Street Music

by Timothy Hallinan

  Because by that time she had her own source, a kitchen worker in the restaurant who gave her a discount (he said) for being so nice to everyone. Weeks later, she learned he told everyone that, and that, in fact, he charged some of the others less, but she didn’t care: the pills got her through the day’s work, and the night’s too. She told herself she was taking them on a reasonable schedule: a half around lunchtime to pick her up in the long hot afternoons at the sorting table, a whole one just before her shift was over to propel her through the hours she spent on her feet at the restaurant. But on the nights when Daw awoke her when he came in, making it more difficult to drag herself out of bed, she began to take a half within a few minutes of getting up, telling herself she’d skip the one before lunch. She usually took it anyway.

  And, as she continued to see Chai and it grew more and more difficult to edit Daw and Miaow out of the version of her life she shared with him, she found a new benefit to the pills: they heightened her interest in him; they helped her ask the questions he wanted to be asked. Sweet as he was, like most men, she decided, he was happiest when he was talking about himself.

  And when he finally asked her to go home with him, the pills came to the rescue again; difficult as it had usually been for her to tell a lie, it required no effort for her to sweep aside the fact that she had to pick up Miaow and to say, without even a brief pause to improvise, that her morning shift had changed and she had to be at the sorting table an hour earlier than before. She promised herself she’d tell him about Miaow sooner or later, when and if it seemed necessary. As she walked toward Sonya’s, she also reminded herself that she had no intention of going to bed with him. Still, it had been reassuring to be asked. She’d been seeing a different woman in the mirror lately, older and more tired-looking, and thinner too; the bones of her face were emerging with new and unflattering clarity.

  That, she knew, was because she’d been having trouble sleeping, and when she mentioned it to the kitchen worker who sold her the little white pills, he said he had something for that, too, and sure enough, they put her out in a matter of minutes and she slept deeply and dreamlessly.

  One night, in fact, Daw had to elbow her awake to tell her that Miaow was crying in her sleep. She felt a flare of resentment toward him for not dealing with it himself, and when she shook Miaow awake she might not have been as gentle as she usually was, because Miaow let out a bewildered yelp and rolled away from her. She took the child in her arms and rocked her back to sleep, but there was an infinitesimal stone of resentment in the center of her chest. In the morning she remembered none of it, and was surprised when Daw told her what had happened. Doubted it, in fact, until she saw something new in the way Miaow looked at her.

  She hadn’t written or called home for weeks and weeks.

  26

  Day by Day

  Day by day, night by night, pill by pill. Not so much difference for the two of them now between day and night. Miaow, though, Miaow still slept all night.

  With their increased income, they moved into what had been called a “suite” when the hotel was still a hotel: double the price, two rooms rather than one, with its own functioning toilet, one that could actually be flushed, although the shut-off valve to the shower was, like the one in their old room, welded closed. Still, they could run the water in the little bathroom sink to wash underwear and Miaow’s clothes and even soak cloths and use them to clean themselves in a perfunctory manner, a quick, approximate sponge bath rather than the showers and the lengthy baths she had always loved. But now the wet cloth satisfied her. Despite the fact that they were much closer than before to the floor’s one functional shower, they rarely made use of it.

  But the most important thing about the suite was that it gave her a room of her own; she had argued for the necessity of her having the inner room so he could come and go without waking her. No more having to get Miaow back to sleep when he stumbled in at three in the morning and no more (although she didn’t say it) having to smell the perfume of the week. By making her pills last longer for a couple of weeks she had bought a cheap but perfume-free sleeping mat and a separate, smaller one for Miaow, and she’d put them right next to each other. But that hadn’t been such a good idea after all. After a few weeks, when she realized her increasingly eccentric sleep patterns were keeping the child up, she’d created a space between the mats and put a rolled-up blanket between them. Separated even so modestly, Miaow seemed less sensitive to whether her mother was asleep.

  As the months sped by, she discovered another benefit to having a space of her own. She didn’t have to share her pills with Daw; they were all hers. She was becoming more accustomed to the various tablets and capsules and more expert in their use, and she found that she was also growing possessive of her experiences with them. She didn’t want Daw in there, staring at her, monitoring her intake, asking what she was feeling, making her talk about it. He could go on forever about what the pills did to him, how they made him feel, making suggestions to her, everything from optimum dosages to mixing cocktails, for what seemed like hours on end. She was doing just fine without all that sharing, and she wanted own her experiences, she wanted to keep them to herself; they were, after all, all hers.

