20

I’m sort of in trouble. That’s the last line of a Mark Halliday poem, “Chinese Leftovers.”  I like his delivery. Low-key, resigned. I’m in trouble because I have to choose. This life or that. It’s part of being grown-up. Like Emma I can look Act III in the teeth. Or I can get married again, with all its attendant illusion. Getting married over and over is a little like re-incarnation. You didn’t learn the lessons of the last life, so you’re re-incarnated again. As a bride. It’s “Ground Hog Day” all over again.

Last Thanksgiving, in New York, Husband #1 gave me a blank book, a journal. Fancy-smancy, my mother would say. With a tooled leather cover. We had been to the Guggenheim and slipped out into the pouring rain. A man was selling umbrellas on the street and he bought one. It felt almost romantic. We went back to the apartment a friend had lent us for the weekend. We were wet and cold. We took off our clothes to dry them and I sat in bed in a flannel robe. The duvet cover was pale orange linen, like orange sherbet. It had been twenty years since we had undressed in the same room. He dug around in his suitcase and gave me the leather blank book. He waited to see if I’d like it; I pretended to like it.

Then he said, “Let’s get married. I want to be married. To you.”

Believe it or not, I was surprised. “What would it be like?” I said. I was aware of faking a sort of dreamy voice. Was it all fake? My heart was beating fast. 

He sipped his wine. He warmed to his topic. “You always liked the lake. We can buy a house close to the shore. Do you still want to have a baby? We could have a baby.”

I pictured the ice that accrues in phantasmagorical shapes on Lake Michigan in winter. “It’s so cold up there in winter,” I said.

“We could go to Florida in winter.”

“Every winter?”

He thought I meant, Oh, goody, we can go every winter. But I meant, Wouldn’t that get boring, going there every winter? I didn’t even know I meant that until later.

“Dad’s been talking about opening a gallery in St. Augustine.”

I finally, cheerfully, said I’d think about it. Since then he bought a ring. Perfect for me. White gold, a delicate basket-weave. 

I can’t write in the notebook. Can’t scribble. Can’t scratch out. Instead I use practical moleskin notebooks or school notebooks to keep my writerly bits, which end up a clerical nightmare, in any case. My first writing notebook was purchased in a five-and-dime in Oxford, Mississippi, when I was thirteen years old.  

Here’s a ubiquitous question: When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

I have my stock answer: when my paternal Bohemian grandmother took me to the library in the basement of Sarah Scott Junior High School when I was four years old. I learned to read shortly thereafter.

I never tell them about Katherine Anne Porter’s emeralds, my first whiskey, and the spring break road trip I took with Benny and one of his friends when I was thirteen. Benny and Burns were seniors at a boarding school in the Appalachians where you got as much credit for learning to rock climb as you did for calculus. My school was in southern Maryland and there was still some residue of the prior era, when girls were not allowed to wear jeans on campus. There was still the notion that we should be young ladies.  Just a decade before, our grandmothers had still worn veiled hats and white cotton gloves to go downtown shopping in the humid summer.  I’ll tell you the same dreary stories others have about Catholic girlhood: We weren’t allowed to wear patent leather flats to dances for fear the boys would see reflected in the shoes our nylon net sugar-starched can-can petticoats, our girlish underpants. Seriously. Occasions of sin were the quicksand we skirted gingerly; the nuns had no idea that behind our literature textbooks in study hall we were reading pulp novels with titles like College for Sinners. So when Benny and Burns proposed a road trip to visit our parents in St. Augustine, I felt as if I were about to squeeze through a keyhole of debauchery and come out the other side a beatnik, in jeans rolled to my knees and a dress shirt of my father’s. This was on the cusp between beatniks and hippies. What I knew about beatniks could fit in a shot glass. They had late-night parties lit by candles and drank Chianti from gallon jugs. The girls had long hair, ironed straight, and if they wore makeup, it was pale ghostly lipstick. They thought anything worth doing was worth doing in excess, but calmly, wearily, as if of course, you’d find your way to Morocco, of course, you’d run into Allen Ginsberg sooner or later.

