-again, it no longer concerned her. The radio host, Joy, would say it was “a ghost. Love’s ghost pestering Ronnie’s workplace. A common occurrence.” It didn’t frighten Ronnie. Ronnie sat in the tub, her chin pressed to her knees, her arms hugging her legs. She remembered that this was the position she had used as a child when jumping from diving boards. The bath had made her nervous. It was the same anxiety she had once experienced when washing a stain out of her blouse in a public rest room. She had to pull the blouse down over her shoulder and reveal her breast, in order to scrub the stained lapel. She expected intrusions and the apologies or silences one receives when doing something that is not illegal but too oddly personal.
Ronnie flicked off the radio and drained the bathwater. She looked down at the tub and saw that the porcelain was streaked a deep green. Oily rings descended the sides in deepening shades. She left it that way.
She had to return to the cemetery before going to her job at Leo’s for happy hour and she dressed in a hurry; drops of water bled through the fabric of her blouse. She had just pulled on her skirt when she heard the dead bolt on the front door. Someone was coming into the apartment. Her lover might want to surprise her, but she had no interest in that. Ronnie found herself imagining something wild, perhaps an unauthorized reunion with Roger.
“Hello—” someone said. It was a woman’s voice, maybe just a girl. “Anyone here?” The voice came from the living room.
“Just a minute,” Ronnie called through the bathroom door. She pulled her pumps on, but her feet were still wet and she couldn’t wriggle into them. “I’m coming out. Just wait.”
A girl was standing in the living room. It wasn’t the woman she had seen at the restaurant with her lover. This one was very young, young enough to be his daughter. Ronnie wondered if her lover could actually have a daughter this age. The girl was tall with broad, level shoulders and an angle of black hair which curtained one side of her face. She looked like a model in a teen magazine. She stood before Ronnie as if waiting to be officially welcomed. She was holding a large pleated umbrella. She twirled the umbrella once before closing it.
“Is it raining?” Ronnie didn’t know what else to say to her.
“This is Japanese. It’s paper and not really for rain. I take it when I’m feeling in a mood. It sort of hides me,” the girl said.
“Oh,” Ronnie said. She smiled at the girl, but the girl was looking around the room. “Well, what can I do for you?” Ronnie said.
“I just wanted to see this place. It still looks the same. It needs something. Maybe some ferns or spider plants. Something. Don’t you think?” The girl sat down on the sofa and stared at Ronnie.
Ronnie told her, “I’m just on my way out, then the place is yours.”
“I don’t think so. But that’s how the cracker crumbles.”
“Shit. I don’t want to hear about it, okay?” Ronnie said.
“I say no more,” the girl said.
Ronnie wondered if the girl was there for any real reason. Did she come to get a sweater, a hairbrush? Ronnie saw that the girl cupped something shiny in her right hand. It might have been a little silver gun, but it was only a pack of cigarettes in a glossy wrapper. “Did you leave some mascara here?” Ronnie decided to ask her.
“Mascara? I don’t know. Maybe I did. Let me see it,” the girl said.
Ronnie went into the bathroom and got down on her hands and knees to reach under the tub. She came back with a tube of Blue Midnight mascara and handed it to the girl.
“Jesus. This blue stuff? Who would wear it? No, that doesn’t belong to me.” She gave the tube of mascara back to Ronnie.
Ronnie looked down at the girl sitting on the sofa.
“I’m still very unhappy,” the girl told Ronnie.
Ronnie stared at the paper umbrella with its scores of sharp pleats.
“I’m taking the fish,” the girl said. “Okay?”
“The fish? Does he know about this? His last girlfriend gave him those fish,” Ronnie said.
“They’re mine,” the girl said. “I gave him these fish. I’m the one before the one before you.”
“You’re what?”
“The
one before the one before you.” She laughed and rubbed the tip of her nose with her knuckle. “Sorry I’m so blunt. That’s just me.”
“Well, shit.”
“It takes a minute to catch up, doesn’t it?” She put a cigarette in the corner of her dark mouth and flicked a plastic lighter. The lighter wasn’t sparking, but Ronnie didn’t get the girl a light. The girl said, “I brought a jar with me for the fish. It won’t take a minute.”
