Chapter 2

In the cab on the way home Emma fades into the back seat. Brake lights, headlights, blur and zip up and down the Drive. The cabbie is a slight, guileless Indian man in a short-sleeve white shirt. He listens to World Café.

Her secrets and sins of omission eat at her. That chart of Joe’s moods she keeps on an insurance calendar, in the hope she can accrue enough evidence to get him to a doctor. The chat room she entered a month ago: depressionfallout.com. She always taught Liz and Sophie, “Your integrity should be your prized possession.” 

Emma has made it thus far without cancer, without tumors. She suffers only minor hot flashes. She takes no prescription drugs. Her divorced parents are still alive; Grandmother GG still plays bridge and does her own lardy Southern cooking. Still, time leapfrogs and tumbles and bounds away. While she’s stuck.  

She overhears the cabbie on the phone: “Yes, this I know. I know it is Friday night,” he says, placating someone. “I know I am late.”

Friday night.

For a while after Sophie and Liz grew up, Friday night might have meant stopping at a northside market – selecting cheese and fresh pasta and bread. Joe might have whispered in her ear, touched her hip possessively: tender gestures in the banal supermarket. They might have gone home to Pilsen and cooked together, a night game on the radio. A Friday night might contain a concert in the park. Or if they did not want to cope with the street and its vagaries, they might have played Scrabble. She might have made a bid for attention – affiliative gesture – with the certainty that Joe would give it to her.

That’s long gone.

Now Joe does the grocery shopping without her; it’s less crowded in the morning. There is always a reason, a reasonable reason. 

The shop – Home Plate – is lit by a grow light, moony glow that spills through the security gate onto the sidewalk. The door to their living quarters is separate, painted bright blue, with a brass mail slot. The kind cabbie waits to leave until she unlocks the door and slips inside. A television commercial barks out the price of hot tubs as she skims up the dimly lit stairs. The 11 o’clock news is on. Joe lies back in a recliner, a bowl of pretzels on his lap. Licorice-black Basie snoozes on the sofa. My brother Benny’s overcoat is flung on the arm of the sofa.

Emma says, “Hi, sweetheart.”  She shrugs off her coat. “Is Benny here?”

Joe shakes his head no. “He forgot his coat.”

She is sorry to have missed him. “What’d you watch?”

“’Pollack.’”

“That’s a sad one.”

Joe’s eyes are boy blue behind his glasses. “You look like someone new. In that sweater.” He takes her hand but his grip feels weak. “I’m glad to see you,” he says.

Glad, delighted, pleased. Joe is none of that. It’s just what he says. He might want that to be true. Emma aches, wonderingly: Where’s my best friend? I want my best friend back.

 

 

 Chapter 3

Sophie and Chanti are in bed, waiting for Joe and Emma to leave.

I’ve heard that John Updike once said, “All novels are about mating.”  My students don’t like to hear this, although mating is one of their Top Ten Tunes, nearly all they think about.  Mr. Updike, if you’re reading this, and I hope you are, thank you for the lust and sexual fumbling in your novels, for revealing what’s hidden. Every day I meet them on the page, I am grateful for Sophie and Chanti and their young lust. Nance Van Winckel says that if her characters are foggy she puts them in bed together. They reveal themselves to her – naked, sometimes silly, vulnerable.

It is Saturday morning, St. Patrick’s Day, and Chanti wants to make what he calls married love. Nookie is more about him, a quickie, hooking up in the bathroom with the shower running full bore to buffer any squeals. Married love is more about Sophie, with tango or Coleman Hawkins playing, Sophie in purple silk or some other slippery trifle. She has a closet full of chemises and slips and nightgowns, cottony, rayon, eyelet-trimmed, paisley, lace, be-ribboned and flounced. She likes to make love with her clothes streaming away, half-unbuttoned, a vixen in a Vargas illustration. Sophie is petite, with small breasts, dark skin from her Eastern European blood, hair she perms in a tangled wad down her back, and a heart-shaped face. The acknowledged beauty in the family.

Among other things, lingerie came between her and her feminist sister Liz. She doesn’t want to think about Liz; when she does, she has feelings that have no place to go.

Now Sophie wears a summery nightgown. With the sheet pulled up over her breasts and tucked snugly under her arms, she delicately spoons syrupy mandarin oranges from a blue Japanese bowl into first Chanti’s mouth, then her own. Church bells ring out. She sold two paintings yesterday. A quarter-bottle of flat champagne on the dresser testifies to their celebration.

