Saint X (ARC)

by Alexis Schaitkin

  IT WAS over a mile from Investiture Boulevard to Sara’s house. They walked along the side of the road. Sara wore peach pumps, her ankles wobbling on the uneven ground, stopping periodically to brush the dust from her shoes. For some time, they walked in a silence that seemed to concern Sara not in the least, while Clive was desperate to break it but could come up with nothing to say, his mind at turns swirling and blank. He didn’t understand how it had happened. She’d stood there surrounded by her friends, arms crossed, as he stuttered his invitation. “M-m-mmmay I walk you home?” Once he’d gotten the words out, he looked up at her, awaiting her rejection. But something had changed in her. It wasn’t just the dress. Her eyes, usually so sharp and flashing, held a dull detachment, as if she were watching herself in this moment from some great distance. She opened her mouth and said, “You may.”

  “How did you enjoy the parade?” he tried finally.

  “The parade is the parade.”

  They walked on.

  “You look nice today,” he said.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do. You always do. You’re beautiful, Sara.” He had wanted to say this to her for years, but had never believed he really would.

  “You’re the only one who thinks so.” She paused to dislodge a pebble from her shoe. “Shall we go to Milk Queen?” She pointed down Tillery Street in the direction of the ice-cream parlor.

  She ordered a banana split with peppermint ice cream. He got nothing for himself. He would have felt foolish eating in front of her. Sara ate her ice cream with the same weariness with which she’d responded to his compliments. She picked at it, licking tiny spoonfuls with a tongue like a cat’s, setting the spoon down, then sighing and picking it up again, as if this were merely one more in an endless line of tasks she must complete before she could be dead. Why had she said yes to his invitation? He wanted to touch the secret world inside her. Instead, he watched dumbly as she ate. When at last she’d scraped the glass dish clean, she murmured, “You’d best take me home now.”

  They didn’t speak on the walk from Milk Queen to her house. His throat felt clutched by a hand. He had not the faintest idea what had happened in the past hour, and he supposed that was what everybody meant when they talked about the mystery of women. There was some consolation, at least, in joining the ranks of mystified men.

  Sara’s house was a single-story cinder-block-and-plaster home like everybody else’s, but the paint was fresh—white, with sunshine-yellow trim. The short front walkway was lined with purple flowers and there were no enervated donkeys or dogs cluttering the yard. All of this contributed to an air of gentility that Clive felt befitted a minister’s widow and daughter brought down by circumstance. The only discordant feature was an old, tumbledown cookhouse out back, with a rusted galvanized roof.

  As they turned off the road and walked up to the house, Sara’s mother appeared in the doorway. Miss Agatha, like her daughter, was a meager woman, no taller than a child. Growing up, he had seen her at church every Sunday. But as she stood in the doorway, her stance slack and desultory, her eyes darting like a hen’s, it occurred to him that he had not seen her there in years.

  “G-g-good evening, Miss Agatha,” he managed. The mother had the same effect on him as the daughter.

  She did not respond, just continued to stand in the doorway with her arms at her sides. Past where she stood, he could see the parlor. There were piles everywhere, and dirty dishes stacked on a table. A framed painting hung askew on the wall; beneath it a planter held the brown husk of a dead plant. As he took it in, mouth agape, he thought of Sara’s pristine speech and dress, everything that made the other boys call her snob and prude. He thought of his grandmother’s house, its smell of bleach and not a thing out of place. He thought of his mother’s house, and of his mother. When he felt Sara looking at him, he tried to avert his eyes from the scene, but he was too late—she had seen him seeing it. She bent her head. He wanted to tell her that her secret was safe with him. He wanted to tell her he understood how the shame came not just from being from a home like this, a mother like this, but from loving a home like this, a mother like this. But before he could do anything but fidget, Sara shook her head, and when she raised her eyes to meet his they were rinsed clean, bright and flashing as always. Miss Agatha turned and walked back into the dark house.

