CONTINUED FROM LAST ISSUE
Aboard Columbia, Young and Crippen
sleep.
Oh,
Jaysus, Mother Mary, help me,” Adie cries, who’s messed her pants.
The Cat Woman has parked the kitty
on the sidewalk in front of Wallex Drug, gone in to buy a News Tribune,
to see if her name is in it from the car that hit her crossing, last week, in
front of Grover Cronins. Yes, it’s on the second page:
Helen
Sheed (They’ve spelled her name wrong) a resident of Myrtle Street, was taken
via cruiser…treated for abrasions and . . . She pushes on across Chester
Brook
…There was a grist mill here owned
by one Thomas Rider; it passed into hands of David Mead and his descendants in
the latter part of the Eighteenth Century, and under Moses Mead, became a
factory which manufactured wooden handles used for axes, hayrakes, pestles,
rolling pins and
such.
And to
the foot of Piety Corner…So named because the deacons of first Parish Church once occupied its substantial houses…The garage sale is a
disappointment. Some dirty placemats and Christmas ornaments, a rusty
meat grinder. She has her pride; but buys a plastic pocketbook and a
plaster Stella Maris, so as not to have walked so far for nothing.
Priscilla goes with Nelson
for an airing—they both need it. The sun makes a brief appearance as
they’re crossing the bridge at Elm, and dances on her river. Nelson, far
ahead, is into mud on the bank. He swims here, he tells her, in the
summer. He’s the only one she knows who possesses the city in the same
way she…He’s into a car wash now; it has a DO NOT ENTER sign. Of course
he cannot read it. He emerges, grinning. Now he finds a
dollar in the gutter. There’s a hot dog vendor on the corner, and he
wants. She buys them each one. They’re delicious, and she thinks
she probably needs more protein—she’s a vegetarian, but neglects to eat
sometimes the substitutes, the beans the nuts, and turns like now into a
ravening carnivore.
Helen Shaed has spotted a squirrel
without a tail. Third sign today that she’ll meet a stranger. Last
night she dreamed of a lion (at the gate?) No, it was a tiger. Just
before she woke. She threw it a child to keep it off, then, in remorse
for what she’d done, herself.
Ickle
puddy sleeping on the blankets. She gets a key to the restroom at
Colwin’s. Dirty. She takes a napkin from her cart and wipes out the
sink.
Aboard Columbia, Young and Crippen sleep.
I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
hums Megan, on the commode.
There’s something
wrong with this Margo. She seems to have locked herself in the bathroom.
Megan thinks she’s preggers.
Back at the Service Center, Nelson swipes Priscilla’s bike and starts to take off. She grabs it by the seat
and dumps him off. You do that and I call the cops, she hollers at him,
and he walks right away from her. She goes and grabs him, pulls him to
her. Listen. I didn’t mean to say that word. Calmer now, she
holds him by both arms. It’s not a thing a friend does, is it?
No.
He shakes his head.
And I’m
your friend, and so I won’t; but listen, though, it doesn’t mean I won’t call
someone, she goes on.
Call who?
Well,
someone like Antonia’s husband, she’s inspired to say. He’s a big man,
strong, in spite of being sick. A stern father…comes to help paint the
offices, sometimes, carry out the trash, Jesus
Roldan. The only father
about this place.
Nelson’s
nodding. Yeah, he says, OK, impressed. He gets her bike and she
locks it up, feeling weary and exhausted. They go in and she makes him
work awhile on the lamp they’re making out of wood scraps—knobs and discs and
spindle shapes they got at a warehouse down on Water Street. She has one
home he made. The electric parts they got at Woolworth’s blink on and off
all by themselves. She sets the paints before him: magenta, ochre, rose.
They’ll try to sell this one at the fair next month, she’s thinking; he’ll get
money, learn that stealing’s not the only…What’s it matter he can’t read?