His angularity presses against her softness. Like John Lennon and Yoko. Iconic lovers. His hard-on has a nickname: Senor Amor.

Chanti says, “I think your mother was in here again.”

“The Shalimar gives her away.”

“Did she do that before?”

Sophie says, “Before?”

“Before we got married.”

“I don’t think so.”

She sets the empty bowl on the floor and gets up, making soothing noises, saying, “Mm. Mm. I’ll be – right back, dear-dude.” She stands at the window for a minute, knowing she is wanted; most of her life she has felt pretty, but her husband makes her feel wanted, brazen. She likes saying, “My husband.” Santiago Natividad Gonzales. Chanti to his loved ones. Her sweetheart since junior high when they were servers at Mass together.

The window is nearly industrial in size, dirty from the winter. Overcast light strikes her as faintly carotene or copper. A child’s St. Paddy’s Day balloon bounces in the maple. The old country family name – Svizi – is carved into the wooden flower box someone built before WW I. Last summer moonflowers pulsed in the flowerbox, with whatever music rose up to the catwalk from the flats surrounding it: salsa, tango, rap. Down in the courtyard, three bags of mulch are stacked near her father’s garden plot.

Downstairs, Joe calls out to Emma: “I’ll pull the car around.” At last. But Emma still putters: Sophie hears her talking to Basie, swatting a closet door shut. 

What she loves about her father’s courtyard is its windlessness, and the echoes of the cries of children who have lived here, Sophie and Liz, her father and his brother, his mother before that.  She imagines the neighborhood as if she were a putty-colored gull gliding off-course from Lake Michigan and able to survey the whole panorama: the Mexicano murals and the panaderias and the treeless streets.

Chanti wants to move. Everyone leaves the neighborhood sooner or later, he tells her.

It’s the one big thing they disagree about.

Even his parents talk about moving.

Sophie’s people were among the immigrants nearly one hundred years ago, and now her family inhabits the house like a ship about to go down. Her hardwood floors slant and she doesn’t know exactly what that means, but it can’t be good news. 

Chanti lies there in watch-plaid boxers. Will they conceive this time? They’ll take the baby to tango. The nights they wait tables, they’ll trade the baby off. It’s a plan, Chanti says.

Her nightgown feels like a sunny day on a beach, like a coconut palm outside a sunny stucco room, outside a window trimmed in blue or yellow. They’ve been to places like that, spring breaks, Punta Cana and Cabo San Lucas. She unravels images. It is a fantasy nightgown. What you need at the tail end of a Chicago winter to keep from noticing your dry rough heels and the way static crackles in your hair. A cloudy day, the forecast calls for drizzle.

Chanti says, “Your Dad heard a shot last night.” 

Sophie can see where that might lead. Why doesn’t she want to move? Liz thinks it’s a cop-out, living with their parents. But Sophie thinks it’s a way to pay off school loans. To live the bohemian life, small b.

She lets the Venetian blind down with a clack. “We can’t do anything about it. Not now.” Then, “Senor Amor.”

Chanti reaches down and slips a CD into the player beside the bed. Some tango. “’Creole Courtyard,’” he says, grinning wickedly. “Soph. Want to make a baby?  Listen to this. ‘And in the tatters of some pretty half-moon, her dark face would gaze at me. . .’”

She lies across the bed and Chanti pampers her. Eventually, astride him, Sophie works up a good sweat.

 

Chapter 4

The first time Joe let Chanti see the Skylark, Chanti said, “Looks like a sports car on steroids.” Joe loves the original factory paint job – Pinehurst Green Metallic, turquoise in some lights, sage-like in others – and the horn button engraved with his father’s name: Customized for Robert March. He loves the white convertible top, the Kelsey-Hayes wire wheels and the white-wall tires, the chunky chrome grill, the satisfying muted thwack when he closes the door. He loves the way heads turn when he maneuvers it down the street. He thinks of it as a public service; people get a kick out of vintage cars.

At the wheel he watches the door for Emma’s beret bright blue. He wishes she would hurry and keep him company, keep him from memories. That seems to be one of the big differences between being his age – sixty-five – and being Emma’s age: he lives in memory.

Jerry Stern said so years ago, when I was too young to imagine life past forty. He was sixty-three and he had come to give a reading in Dowdyville (what Benny and I call Tarkington where I teach at TSU). Outside the party house, Jerry and I sat talking under a street lamp in crackling raked leaves. I remember I asked him, “How do you decide how many readings you’re doing?” And he said, “It depends on how desperate I am for attention.” At the time I had one book; he told me I was skiing downhill and not to worry about a thing. I was widowed and Jerry had been left by his lover of many years.