  “Your mum vex?” he asked.

  “My mum is nothing.”

  “I hope you did have a good time,” he said pitifully.

  Sara kept her eyes fixed on the ground.

  Clive turned and walked down the porch steps, past the purple flowers that lined the front walk. He was about to turn back onto the road when he heard footsteps behind him. Then he felt Sara grab his hand. He turned, and she met his gaze. Her eyes were shining, he couldn’t tell if there were tears or if it was the moonlight. She pulled him off the walkway.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “Hush,” she said. She led and he followed, around the house to the yard and into the old cookhouse.

  TWO MONTHS later, when Sara told him that she was pregnant, Clive had the feeling that this eventuality had been waiting for him all along. He was scared as shit, but it had a rightness to it. Clive and Sara. He looked at her belly and tried to get his mind around the truth that a person who was half him and half her was inside, blooming into being day by day. It seemed like a thing that could not possibly have happened to anyone else ever before.

  “I want you to know I’m going to take care of you,” he told her. “Both of you.”

  “You don’t even have a job,” she whispered. Her voice was not angry or accusatory. There was nothing in it at all. She blinked.

  “I’ll get one. We can rent a place of our own. Buy a car. It will be okay. I promise.”

  “Didn’t anybody ever tell you not to make promises you can’t keep?”

  “I will keep it, Sara. We can be married. We can be a family.”

  He did not stumble on the words. He had at last found something worthy of his conviction.

  Sara looked right past him. “What kind of family would we be? You out all the time carrying on with your friends, and me … you’ve seen how I did grow up.”

  “It won’t have to be like that. I’ll stop all of it. We can give this child everything.”

  “I might be crazy like her. I know I might.” Her voice was a whisper.

  “Sara.” He took her hands in his, but she yanked them away.

  “You think because you did rut with me like a goat in a shed I must marry you?” she snapped.

  He wanted to tell her he would weather any storm with her. He wanted to remind her that what happened in the cookhouse had been her idea; that as he emptied himself into her in the pitch-dark, breathing in the smell of must and rusted metal, he felt such sadness, because he didn’t want to do it like this, that he would be angry with himself forever for letting it happen the way it did.

  “I know you come from a good family,” he said instead. “I’m prepared to set you up how you deserve.”

  She stared at the dirt. “If you believe I’m a minister’s daughter, you’re a fool for true.”

  “SWEET BOY LIKE honey. Always stick to the most venomous girl.” His grandmother said this as if it could not be helped. Clive had waited nearly a month to inform her that he was going to be a father, telling himself he was withholding the news simply because it was none of her business.

  “Sara is not venomous.”

  “Don’t give me that backchat.”

  “You don’t know anything about her.”

  She snorted, then released a laugh like vinegar. “I know she crazy mother. I know goat don’t make sheep.”

  He slammed his fist on the table. “She’s the mother of my child and I won’t let you speak low of she!” he shouted.

  For the first time in his life his grandmother averted her eyes from him. Looking back, he would realize this was the moment when she relinquished him to himself; never a
gain would she pester him about his late-night liming or encourage him to enter a training program so that he might learn a vocation.

  “Oh, you’re a real man now,” she whispered.

  He wanted to press himself to her and weep.

  HE BEGAN looking for a job the day Sara told him she was carrying his child, but found nothing. He was beginning to despair, and to think that Sara was right when she’d told him not to make promises he couldn’t keep, when Edwin announced he’d secured interviews at a new resort for both of them. “I thought nobody ever got rich working for somebody else,” Clive said when Edwin told him.

  “What you think, I’m going to abandon my bred in he hour of need? Beside, we gonna make mad service charge.”

  What would he do without Edwin? They were hired. The job came with a uniform, crisp and white, with Indigo Bay embroidered on the lapel in gold thread. When he went to Sara’s house in the uniform after his first day of work and gave her the tips he’d earned, she smiled the secret smile he’d seen all those years ago at the Christmas pageant, the one he’d been chasing ever since.