He’ll work, she thinks. He’ll make things like those little boys in Persia make the rugs. Yes, in a simpler age he’d be apprenticed to a carpenter, a
fatherly shoemaker…
In spite
of recent disappointments concerning Mao and his revolution she’d once been so
ardent about after that production of Fanshen in Boston she’d gone to
with David while she was still a student at Mount Holyoke, she clung to these
notions of what…? Of a society unlike this one she lived in…poorer, more
attuned to need, not desire. Must it always end up like this, this Gang
of Four?
Hey!
What?
You doin’
it again.
Thinking,
yes… I was thinking about the little boys in Iran. That make the
beautiful rugs.
What
beautiful rugs?
Persian
rugs, they’re called. Little boys have been making them for
centuries. I used to have one in my house.
And how
they make them.
They make
little silk knots in different beautiful colors, to form designs that their
great, great, great grandfathers made up from looking at nature.
They are something like puzzles. And these designs were passed down from
father to son, or mother to son. I’m not sure. There were so many
things she wasn’t sure of, she only half knew. So much she read about or
forgot, or couldn’t connect to anything else. And now there was no time
to remedy this.
They have
to do it? he asks.
Do what?
Make the
knots?
Yes,
that’s the bad thing. They have to work many hours a day all week, and
they can’t go to school.
They
don’t have to go to school? he says hopefully.
They
can’t. They have to earn money for their families to eat. They
would like to go to school.
No, they
wouldn’t.
Yes, they
really would. If they were to go to school, they could earn more money;
but I think, in a way, they must be happy as they are. .
Nelson
paints his fingernails magenta. She retrieves the magenta. I’ll
help you. She picks up a brush. Is this your brush or mine?
It’s
yours! he shouts. It’s all yours, don’t you know!
Of course
it’s hers, the lamp, the whole construction in her head. She’d like to
give it to him, but she can’t.
Untreated
leads to…
And yet,
she tells herself, she sometimes gets it right. I won’t call them,
police, but I’ll call someone. Yes, she got that right.
Eulalie rests in a broth of
sunlight on a bench in front of the Banks Square House. In front of her
Arizona Johnson, a little girl from the project sits on the curb and puts on
her roller skates. Her little brother, Painter Johnson stands on an old
tire watching her with his stomach stuck out. A man with headphones on is
passing a metal detector over the scruffy lawn. He stoops, picks up a
rusted nut.
Eulalie
wonders what could possibly be the benefits of this apparatus. Coins,
someone told her once. They look for coins and diamond rings that
someone’s lost. But how many coins would you have to pick up to even pay
for the machine. And what are your chances, really, of finding
someone’s…?
It’s only
five, but Henrietta Rose, instead of going home first—mounting and dismounting
two more buses—walks up to the Waltham Spa and has tea and a muffin, lingering
over it an hour, and thence to the basement of St. Charles, known as the
Italian Church, where she starts the coffee for the meeting at seven. A
humble coffeemaker after ten years sober. One doesn’t get above oneself;
she’s learned that lesson. It’s difficult with two canes, and John the
Indian is usually here to help, or else Dave, that shy new boy that rides a
bicycle; but it’s too early for John and these shy new boys on bicycles because
they’ve lost their licenses until well into the next century are given to
lapses. She puts on the hissing pot and digs out the powdered creamer and
the lumpy sugar from the steamer trunk on the floor behind the stage, moving
slowly with one cane. She’ll see tonight if she can do it all
herself. From a tilting file cabinet, she takes the photo of Bill Wilson
stuck among the plaster madonas and the catechism workbooks—Seven Bulwarks of a
Catholic Home. There’s a votive candle in here somewhere—they light it
for the still suffering alcoholics, and a framed needlepoint of the Steps. She
sets the speaker’s table up like a little altar. A few people come
in. The homeless and semi homeless deposit themselves in corners like the
victims of a bomb: a young man with his foot in plaster, a young girl weeping
over supper in a paper sack. She asks the young man with the foot to set
up the literature rack. The lame and the halt, she thinks, but it is
done.
The child of the weeping girl is
on the floor with crayons and a coloring book. He’s about the age of hers
when she was drinking Bwana Bap, The People’s drink…It’s funny
that she can’t recall her children in that setting. Husband, yes,
herself, atop an elephant . . . When did they menstruate? When sprout
pubic hair?