Ronnie stacked some magazines while the girl chased the fish with a small green net. The angelfish swirled in one corner, butted the glass, and shifted direction. They moved swiftly, streaking back and forth; they seemed to dissolve like candy. But the girl was expert with the net, it didn’t take long. Ronnie looked out the window as the girl screwed the lid on the jar. The sound of the metal threads was shrill.
“I’m leaving,” the girl called back to Ronnie as she walked toward the door.
“So long!” Ronnie was embarrassed by the gleam in her voice.
The girl turned around. “You know, it’s my anniversary.”
“Your anniversary? It’s the day you met him?”
“No. Not the day I met him. I figure that today is the day I will remember. I’ll remember the day I really shook him. I’ll put that in my birthday book. What about you?”
Ronnie was surprised to hear herself say, “Hell. Why not today?” She was already thinking of Roger.
“That’s far out,” the girl said. “Let’s write a note. We’ll sign it together.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Two signatures will give it some umph.”
Ronnie stared at the willowy youngster who looked more and more like a young Mod from Carnaby Street every second, a Jean Shrimpton look-alike, and she was overwhelmed by the sudden feeling of solidarity she felt with the young castoff. Ronnie said, “I know, we’ll make him a cake.”
“A cake?”
They laughed in competitive octaves until their laughter combined, dipped, and flowered together.
The girl put down the jar of fish. “You’re wicked, you know that?” she said to Ronnie as she followed her into the kitchen. They pulled open the cabinet doors looking for supplies.
“I thought he had a mix in here somewhere,” the girl told Ronnie. “But that was months ago.”
“It’s still in here,” Ronnie told her. “Duncan Hines.”
“Devil’s food,” the girl said, and she grabbed the box from a high shelf and tapped it on the Formica.
Ronnie twisted the dial to preheat the oven while the girl found a bowl and a wooden spoon. They stopped to look at one another. “You’re kind of young, aren’t you?” Ronnie said to the girl.
“It’s all relative,” the girl said, a little stung.
“I mean, you’re young to have such a clear eye. It usually requires some years.”
“Well, I’m one of these people whose nine lives go really fast. I’m accident-prone I guess—”
“I was wondering. Isn’t that a bandage on your foot?”
“This? I sprained my ankle last fall. I wear an Ace if I have to walk somewhere. I live ten blocks.”
“You should ride the bus. Tell me, did you need to have crutches?”
The girl looked at Ronnie. “Crutches? Not me. Well, I tried it for a while, but they pinched my underarms.”
Ronnie said, “You can adjust the height of those things so that they don’t pinch at all—”
They saw it at the same time. Smoke was rising from the oven door. Ronnie pulled it open to take a look. There was something on the bottom rack, on fire. It was a pair of golden mohair gloves. The gloves had been left to dry on the oven rack and had ignited when Ronnie preheated the oven. Ronnie grabbed a tongs and she lifted one glove, a burning hand, and dropped it in the sink. The other girl turned on the tap, dousing the glove. Ronnie reached into the oven again and lifted its mate with the tongs, but the flames ate it until it was a smoky cuff. She dropped the remains into the sink and they examined the sooty mementos.
“Are these yours?” the girl asked Ronnie.
“Not mine.”
“Someone else was up here, I guess.”
“Seems so.”
They walked around the island for a second, collecting their thoughts.
“Fuck the cake,” Ronnie said. “I can’t make a cake, I have to go to work.”
“Where?”
“Swan Point Cemetery.”
“You bury people?”
“Only the predeceased.”
The girl liked Ronnie’s humor and together their laughter sparked and exceeded what either one could have achieved on her own.
“The graveyard? No kidding? Ashes to ashes—”
“Dust to dust. You know,” Ronnie leaned nearer, “I think my old boyfriend has been stalking me there.”
“You’re kidding. He’s after you at the cemetery?”
“I guess,” Ronnie said.
“If he can wait long enough, you’ll be easy to find. How long you going to make him wait?” the girl said with the pleasure of a practiced trickster.
Ronnie told her, “You’re a breath of fresh air, you know that?”
The girl’s face smoothed, revealing a simple, remarkable joy in their alliance.
Ronnie said, “Shit, you know, we almost had a baby together.”
“Seriously?” The girl’s eye’s were wide. She might have thought Ronnie was referring to their lover in common.