Burns had a car, a VW bug with green paisley contact paper teardrops on the hood. I rode in the back seat and was put in charge of food – the construction of garlicky muffaletta sandwiches – but none of that mattered.  That being questions about the division of labor and gender inequities. I didn’t give a hoot; I was only thirteen. The tape player was an eight-track and Benny was in charge of music. Over and over he played Bob Dylan and Leadbelly, accompanying them on a three-dollar harmonica he’d gotten in his Christmas stocking years before. If not for you.  Irene, Goodnight. Benny was cheerful then, excited to be alive, but the specter of the military draft nibbled at the edges of our fun. They would talk about moving to Canada or faking high blood pressure. In a string of inventive profanity, they would curse Nixon. The year before they had taken me to the National Cathedral to hear William Sloane Coffin speak out against the war. Burns had said that I was educable. The brightest star in the sky. The sharpest tool in the shed. He talked like that.

Our first stop was Richmond, Virginia, where Burns had somehow divined that Katherine Anne Porter was reading from her work at Virginia Commonwealth University. Katherine Anne Porter! We had read “Maria Concepcion” in 8^th grade Lit. There were living writers in the world!  It was standing room only. Elegant, chic, a grande dame, in a white pantsuit, her hair platinum white, she wore real emeralds. She told us they were real. She bragged a little. I held my breath, listening. Afterward, we got in the Bug and puttered on to Charleston where Anne Sexton read the next night. All my pretty ones! Her voice was smoky; she wore a red sheath. She said, “Writers should be forgiven their bad books.” Burns bought one of her books and asked her to sign it, and in the car he made me lean over the front seats and read the poems out loud.  “You can write a fucking love poem,” he shouted, “without using the word love!” I was drunk on him by then, his glossy hair that he allowed me to brush, his bell-bottom pants, his Jesus sandals, his kindness to me, a mere child. Later he would burn his draft card and go to prison. I carried a torch for Burns for years, concentrating right before sleep on a holographic image of him complete with Day-Glo auras, remembering a time he held my hand when we crossed a street to get to the ocean.

In Charleston Benny put me on a snotty, greasy payphone to our parents, to let them know that I was all right. He and Burns had decided against Florida. Our parents gave me the choice of getting on a Greyhound or sticking by Benny and Burns. A no-brainer. People felt safer then; our parents trusted us; they always said, “So long as you’re with your brother,” when I asked permission. They probably shouldn’t’ve because Benny and I got into a few jams. Under the influence of hallucinogens. There were lost years up ahead: I would drop out of college twice, get married too young, wake up all too often in emotional ruin, and rage against the government. With my brother Benny at my side. My first wedding was in San Luis Potosi and, as a gift for our honeymoon in Playa Azul, Benny had purchased peyote from the herb man in the market. We threw up the peyote, but the marriage license stuck. Once I nearly drowned rafting on the Gauley after we’d all taken hits of exceptionally pure windowpane concocted in labs at the University of Wisconsin. But that spring break was innocent; I knew nothing of Timothy Leary or Ram Dass. I knew nothing of hashish.

From Charleston we looped across the South to Oxford where Burns pulled a pint of contraband bourbon from under the driver’s seat, which we drank at Faulkner’s grave, my first whiskey. It lit up my insides like a textbook illustration. I haven’t drunk whiskey since; it was like a vaccination against whiskey. But there I was, with two sweet tipsy guys. We went to Square Books and bought more books. We ate at an all-you-can-eat catfish place down by a river. The songs on the jukebox were some Delta blues, Mississippi scripture from the underworld.  Someone told us about the Subway lounge in Jackson so we went down there and they let us in. The blues didn’t get off the runway at the Subway until midnight. We stayed all night. A shivering fat woman with a gospel-trained voice sang about going down on her man after wining and dining him well. Burns whooped at the down and dirty lyrics; he raised his bottle of beer in toast to me. Everything I came across: the flowered oilcloth on the tables at the catfish place, the hushpuppies, the fishy odor of the tea-brown river, pelicans on the dock, the shimmer of that fat woman on stage in Jackson, the broke-down brick hotel that housed the Subway, every little detail of that day and night in Mississippi reiterated: this is the good life. On pilgrimage.  Listening to writers. Visiting bookstores and blues venues. Reading poems to each other. On the road, when gas was under forty cents a gallon.

I’ve been a writer ever since. #1 once said to me, “You writers just like the idea of doing something. Not the thing itself.”  He wanted to spend money on parasailing. I wanted sit on the beach at Acapulco and write a poem about it.

I sometimes wonder if my romances have failed because nothing can live up to that: the exuberance of being with Benny and Burns when I was thirteen and life fanned out before me in splendiferous possibility. 