The coffee’s done. She takes
some, creams it with some ghastly stuff, and pokes in the messy trunk t find
some oatmeal raisin cookies, sets them out. Still a half an hour until
starting time.
Priscilla locks her bike to the
swing set and climbs. The elevator hasn’t worked for several months, and
there’s a pervasive smell of rotting mop. Frostie’ s home, standing in
front of the open refrigerator. She fixes tea.
Find what
you want and close, she says to Frostie. You think I’m made of
money? Where are the others? she asks. He tells her Solie
took Benno to the store, and says, There isn’t any juice.
There isn’t anything.
There’s
last night’s casserole we’re going to have soon as I rest a minute, she says.
He shuts
the door and walks around the table eating a slice of bread.
Ma, I…
Stop
milling.
I’m not
milling. Ma I need your signature is all, and six dollars…
Six
dollars! I might have thirty cents, you hunt through all my pockets…
…to rent
the skis…
The skis!
All the
other kids have their own, of course.
In Varnum Circle, kids have skis?
Well it’s
the school that’s going, not the project. Can’t you write a…
A
check! Rent skis! What do you need the skis for? To come down
a mountain, right? Now if we lived on top of a mountain, there would be
some sense; but since we live in Varnum Circle, Waltham, Massachusetts, where
there isn't even snow this time of...
Ma!
They must
transport you to this mountain…
Ma, the
bus is free. The school pays!
Pay
Who said
that to her?
Oh, that
woman at the Sunshine Club. Who played the harp.
But first
she must finish this.
So they
must transport you to this mountain, and then up the mountain, where you must
rent skis to come down it!
Ma!
Usually
he’d follow her in this.
and
someone, somewhere has to pay for it. Nothing’s free, speaks the great granddaughter of Enoch Rowan, a
socialist since she’s seventeen.
Here. She says, taking up her bag and finding her last ten.
And get a hamburger if you want. You see my logic, though?
Yeah. But going down is worth it.
Hah. You are my wonderful boy. And I should appreciate the school
lets you take college courses in the summer and all…
Thanks,
Ma, thanks!
How can
there be snow? It’s April.
Oh,
there’s snow. Or they make it.
Make
it! And what can that cost!
She
shakes herself and takes her teacup to the sink. She can’t be battling
everything all the time. She used to like the notion of going very fast
over snow herself. But the snow was never manufactured.
This
cross country skiing must be nice. Why can’t you do that?
Maybe
when I’m old as you.
Ah,
yes. Did Solie do her homework?
I don’t
think so. I did mine.
Solie. She was first. The first child comes and colonizes this
world, fells the trees to make that first clearing, where the others come and
settle comfortably, alert and curious, like Frostie; and babyish and playful
like Benno; but never vigilant for tigers like the first.
What did
Solie pick up when she was sleeping in that bureau drawer on Spring
Street? That her mother worried about the world ending in nuclear
disaster. There must have been something communicated to her by the boxes
stored everywhere with provisions, by the night alarms, the hastily called
meetings, the arguments between David and Ross, between David and
herself. The house in Weston must have seemed to keep off the tigers.
She worried about the world, like her mother; but not in the same way.
It was a trying afternoon, I must
say, Megan says to Margo, whose face is all blotchy. And no one enjoyed
it. Except for the music. And I'm sure I was the only one that
listened. Priscilla tried to get me something decent from the Bookmobile.
I wanted something on Elizabeth the First, and all they have is this present Elizabeth. World’s most boring woman. All she cares about are dogs and
horses. Ought to let her son reign. At least, they say, he has some
other interests…
The girl isn’t hearing a word she
says. And she’s only babbling on so that the poor creature can get a hold
on herself so there isn’t a scene.