Ronnie didn’t bother to clarify it. “I’m going to be late at the boneyard,” she said. Yet she knew that afternoons at Swan Point were always slow. People prefer to visit graves in the morning light. Early sunshine looks nursery-pink on the monuments. Afternoon light is harsh, and in the evening the stones lose definition, their chalky outlines dissolve against a field of dark. “Can we forget the cake and just get out of here?”
“Shit, the cake was your idea. I don’t need sweets.”
“Let’s just take the fish.”
Ronnie went to the bathroom sink and took a plastic cup from its circle holder. She walked back into the living room and plunged the cup into the fish tank, holding it before the speckled loach. The fish swirled forward and she lifted it out. Inside the plastic cup the fish seemed magnified. Its gills lifted and fell in silky hitches. Next, she put the key he had given her onto his desk blotter. The key was wet from her hand and it darkened the paper. The girl put her key directly on top, flush with the other. The metal teeth were shiny where the keys were identically sawed.
The girl took her jar of fish from the coffee table and dropped it in her big, oversized pocket. She lifted her paper umbrella and pushed the clasp forward until the pleats opened. Ronnie waited for the girl to go first, then she let herself out of the apartment and pulled the door shut.
Ronnie heard the telephone ringing, but the girl didn’t seem to notice. Ronnie was seeing a picture of Roger, his whiskery chin; his cleft was attractive accented with one day’s stubble. Perhaps his flaw resided in his great capacity to love the unborn as if it were more than just the sum of its parts. Ronnie had asked to see it and the nurse revealed a pulpy knob in a stainless-steel dish. “That’s it. That’s everything,” the nurse had said, tipping the shiny bowl so that Ronnie could see its contents. Roger had once told her, “Faith is the art of creative visualization.” Roger had wanted to teach her. She imagined him circling the block, or waiting for her on the cinder path at the cemetery.
On the sidewalk, the women walked abreast into the crowds of people. They split up at the corner. Ronnie went to her car. She looked down at her exotic token, pulsing in just two inches of water. Before she got behind the wheel, she watched her young accomplice walking up the street. She tried to see if the girl was limping from her injury, but the girl took easy strides, spinning her parasol behind her shoulder. The paper cone twirled at a wild velocity until its ornate pattern bloomed into a single bright color.
THE GOLDEN THERAPIST
The office was quiet. Ev
eryone had left. His blithe, irreverent apprentices had one after another leaned into his cubicle, saying, “Too bad, fella, you’re loaded down,” and “Overworked and underpaid.” “Quittin’ time, asshole.” The men left at five o’clock with the ease of some grammar school boys after snapping their cases shut, each with his own distinct flourishes. Selby didn’t lock his top drawer or stand up from his desk.
He leaned back in his chair and watched the winter sun sink below the window ledge. Its violent shield was twinned when he closed his eyes. When he looked again, an ambulance strobed over the granite of an opposite building, a soothing focal point compared to the peppery dish of hot sauce on the horizon.
He had promised to walk Pauline outside but she hadn’t yet returned from the ladies’ room. For the past several days, she had complained of a man, an ousted boyfriend or common-law husband, who harassed her after work. That morning, the man had trailed her to her job, following her into the building. The man threw his shoulder against the elevator door as it pinched closed without him. He took the next express elevator, which skipped her floor, but he found the fire stairs and walked back one flight, right past the guard. He entered her offices. Pauline was at her desk. He upset her computer terminal and pitched it to the floor, tugging her keyboard loose and then the surge suppressor. He dashed the plastic components against the wall. He reached across her tabletop and grabbed Pauline by her sweater lapel, twisting the wool into a tight rosette beneath her chin. She pounded him with her pocketbook.
Security arrived, but not until the man had ripped Pauline’s imitation gator-skin purse in half, spilling its contents everywhere. Selby found the torn pocketbook alarming, like a real animal hide in the aftermath of a predator’s strike. The swiftness of the attack and its immediate climax echoed a wildlife spectacle on the Nature Channel.
Her ex-boyfriend wore long, tousled hair and was dressed in a familiar UPS uniform. His shirt’s front plackets were quite rumpled, as if he had worn the same brown shirt for days and perhaps even slept in it. Guards collected at the office doors, resting their styrene coffee cups along the baseboard before they escorted her lover outside, where a police van had been rolled right onto the sidewalk. He offered no resistance. Pauline sank to the carpet, plucking her possessions from the rug.