While I’m quoting Jerry, let’s get this one out of the way: once he said, “There’s always power in love. One has more money than the other; one is more beautiful; one can have babies, bestow progeny; one has parents with a house at the beach. And so on.” Is that what we’re saying when we say I love you? Share your power with me? I’ll let you be in my dreams if you’ll let me be in yours? Were we arguing about power, Jerry, that time in the grocery, buying butter for Thanksgiving? I wanted salted; you wanted it without.

At that time, Jerry traveled with a framed photo of Pat, his only wife and the mother of his children, her cheeks tinted an innocent rose. I was moved by that. It made me wonder about Husband #1, whether he ever thought of me. Did he have that framed photo on his dresser from Playa Azul: me sunny-cheeked, in a gauzy embroidered Mexican blouse and bell bottoms, my arms around him and Benny, all of us higher than kites, too stoned to boil water? Jerry and Pat had been divorced a long time, but he still traveled with her photograph.

One blizzard-y blues-y night in Chicago, Jerry bought me a wool hat at a second-hand store. At a Polish restaurant we felt loved by the steam and clatter, the heavy mugs. The regulars shouted about the mayor and football. The waitress told us how long it took her to grow out her bangs. We’d been to the Art Institute, to the Gauguin show.  We rushed from painting to painting, whispering, his life, it was Gauguin’s life that mattered to us. The foolhardy courage of voyages and young girls and selling his belongings. We had only twenty dollars in cash and Jerry said, “Let’s pretend it’s the old days and see how far we get on this.” He spoke of his father’s grave and asked me to help him remember this phrase until morning: a little light left.  All those people of our embraces, outlaws, veterans, swayed in that little light. I asked Jerry what the difference was between my age and his. “I live in memory more,” he said. And I have been waiting, without meaning to, to cross over that chronological line when I live in memory more than not.

For Joe March, good memories are the worst. Love and surprise. Yes, youth. A time before regret. The life everlasting, as Jerry wrote. Vivaldi years.

Today the Skylark reminds Joe of Sylvia, his only Jewish girlfriend. If Emma comes out, Sylvia will fade and he might keep even keel. Sylvia’s family disapproved. He called her “Sunshine,” a bold move he thought at the time, giving a girl a nickname.

It was 1953, he was sixteen, the Rosenbergs had just been executed. His brother Leo was still alive.

At last Emma emerges and Joe gets out and, with a magnanimity he has to fake, he opens the passenger door for her. She gives him a peck on the cheek and gets in.

He waves to her, still faking, on the way around the hood to the driver’s side. Crowds funnel along the sidewalk now, flea market-goers on their way to Canalport, and children running, tagging each other, teasing, and loiterers, adolescents who hang – that’s the expression, Joe’s been told. Glassine envelopes are traded for wrinkled cash. Once he asked Chanti, “What goes on out there?” And Chanti said, “Wraps. In-di-vidual portions of crack. And other substances. They’re in a world of hurt.” He punctuated the air with his thumb and forefinger circled, like a chef discussing a special. Chanti works for Ceasefire, a network bent on ending street violence. When someone dies he goes to the hospital and in the blood and bone of the emergency room, he persuades the perpetrators to break the chain. Every time he rushes out, Joe wants to haul him back inside and bolt the door.

The car floats away from the curb and Emma slides in a CD. She removes her beret, which is too bad – he likes the maverick look of it; she pats it onto the back seat next to a pastry box of zeppoles, left there by Uncle Leo in anticipation of Joe’s feast day, Monday.   

He says, “I wish Uncle Leo wouldn’t tempt me like that.”

Emma says, “I think the ordinary, family rituals make him feel better. He’s in dire straits.”

Dire straits: Uncle Leo – nearly ninety, a retired Dominican friar, old enough to know better – is up for criminal charges, plain and simple. Against Joe’s advice he went to an anti-war prayer vigil at Ft. Benning, and he and his cronies – wild-eyed Jesuits, Joe assumes – got caught up in things and marched where they weren’t supposed to march. Joe bailed him out, but he wishes the entire incident would evaporate. Too much Vatican II in Uncle Leo’s veins, that’s how Joe sees it.

He reaches for Emma’s hand and meets her eyes. Emma is kind to Uncle Leo and that goes a long way with him. He squeezes her hand.