John The Indian arrives and sets
up the sound system at the basement of St. Charles. Young Ronnie chairs
and asks the young man with the foot to read ‘How it Works’ out of the Big
Book. Never heard of periods or commas, seems. All the results of
our shoddy education system on display here. But Henrietta admires them
for taking on this difficult literature. Bill Wilson liked big words and
long sentences. Any other organization she ever knew would have long ago
modernized all this, taken out the references to the Depression, the iron lungs
and all; and gender neutral pronouns, of course, even the Episcopalians have
that…But we’ve more important things to…and it heartens her to see these,
scruffy, half educated young men learn to read sitting around a table and
reading the Big Book and the Step Book over and over like
primers.
For you never finished with
them. You started over. Salutary for a reader of novels like
herself. Once, in her step group, she met a newcomer, a rather elegant
woman like herself, who graduated from Radcliffe. They finished up step
twelve that night, and, she remembers, the woman asked her what they would read
next. We go back to step one, Henrietta told her. My God, how
boring, said the woman and she never came back.
Margo’s back with Adie in her
geriatric…Who was it, Megan wonders, wrote that book on Mozart?
She was the daughter of the singer
Alma Gluck. Oh, well, you wouldn’t know; you’re far too young.
There’s
something owed the young, too, Margo thinks.
Why don’t
they die?
Lovey
Mother, Adie yells
What was
her name? Megan asks herself. It was the same, she’s thinking, as some
town in Iowa…Davenport! Yes, Marcia Davenport! Megan says out loud,
but Margo’s in the bathroom crying. Adies’s hit her; didn’t want her
corset off.
Margo
tells herself that Adie doesn’t under…just it hurt her, catching the earpiece
of her glasses, causing them to dig into her nose. She’s overwrought, is
all. It’s no use blaming them.
It wasn’t them that got you
pregnant. Of course not. It’s she, herself, that’s thrown away her
education, simply. She can’t possibly go back until this baby’s out of
diapers, and then her credits will be useless.
Marcia
Davenport was Alma Gluck’s mother, says Megan, marveling at her brain’s
capacities.
Two
gentlemen of leisure, the Professor, badly listing, and the kid they call the
Maggot, have taken themselves to dine at St. Charles Boromeo where the ladies
of the Altar Guild are serving beans and franks. The Professor chooses
two pairs of trousers from the clothes box and holds them up. Which of
these, har, do you think the better? he rolls his dirty eyeballs at Mary
Regan, ladling beans.
Have to do an essay, Frostie,
tells his mother, about who I think’s the greatest man our age. Hmm,
Priscilla takes this up while getting out the casserole and sprinkling some
extra cheese. Churchill, Charles de Gaulle? Chairman Mao,
Adlai Stevenson…Priscilla wonders.
You want to catch a pair of
hummingbirds in coitus you need a slow motion camera, Megan tells Margo, who
has almost thrown her dinner at her. On the other hand, with frogs, the
sexual embrace can last for weeks.
Eulalie relaxes in her
bath. Alcide fed, in bed with the rails up, teeth in the container.
Helen Schade is coming in to watch him while she goes to choir. She lifts
a fine-boned ankle and admires her silky calf. No hint of veins.
She remembers baths in the farmhouse kitchen in New Brunswick, the blackened
copper tub, her sisters plaiting their hair in the steamy room and pressing
their ruffled dresses with the tall black iron that you filled with stove
coals… Oh, the farm was happiness. But there were too many of them.
Not all could stay. She and her sister Helene must come here to
work. How they wept that first winter on Cherry Street. Walking the
block to work in the dark, and home again in darkness, to wash her stockings,
dry them on the sill. Their hearts were always back there on the farm,
the steaming kitchen, saving up their paychecks to return. They always
hoped they’d be asked to stay, but they never were. Here was work, the
Mill, Le Watch. She cleaned the undersides of looms, then
kept the spindles loaded, bettering herself; she walked demure down Moody Street, eyes on her lace up boots, and the young men’s eyes on her.
Eulalie! A voice in the steamy bath.
Who
calls?
Your
bust!
Who? What?
Examine
your bust, Eulalie!
Dieu, who
speaks!