  Over the following weeks and months, as the pills carved their way into her rhythms, she began to see the hours of darkness differently. She came to regard as wasted much of the time she had previously abandoned to sleep. By postponing swallowing the sleeper sleep until three or four in the morning, she could set her own rhythms, choose her own projects. For one thing, she could clean; she had taken to wiping down the floor and the walls, at least as high as she could reach, with a damp cloth, turning it until it was gray on all sides and then rinsing it out, repeating until she was done. She could do this almost nightly and still feel like she was falling behind. She could organize her clothes for the week, laying out five sets of T-shirts and jeans, which she would cover partially with the long buttoned jacket she wore at the sorting table and removed to eat in the restaurant. She could mend things, both hers and Miaow’s, spotting an area of wear and reinforcing it before it could give way, re-patching the patches. She bought new buttons for her blouses, snipped off the old ones, and replaced them. She bought a stiff brush so she could clean out the stuff that got wedged into the tread of her shoes. Everywhere she looked, she saw something that needed to be done. One night she came home with a tablet of lined yellow paper and began to write down her thoughts, which evolved into the story of her life, told in no particular order. She illustrated it with line drawings, taking it with her in her purse each day so Daw couldn’t read it if he came home early, which he never did. She bought a second tablet and wrote dozens of letters she never sent, to her parents, her sisters, and her friends from the village. The nighttime hours were, if anything, too short.

  One night, when she’d run out of things to do, having been aware for the first hour or two of Miaow’s gaze, she gave up and swallowed a sleeper—actually a sleeper and a half—and drifted most of the way to the cliff she always fell over now when she went to sleep, but instead, abruptly, she sat up. The suite had rats, and she’d suddenly envisioned a new kind of rat trap, one that couldn’t snap shut on her daughter’s fingers. Within minutes she had created it: a bread knife with a dab of Miaow’s peanut butter on its tip, balanced on the edge of the built-in four-drawer storage unit. The knife was positioned over a wastebasket, and several times in the first two or three weeks she’d been awakened by the knife racketing into the basket and the rat running feverish laps at its bottom. Daw had forced open a window in both rooms—nothing as crafty as in their old room—and she just dumped the rat out the window. Eventually, she made a trap for Daw’s room, too.

  She was learning that, with the pills, nothing stayed the same for long. As the sleepers lost their potency, she upped the dose and noticed a fundamental change in her usual nightly dance with sleep. Where in the past, before the pills, she had d
rifted slowly into dreams and then snapped awake in the morning, ready to go, she now fell asleep without any transition, completely and abruptly. And waking, instead of being a gentle swim into the morning light, had become an ordeal. After several days when she slept through the alarm and had to be awakened by Miaow, hungry for breakfast, tugging at her finger, she took to putting one of the white pills on the floor beside her bed and setting the alarm an hour early so she could roll over, take the pill dry-mouthed, and drop off again until she abruptly snapped back to life, often ahead of time, surfacing instantly with her foot tapping and a list of chores and errands assembling itself in her head. Jump up, check the other room to see whether Daw was asleep, had already left, or (possibly) hadn’t come home at all. Make a quick breakfast for either two or three, depending. Wash face, scrub under arms, wash Miaow’s face and hands, get dressed, argue with Miaow about which T-shirt she would wear that day, and bundle her out the door.

  Her relationship with Sonya had become businesslike and even chilly. In the morning, Hom darted in and out like a hummingbird, always running late, and Sonya no longer talked with her about teaching Miaow English or, actually, about much of anything. The evening visit was equally truncated. Hom would nip in with minutes to spare, wake the child from her napping place on the floor, take her hand—she had become far too heavy to carry comfortably—and lead her down the stairs, occasionally hurrying her even though she knew Miaow was proud of going down without help and enjoyed prolonging it. Sometimes when Hom appeared at Sonya’s, Miaow would cry as though she were unwilling to go. Once or twice she stretched her arms toward Sonya’s helper, as though she wanted to stay there.

  And, in fact, it seemed to Hom that Miaow’s terrible twos hadn’t eased much when she had turned three, or even now, as she approached her fourth birthday. She was querulous, insistent, demanding. She eyed her mother at times as though she were a stranger. Sometimes when they were alone in the room that belonged to just them, Miaow would fold herself into a corner and talk under her breath to the two rag dolls she’d had since she was in her crib. She kept her face toward the floor, moving the dolls from one side to the other as though they were playing with each other, maintaining an inaudible dialogue under her breath. It didn’t take much to start her crying, and she went into a rage if Hom took the dolls away—even if she just wanted the child to eat. And when they were sitting on the floor together, eating, Miaow often whispered to the dolls rather than engaging with her mother.

  Miaow’s new distance angered Hom; wasn’t she working herself half to death for the benefit of her child? What was wrong with Miaow? What happened to the cheerful child who smiled at her all the time, the quick learner who sometimes startled both her and Daw with her English words? Where was the little girl who had turned to her for everything, who cried for her the moment someone else, even her father, picked her up? Now she seemed happier with Sonya and Sonya’s not-very-intelligent assistant than she was with her own mother.

  And it seemed to her, during the times she was thinking about Miaow, that it was all she did: she felt like she was preoccupied with Miaow night and day. She had invented the rat trap just for her. Wasn’t that love?