  Clive made plans. He spent a Saturday at the small island library, paging through a mildewed book about pregnancy. He brought Sara ginger candies to quell her nausea. He purchased bottles and diapers and a soft brown bear he imagined would become his child’s favorite. He made sure Sara had the phone number for the back office at Indigo Bay so he could be reached when it was time.

  But in the end, Sara went into labor at night, three weeks early. He was at Paulette’s with his friends. He stumbled home that night the same as usual, woke from his hungover sleep the next morning like always. It was only when he went into the kitchen and saw his grandmother sitting stiffly at the table that he knew something had happened.

  “You have a son,” she said.

  He could not square in his mind how, as he’d been drinking with his friends, elsewhere, he was becoming a father. He would never know exactly when it had happened. The moment he went from being one thing to another was lost to him forever.

  When he went to Sara in the hospital that morning, she would not look at him.

  “How could you?” she whispered. She held the baby, his son, asleep in her arms, swaddled in a pale blue blanket.

  But how could he have known she would go into labor so early? Didn’t she see all he’d done to prepare? Didn’t she know he was not the deadbeat she seemed to want to make him into? He was about to say all of this to her, but the look in her eyes stopped him. It was not sadness, or hurt, but a brittle, impassive stare. The world had disappointed her once again, as she always expected it to, only this time he was the one who had done it.

  The baby began to cry, a desperate wail that sucked the air out of Clive.

  Sara turned away from him as she rocked the child. “Hush, Bryan. Hush, my sweet love.”

  When Clive told me I was beautiful, my heart cracked. All my life I had waited for a boy to say that to me, and now one had, and it didn’t matter, because I could not let myself believe it. I had finally gotten what I wanted and it was no good because I was who I was and I always would be. Everything was like that, ruined just because it was me it all happened to.

  Sara Lycott. So proper and well spoken, so devout at church, so obedient at school. How my friends would have recoiled if they saw who I became at home with my mum, how we yelled and yanked and scratched.

  Behind its freshly painted exterior, our house was a wild place. We were not so much mother and daughter as two women suffocating together, breathing into one another until all the air in the house had been warmed by the insides of both of us. There was nothing in life we were not tired of.

  Though we fought all the time, we only had a single argument, which we repeated over and over until I was insentient to it as stone. Our fight was like the walk home from school, marked by familiar signposts: the Scotts’s orange front door, the pothole shaped like a heart on Underhill Road. I think there was comfort in knowing we would only hurt each other in familiar ways. I think I hoped each time that the argument would finally take us somewhere new, out beyond the hating and loving and hating that was all I had ever known.

  It went like this: I would sass, or leave a mess, or be a disappointment to my mum in some other way, and she would scold that I should be better, for I was the daughter of a government minister and I could not afford to forget it. I would shout back, call her hypocrite. “When was the last time you did clean we house?” I would say, and off we would go, shouting about all the ways the other had failed to live up to the kind of family we both pretended we were.

  On the morning of the Grand Parade, we had found ourselves deep in the mud of this same fight once again. She had come into the parlor to find me scratching at my scalp. She grabbed my elbow.

  “Stop that. Where are your manners?”

  “‘You’re a minister’s daughter,’” I mimicked. I wrenched my arm free and went right back to sliding my fingernails beneath the irresistible dried skin on my scalp.

  “Don’t you mock me.”

  “And you’re a minister’s wife. Must be some other lady I saw in we house yesterday itching she pum pum.”

  “It’s a good thing your father’s dead. How ashamed he would be to hear you speak this way to your mum!”

  How many times had she said this to me? A dozen? A thousand? But this time the anger I felt was different, feral and hopeless, sharp as teeth.

  “You never tell me again whose daughter I be!” I shouted. “The only person I see I’m the daughter of is you. A sket like everybody say!”

  I screamed so loudly my throat would be raw later that day, when I told Clive Richardson he could walk me home. I held my mother’s gaze and sucked air through my teeth. I swear the whites of her eyes turned black.