Above her
right nipple, she finds it…size of a grape…heart stopped in the perspiring lilac
tile, astes corruption. Sacre! Yes, it’s there. No
doubt. Her mother’s voice, she recognized it. Her lump found
when she was fifty; killed her six years later. She recalls the
grotesque, swollen arm. They cut it off to spare her the inert
weight. A dead thing, it preceded her to the grave.
Giddy
with quick breathing, she sits on the hopper, throws her wrapper over
her. Through the fabric she can’t feel it.
The two largest brains in history
were Aknaton and Sir Isaac Newton, Megan tells Margo. Newton’s brain is
preserved in vinegar somewhere.
The
agency calls Margo back.
I
can’t, I can’t another minute. I’m sick. I’m going to kill
someone!
They’re
going to send Priscilla, they tell her. She’s shaking all over she puts
the pills in paper cups: Elavil to elevate, and Mellaril to ameliorate, and
Restoril to restorate. She always studies the literature that comes with
them from the Pharmacy: Reduced libido, lowered sperm…laboratory trials show a
count reduced to forty million sperm per cubic…Well, it’s only one you need,
she thinks.
Priscilla dozing when they
call her in. Frostie and his sister Solie gone up to the roof with
Frostie’s telescope. She’ll come, yes, till Rosa gets there at eleven,
she tells them, but give her twenty minutes. She clears the table and
eats the bread crescents left on the plates. Benno comes and winds
himself around her. To bed. You must. Mummy must go out
again.
No!
Only for
a couple hours. Solie’s here. Solie is his mother. Fierce and
vigilant for tigers. Benno has interesting nightmares and always it is
Solie who takes him in her bed.
I might
dream about the raccoon again.
But
raccoons are gentle animals. They are vegetarians.
What’s
vegetarian?
They eat
carrots and tomatoes. They steal from gardens. It’s their only
offense.
What’s
offense?
Crime. Well not crime. We are the criminals. We take all the
space to grow the vegetables away from them.
And put a
fence. That’s why it’s called offense.
Well,
maybe there’s a connection.
The
raccoon in my dream has pointed teeth. I shine my flashlight at him and
he has pointed teeth.
That’s
something you remember from when we lived with Daddy. We heard a noise
one night and Daddy went out with his flashlight to see and surprised some
raccoons in the trash.
Well,
when I tell Solie the dream, she’s afraid with me. And Daddy was afraid.
No, he
was just finding out what was the matter, and putting the lids on tight.
When you think of a raccoon, just think he’s hungry and wants to get your old
peanut butter sandwich.
And one
was sick once.
Oh, yes,
I remember. They came out of the Welfare once, when Benno was quite
small, and there was a raccoon sitting on the stoop. He was sick.
That was much more scary than the raccoon in the trash. I didn’t want you
to touch him because he might have been sick.
And you
went back in to get a piece of bread.
Oh,
yes. She’d thought he either must be sick or hungry to be just sitting
there on the stoop like one of the Welfare recipients.
Maybe he
was just hungry, she says. Did he eat the bread, do you remember?
I think
he did.
I hope
so. Sick scares me, but pointed teeth don’t. We have two pointed
teeth. She points to her cuspeds. Come to bed now. She
gathers up his bones, his elbow in her as he fingers his cuspeds. Then
puts her uniform back on and goes up to call Solie down. Who’s that?
she asks about the shadowy figure with Frostie.
That’s
Nelson Márquez.
If he
gets caught, he’ll go to jail. It’s past the curfew. Ah,
well. She can’t make everything right.
Nelson
Márquez, you go home! she shouts nevertheless, into the darkness.
And to her daughter Soledad she says with even less hope: You’ll do your
homework please. I have to work a couple hours.
O.K. She might and she might not, Priscilla
thinks. She’s failing history and science. Her math grades are good
however. And she will make sure that Benno’s O.K. That’s all she
can count on. People do what they want, she tells herself and tries
to remember its how she operates herself.
They won’t cut her, not this body,
Eulalie tells herself, and takes heart from this resolve, standing before the
foggy mirror and repeating, Pas!