  There were times when an unwelcome notion peeked through at her: Were the pills to blame? But how could she do without them, how could she power through it all, her fifteen-hour workdays, her loneliness, her unsatisfactory, unfaithful husband, all of it? She decided several times to stop taking the pills, but after a few sleepless nights and a few endless, exhausting days, they always waved at her from her peripheral vision, calling her back to them. Several times, when she found herself taking a little extra—another quarter or half, or perhaps more—for the same effect, Daw came home, bursting with energy, with something new, something that lasted longer and gave him more energy—so, he said, he could take less, work harder, work longer. Once again Hom began cautiously, by halving them, and once again that lasted only for a couple of weeks until she graduated to just popping the whole thing, or, occasionally, two. They were stronger, they seemed to make her faster, clearer, more incisive, better at her job in the restaurant.

  They cost more, too.

  She had begun to notice that her days, vivid as they were when she was living them, were getting more difficult to remember. Sometime she couldn’t recall what she’d done the previous day, sometimes she remembered an event as having happened on a day when it logically could not have. Once she got dressed and went to work to find the restaurant fully staffed; it was Sunday, the one day she didn’t work. She went back and got Miaow so she wouldn’t have to pay Sonya for a whole day, feeling the curious gaze of Sonya’s newest helper, the one who worked weekends.

  And then, on the eighth or ninth morning that she straggled into the sorting room too late, the supervisor took her aside and told her she was concerned about her. Maybe, she said, Hom was trying to do too much, but whether that was the issue or not, it was obvious that something was wrong. She was late as often as she was on time, she seemed jumpy and quarrelsome, and she had recently made several mistakes, sorting errors that would have cost the business a lot of money, or even an account, if a new girl, one of the ones Hom had trained, hadn’t spotted them at the last moment and called them to the supervisor’s attention. “What I want you to do,” the supervisor said, looking at Hom very closely, “is take a few weeks’ vacation. Think about things,” she said. “Get some rest, you look tired. If you still want to be here when things have settled down, you come talk to me, and we’ll work something out.”

  Then she had reached into her pocket and pressed into Hom’s hand a small wad of bills, the exact pay for the three days she’d worked that week. Not until Hom was on the sidewalk did she realize that her firing had been planned. The supervisor had precisely the right amount of money in her pocket. The new girl, the one who reported the mistakes, had been sitting at Hom’s table. She never glanced up the whole time Hom was there.

  As she stood perfectly still on the sidewalk, the wave of shame almost swept her off her feet.

  On the following Saturday, the day that Hom worked a full day-shift at the restaurant, she came home to learn that their rent had been doubled. Daw had been there when the rent collector knocked on the door to get the money and give him the news, and when he protested, the collector gave him two days to move out if he didn’t like it. There were a lot of people who wanted the room, he said. Stay and pay, or go, the management didn’t care which. That night, shortly after Hom got home, Daw came in from wherever he’d been, sober and fragrance-free, to report the conversation.

  “And I’m not getting as much work as I was,” he said. “One of the men who ran the company split off and started his own outfit, so now there’s only about half as much work.”

  “Really,” she said. “I’d think you’d be home more.”

  “I’m out every day, looking for something new,” he said. “Now that you got yourself fired, I need to make more. Great timing, by the way.”

  They were in the front room, Daw’s room. She’d only gotten home around six-thirty, half an hour before he came in, and when she heard the front door open she’d left Miaow in the inner room. Now, perhaps hearing the anger in their voices, she began to call for Hom.

  “Mommy,” she said. “Mommy?”

  “Take care of her,” Daw said. “Then make something to eat.”

  “I had no way of knowing you were going to be here,” Hom said. “You’re never here at this hour. I haven’t got anything you’d want.”

  “What about you? What about the kid?”

  “I ate at the restaurant. I can just heat some soup for her.”

  “I don’t want soup.”

  Hom got up. “I wasn’t offering you any.”

  “Sit down,” Daw said.

  Hom said, “Go out and get something that you—”

  As she turned away, Daw grabbed her wrist and yanked her back, so hard that
she stumbled and went down sideways onto the chair, hard enough for it to start to go over backward, but he slammed his forearm down on her knees and brought the chair’s front legs back to the ground.

  From the other room, Miaow called, “Mommy.” She sounded anxious.

  “You’ve got money in your pocket,” Daw said. “You got tipped all day long. Go out and get me something right now. Tom yam goong and phad kaprao. And get them back here while they’re still hot.”

  Hom said, “Tell one of your girlfriends to—” but he slapped her in mid-word. She sat, stunned and glaring at him, barely hearing Miaow crying from the inner room, and then, slowly, she stood up. “If you ever do that again,” she said, “that will be the end. It will be the last time you ever see me. If you don’t believe it, hit me right now. Come on, do it.”