They decide to take his favorite route, through Chinatown, onto South Lakeshore Drive, with its curves and harbors, the sailboats bobbing in the tarnished winter water. Emma is resting, eyes closed. They pass the site in Jackson Park where the Army maintained nuclear warheads to defend Chicago during the Cold War. That would be a plus-feature now: to have warheads at the ready.

Once they leave Jackson Park and begin the tricky part, the trek down Jeffrey Boulevard, Emma opens her eyes and helps him drive, which to her means watching, scanning, daring someone to jerk suddenly out from a parking spot or run a red light. But Joe takes it slow.

A concerned Emma says, “How’re your eyes, Joe?”

“Don’t bug me, Emma.” Joe does not want to discuss his beginning cataracts or his macular degeneration; there’s never anything to say about that sort of gradual wearing away of what was once, until recently so it seemed, a fully functioning bell or whistle. “Sorry, sweets.”

“I accept your apology.” Emma opens a road atlas; she turns to the state of Montana and opens it wide on her lap so that Joe can see.

Her travel fantasies irk him. “You missed Dom Silva last night.” As soon as the words are out of his mouth, he regrets it. 

“What did Dom Silva have to say for himself?”

“What he always says. I’m not selling. The house is for Chanti and Sophie.”

Long pause. Long pause in which – he can tell – Emma tries to decide how far to push it. One of their habitual conflicts is about to rise up, many-headed beast. Next, she’d be asking, Why can’t you move the shop closer to Comisky? Or up to Wrigleyville? Why in the world did your father think he could make a living off the beaten path? His heart lub-lubs: how is it his heart beats along like a champ without him noticing unless he’s pissed? Then he feels it pounding and worries it might stop.  

“Chanti and Sophie don’t even want it.”

“Some things are more important than money.”

Emma doesn’t speak.

“We used to agree on that, Emma.”

Still, she’s silent. 

They pass Chicago Vocational High School, bleak citadel, home of the Cavaliers, their school colors navy blue and gold, a fact Joe seems to have squirreled away when Alonzo Redding pitched for CVHS before he was picked up by the Winston-Salem Warthogs. This train of thought, the minor leagues, spring training, the aperture a game gives, a place to test your lungs – all that makes his irritation not worth a tinker’s damn.

Once on the toll road, Emma reaches for his hand and squeezes it, Morse code for, if not apology, the illusion of apology. As if she has divined his thoughts. “Let’s be friends,” she says.

He squeezes back.

All the way through East Chicago and Gary, the Rust Belt, the industrial maze laid out before them stirs Joe, the ports and shipping containers and fuel tanks and smoke stacks, a little like the thrill of a patriotic pre-movie newsreel he looked forward to in the fifties. He takes the chance of giving Emma a history lesson, what he’s fairly sure she already knows. “In the 1800’s the Potowatamis lived in fifty villages around the tip of Lake Michigan. One hundred years later Judge Gary’s dream of a gigantic steel mill was a reality and the city of Gary became the --”

“Wasteland of America,” Emma says.

He has heard that the EPA refers to the area as a National Sacrifice Zone. He says, “No one knew what to expect. People were innocent then. Now you can’t buy a candy bar without feeling guilty about the wrapper.”

Kind of Blue ends.

Emma says, “Did you hear anything about that girl who was shot?”

“I was holding off telling you.”

“Tell me.”

“She’s still in critical condition at RUSH. Twelve years old.”

“Jesus, Joe –“

Joe sighs, sorry to have to tell her. Every time a child is shot, he thinks, How the hell can this happen again? And then he forgets until the next time, the forgetting reminiscent of the way he categorizes terrorist acts. He doesn’t want to read the long accounts of terrorism in the newspaper. All those tourists killed in Egypt in 1996. The USS Cole. The churches bombed in Indonesia. He still thinks of them as isolated incidents.

“Don’t start.”

“I’m not starting. I’m way past starting.”

Joe bites his tongue to keep from wrangling; he can’t talk about moving, not today. He counts to ten and turns on the radio. “How about a little music? A little soundtrack?” He searches for a station, settling for something rosy, classical.

“I’m sorry,” Emma offers. “Sorry we’re not getting along. I must be cranky. I’m concerned about Liz.” She grabs a pillow from the back seat, tucks it against the door, sighs into it, and closes her eyes.

On I-94, in the six-lanes of traffic beclouded with exhaust, mostly bellicose semis, Joe misses her. He ventures, “Is there anything I can do? For Liz?”

Emma naps on.