There’s a potluck supper at the Baptist Church on Lexington Street. A talk and slide show on El Salvador. The Reverend Thomas Withbroe. The Professor dozes comfortably
through it. Helen Schade is come while
Eulalie finishes dressing. Puts on the TV and seats herself before
it. Eulalie, carrying corruption, says goodbye to Helen.
She’s put the urinal beside Alcide, will be back by ten, she tells her.
No hurry, says Helen comfortably.
The Professor snores softly in the
slideshow dark.
Ramona Márquez drags her son home,
locks him up, and goes to services at La Iglesia de Cristo Misionera in the
chapel of the Congregational Church. The minute that she’s gone, he’s out
the bathroom window to the roof of Building B, where Frostie’s left the door
propped open.
Priscilla mounts her bike and
coasts the block to Norumbega. Martin Luther King, she’s thinking, was he
the greatest man our age…? But there were those before him, Dorothy Day,
Thoreau… Well that was another century… A streetlight’s out in front of the
Welfare, makes a sinister scene from out of some old black and white
movie. She skirts the Common with its warm lights and reassuring bus
passengers at the south end, and goes straight up Moody without her morning
detour over the little footbridge by the Mill. She’s late, but thinks
she’ll need some coffee to get through this shift and locks her bike to the
stop sign outside the Waltham Spa and goes in to fill her thermos.
Eulalie’s there buying her fourth of a ticket for the lottery. Did Alcide
come back? Priscilla asks. He come back with police, Eulalie says,
I hide his walker and then he go out again.
He is impossible.
Yes,
impossible. She wonders what accounts for deadness in Eulalie’s
voice—usually she would cry, imposs i ble on a rising note. Are
you all right? Priscilla asks. Eulalie turns her long and complicated
French face with its massive ears and jowls and its slight tremor toward
Priscilla, and there’s no seeing into it. Of course. There is nothing the
matter. He is home with Helen Schade now and the rails up. Eulalie tells
Priscilla.
If that’s
any guarantee of anything, Priscilla thinks. Eulalie appears to have lost
her sense of fun. She sips some of her coffee, then puts it into her
backpack and gets her bike and rides on, using the sidewalk here, though it’s
forbidden for bicycles.
It was on this block, just
past the Irish Travel Bureau, a car came down Myrtle Street and sideswiped her,
throwing her into a hedge. The incident replays itself with
variations on eighteen-wheelers; fortuitous hedges replaced by concrete or
fences with iron spikes. She shakes the scenes out of her head, pedaling
vigorously up Adams Street. Just a warning to her to be careful, that incident.
She is more careful now than in those days of scaling fences and lying down in
front of massed policemen with truncheons. She was never afraid then,
never imagined real danger. Still can’t. It was all a drama, with a
foregone conclusion… It was all in the cause of peace and…Gandhi! she
thinks. Gandhi, of course! How could she not think of it?
Gandhi was the greatest man of our age. S
he locks her bike to the iron
railing. Margo’s got the door open and her jacket on. You sick?
Priscilla asks.
Yes, sick, I can’t…
No, I
have to get out of here, Margo cries, and she’s off down the street without
giving report even. Oh well, she’ll get it another day, or make it
up. None of them are above making up a report: quiet night, changed bed once, or:
restless night, changed bed three times…But what could be wrong with everyone
tonight?
She’s preggers, Megan tells
her. I can always tell. Megan is on the couch with Opera News
and a Public Television offering on. Her eyes are bright with mischief,
and Priscilla sees a hint of victory over Margo in them. She avoids her
for the time to tend to Adie, who has messed herself, and the laundry which is
piling up. She puts the load she finds in washer into
dryer, loads the washer with what’s in the basket and puts Adie’s sheets to
soak. Yes, Gandhi, she thinks. She wishes she could tell
Frostie. When she gets a minute, she’ll call. Then she gets Winnie
up and strong arms her on to the toilet. Megan’s watching the news.
It seems the would-be assassin of the President is the son of a wealthy Texas oilman. His apparent motive was to win the affection of a teen-aged movie
actress that he’s never met. My astronomer is on next, Megan tells her.
We’ll watch it together. OK, Priscilla says, walking Winnie back to bed.