  Her hands fell to her sides. “You think I’m nothing but your mum,” she whispered. “But someday you’ll see.” Then she turned and walked slowly to her bedroom at the back of the house and pulled the stained curtain across the doorway.

  Oh, what a fine actress, my mum, playing the victim of my cruelty. Where did I learn how to lash with words if not from her?

  I changed into the shortest dress I owned. I snatched my purse and slammed the front door behind me. At the end of the parade, when Clive Richardson stumbled up to me and mumbled his invitation, it was like God or fate or whatever thing I lacked the time or proclivity to wonder about then was handing it to me, just giving it to me for free: a chance to take my life into my own hands and spoil it before it could disappoint me; to break my mum’s heart and free myself from our suffocating life together; to prove I was every bit my mother’s daughter. Though in the end, the cost would be more than I could have imagined.

  THE SECRET CITY

  IN MID-DECEMBER, a food deliveryman on a bicycle turned the corner by my apartment too sharply and mowed down pitiful Jefe mid-elimination. I was at the other end of the block when it happened, returning home from work. I did not see bike and pup collide, but I heard Jefe’s high-pitched yelp and witnessed the aftermath: The man in the NASCAR hat gathering Jefe in his arms like a baby. The deliveryman putting his hands up defensively and repeating, “Sorry,” in heavily accented English as the old man berated him in Spanish and passersby craned their heads to watch, sometimes pausing as if they might intervene before averting their gaze and hurrying along. The deliveryman backed slowly away and got on his bike (plastic bags of takeout still hanging from the handlebars). He rode quickly around the corner and out of sight.

  The old man carried Jefe to the front stairs, sat on the lowest step, and rocked him. I’m not sure whether the dog was still alive or whether he’d already departed this mortal coil. As I approached them, I thought I ought to say something, but when I reached the steps it seemed that to intrude in their final moments together would be obscene, so instead I walked quietly past them up the stairs.

  As I disappeared into the vestibule, I heard the man whisper, “Nos vemos pronto, viejito.”

&n
bsp; When I was underground in my apartment, it occurred to me that now there was not a single soul in the building whose name I knew. So began winter.

  An entire season had passed since I found Clive Richardson. I had been conversing with him for several weeks, and an ironic reversal had transpired. In the beginning, our proximity had terrified me. Now it was just the opposite. When I was away from him I became unnerved, agitated, itchy, feelings that festered until I was sitting across from him again, our trays of stew and beer before us. I’d catch myself prolonging our evenings despite being aware that he was ready to leave, because once he was out of sight the dread would set in all over again, and I would face the long night hours alone with it.

  When I was not with him, I was thinking of him. On the surface, I could be conversing with my mother on the phone about which produce it was most important to purchase organic (blueberries: essential; bananas: not), or racing past the travertine-and-glass grid of the Grace Building in the sleet on my way to work, or eating a lunch of anesthetized midtown falafel with my fellow bright young coworkers, and I might pull all of this off convincingly, but really I was with Clive, imagining hypothetical interactions we might have that would lead to his confession. I imagined, for instance, that there might be a fire at the Little Sweet, and that after making our escape I would dash back into the building to rescue Vincia; afterward, as I breathed through an oxygen mask in the back of an ambulance, Clive would be so stricken by my self-sacrifice and my goodness, and by his own shame, that he would prostrate himself at my feet and tell me everything. Another scenario found us at the Heidelberg on the Upper East Side, washing down käsespätzle and sauerbraten with steins of Dunkel. I would remark that the saying about the impossibility of stepping into the same river twice could be applied just as aptly to New York, a place as transient as it was eternal, the Germans of old Yorkville disappearing into the sediment and making way for new inlets and curvatures—Little Brazil, the Nepalese of Jackson Heights. This comment would strike Clive as so utterly insightful that he would decide that he had finally found a person worthy of being entrusted with his secret.