Eulalia, carrying her new
knowledge, crosses Spring Street, notes the green car pulled up at the circle:
Leo Blakey, that Megan’s brother. Good brother, that one, she
thinks. He never married. Had his sister Winnie home with him until
she took her stroke. Funny, thinks Eulalie, how your life goes on, your
thoughts go on in spite of…She hopes that Helen Shade will be all right with
Alcide. She still hears voices sometimes.
Nelson Márquez, child of criminal
tendency, encounters Frostie on the roof, pulls out his stash of stolen watches
hidden in a hollow concrete block and passes one of them to Frostie. La
Schade has checked Eulalie’s fridge and eaten some olives, green. She’s
hearing voices telling her to steal some writing paper, write her sister
Maddie, tell her some home truths.
Frostie studies the cheap
digital watch. They’re stole from Woolworths, Nelson says.
Me and Dennis gonna move one. Frostie’s figuring the economics: A
coolie in Taiwan made maybe, twenty cents by its manufacture. Woolworth’s
buys it wholesale lots. They, of course, are the losers when a kid like
Nelson takes it off their hands, though of course they have
insurance… We get the money, we pay Ana for a fucking lesson, Nelson
tells Frostie. The establishment, in short, is robbed the value of one
fuck, thinks Frostie, who’s his mother’s son. A kind of justice,
yes… He focuses his telescope on Sirius in the Greater Dog. He
cannot see its dark companion. Listen, Nelson, you think Dennis
can? I mean has he arrived at puberty?
At where?
Has he got
hair, I mean, down there?
Frostie, you
are mad, his sister Solie says.
I
Not really.
You got?
No, says
Frostie. I’m on the slow side. The median age is twelve.
And she, you
sister?
Solie, you got
hair? Kid wants to know.
Hair where?
Oh well, we
know you got it on your head.
Leo Blakey comes up the steps to
visit his sisters. He goes in to Winnie first. My name is Winnie
Blakey and I live at number twenty Aspenwall, says Winnie by way of
introduction. I know that, says her brother, aware that thirty years ago they
lived at twenty Aspenwall.
And who
are you?
Your
brother Leo, Winnie.
Well,
pleased to know you. I’ve been talking in my sleep they tell me.
Have
you? So do I sometimes.
They’re
giving me a pill, the doctors. Do they give you too?
For
talking in my sleep? Oh, no, I just don’t tell them.
They
don’t like me doing it. I wake them up and make them jump. Say,
what’s your name again?
I’m Leo,
Winnie. Leo Blakey.
Well, I’m
sure it’s very nice to meet you. Listen, there’s another thing. I
don’t tell
anyone…
What is
it, Sissy?
There’s a
lion in the tree out front. A couchant lion.
Is there
now?
Couchant,
rampant.
You don’t
tell them though. It’s wiser not.
Oh,
absolutely. There’d be trouble. What’s your name again?
You’re very kind.
It’s Leo,
Winnie.
Well, wait a minute.
You want to see my armpits? Solie
offers, then goes down to watch her brother Benno, having exacted a promise
from Frostie to spell her later, so she can go to Nelson’s house.
What do you think, says Megan to
Priscilla, this fuss about the presidential health?
Now, Grover Cleveland had a cancer
of the lip you know. He smoked a pipe. They operated on him out at
sea in a hospital ship. The public didn’t need to know the gristly
details. Yet one does, want to know. At least in the case of
someone interesting. Most of them, including this present incumbent,
aren’t of much interest. I’ve heard enough already. Was it you told
me this afternoon I should try fiction?
Henrietta, leaning on her canes,
awaits the bus from Roberts, sees it stop a block ahead of stop, and wonders
will he pass her, runs out to wave. Madame, you run in front of me…I
might have…
Chance I had to take. You
pass me by, I have to wait another hour.
And you stopped before the stop,
she informs him. A bus is supposed to stop at stops! Fumbling in her
pocketbook for fare, she notes that he’s an Indian—bruised skin about the eyes,
the loopy forelock.
Yes, and Indian would be
vague about the stops. She sits, a little sorry—always had a soft spot
for them—thinks she’ll ask his pardon later. Let him stew a little first
and learn to keep his wits about…
You ever wonder, Megan says, how
birds copulate?
Alcide
wakes and sneezes, gets up and rummages in drawers. Involved in her
letter, Helen Schade doesn’t hear him.
And
there’s a traffic jam near Bemis. Henrietta’s Indian has taken up a
little reedy flute, is tootling one of those tiresome melodies that she
remembers. Yes, he must calm himself, she thinks. An Indian must always
calm himself. It’s odd. She never knew one drive a bus—except,
incompetently, in their own country. They weren’t cut out for it.
This one is most likely a dreamy astrophysics student nights, or some such
pursuit.
The
traffic is moving slowly past the old Murphy General Hospital—now housing
overflow from the National Archives: papers of the Continental Congress, Indian
Treaties, histories of the coastal forts and lighthouses, Daniel Webster’s
papers, tax returns, patents on Paul Moody’s power loom, genealogies…
Yes, the Montague’s traced their ancestry to William Brewster; there were some
other clergymen of note, but a surprising number of them came to no good end;
one of her great uncles spend his prime in jail…
There is
stir among the passengers. She looks out the window at an unfamiliar
lighted square. Where is she going? She takes out her memo pad and
asks her seatmate what day it is. It is Tuesday, he says. And this
is supposedly a Bemis bus… Yes a Bemis bus. She always takes it home
after the meeting at St. Charles Borromeo; but it seems to be taking a
different route. I get off at Walnut, she says.
Well,
we’re nowhere near Walnut.
Pardon
me, but is this a Bemis bus? a woman at the back calls out to the driver.
No, I am Kenmore, says the driver pleasantly. He has put his flute away and has found an open
road, which he is plunging down with a bit of abandon which seems unwarranted.
Kenmore. We’re going to Kenmore. We just passed Lewando’s Laundry, mutters the
man beside Henrietta, and suddenly everyone is shouting at once:
Bemis. It says Bemis on your sign! Just look! God, we’re
miles out of…this is crazy…
The woman
from the back has gone forward and is trying to correct his course, while he
protests that he has always been a Kenmore bus, and reaches up to twirl the
dial of his sign.
No, you
are Bemis! shouts the woman. We are all Bemis passengers, and now we will
all be late.
It
has already happened, sighs the man next to Henrietta, looking at his watch.
He must
stay calm, thinks Henrietta. We must stay calm.
But no one is calm. The shouting woman finally convinces him to turn, so
that they are bumping over streets that no bus ever took, with the woman
browbeating him at every corner: turn here! Turn here! fuming
through long red lights and bumping over curbs. And now cars are honking
at them. We’re way into Watertown, says the man next to
Henrietta. A car is honking in the other lane, just below their
window. The man opens it, and they hear some words that sound
like…hijacked!
Are
we hijacked?
No, no,
Henrietta’s seatmate shouts out the window. Just an idiot.
But he
isn’t heard. The bus comes to a sudden stop, throwing the
instruction-giving woman into the driver’s lap. Two police cruisers have
parked in front of them. The officers burst in and drag the driver out of
his seat and onto the pavement.
But he
must have calm, thinks Henrietta. And I was going to apologize to him.
We’ve been driving all over two
towns on a bus that says HELP. Well, we needed help, didn’t we? says
Henrietta reasonably. You know I lived in India. They are an
extraordinary people. They have a great deal of intelligence and talent,
but some of them should not drive buses.
Alcide wakes and
sneezes. Marry her…thinks Alcide. It’s the only answer.
He’s out of bed and rummaging in drawers. Achoo! But Helen Schade
doesn’t hear it. She’s hearing voices speaking French or something, like those
nurses at the State. Haitians. They were mostly Haitians. Had
last names that sounded like first names: L’Eveque Nancy was the woman who
escorted them to the therapy, jingling her keys and opening the heavy doors
that crashed behind. She was nice.
CONTINUED IN NEXT ISSUE