 

21

Joe and Sophie edge up to an unspoken conspiracy: they do what they wouldn’t with Emma there. Sophie buys ground sirloin and they grill burgers on the hibachi on the landing outside the kitchen. Joe leaves apple cores on the coffee table. Benny comes over a few times. Down in the shop, they get on a Jackie Chan kick.  He feels foolish – useless – for having stayed; Sophie doesn’t need him. Impatiently she says, “I need to keep busy, Dad. That’s all.” 

One evening, at the kitchen table, she says, “How did you know you belonged here? I don’t know where I belong.”

Purring Peggy Lee makes biscuits on Joe’s knees. The kitchen smells pleasantly of beef and garlic, a smell Emma would’ve made a fuss about. “Some people are homebodies.”

 The phone rings and they cock their heads and listen to the answering machine. It’s Damon Ray. “The cellar’s flooded. The electricity’s gone off.”

Peggy Lee leaps down and Joe picks up, fumbling the receiver. He says, “Hey, hey. DR. What’s down there in the cellar?”

 “The furnace. You don’t want to damage the furnace.”

 Sophie begins the clean-up.  She stacks their plates and salad bowls. 

“It must be the damn sump pump. Can you hear it?”

“Not really, Joe. I can’t hear it. It’s raining like I’ve never seen it,” he says. “It’s wild.”

“I’ll come out,” Joe says. “Better not tonight. But first thing. First thing in the morning.”

At the sink, Sophie squirts dish soap into hot water, and she looks over her shoulder when she hears Emma’s voice on the machine, the old messages. She says, “Don’t look so sheepish.”

“We should have been checking the messages.” He stares at the black machine.

Emma says, “It’s lovely here in Glendalough.” She mentions wildflowers, a monastery in ruins. 

Sophie says, “Wasn’t she going to Dublin?” She slips a skillet into steamy dishwater.

 “She changed her mind.”

“That’s what minds are for, she always says.”

He tells her about the flooded cellar. “You’ll go with me, won’t you?” 

Barefooted Sophie wipes her hands on a dish towel and turns to face him. She says, “At least you know where you belong.” 

“I want you to go with.”

“No way, Dad. I’ll look after the shop.”

“Let’s ask Uncle Leo to stay with you.”

 Resigned, Sophie says, “If it makes you feel better.”

What happens is between the two of them. They might miss Emma, miss her throaty singing the bathroom, miss her affection, miss her healthful cooking, but life is less complicated without Emma. Thoughts of the stolen revolver take up less space. It’s a secret, but he can’t be responsible for telling her God’s honest truth if she’s away.

The next morning Joe packs a bag. He drenches his tomato patch, for the rain that hit the farm has not come to Chicago. He corrals Peggy Lee. He settles her into a cat carrier. “We’re going home,” he says to her. “You’ll like it there.” He imagines telling Emma why. Eventually he will have to explain himself to Emma. “I had to protect Peggy Lee from Basie, that’s all. And Soph – she wasn’t around much.” He believes that. Believes that a simple explanation is the best. And he wonders, Will she be different when she comes back? We’ll upset each other’s apple carts. 

 

 

 22

A Saturday in July, but there is nothing summery about Casa Verde, a looming stone house, built in the 1920’s, with a religious arts store on the first floor and a literacy center on the second floor. Ashland Avenue does not bring to mind green. The foundation of the house has been eaten away by weather, the limestone pitted. The sidewalk buckles. Statues of Our Lady of Guadalupe are displayed in the big bay window, their spiky halos shining in the morning sun, when there is sun. A chain-link fence surrounds the narrow mole-tunneled yard. Big Wheels and rusty wagons are piled on the porch, garage sale toys that children play with while their mothers learn to conjugate English verbs upstairs.

Sophie cuts around the side to the basement entry. Her loose black capris and flowing white shirt – teaching clothes – feel heavy, scratchy, against her skin. It’s in the nineties, the air an eddy of toxins and humidity. She cannot help thinking of the summer before. She allows it to bloom in memory, like a splash of watercolor blooms on paper: waking up late in the morning heat with Chanti, showering together, the voluptuous slip of them together in the shower, his cock, her breasts slippery, his mouth --.  And there she stops. Stop. Stop. Stop.

The steps down to the basement are littered with tissues, a spent condom, candy wrappers, a water-sodden Converse sneaker, and piss-yellow cash register receipts from the tienda two doors down. An industrial-size fan roars in the hallway, but in spite of its roar, music leaps out from the classroom, two competing sounds: the students in strife – will it be Celine Dion or Control Machete? She hopes that Tony will not be there – if only he would disappear.

In her big bossy voice, Sophie says, “I brought the music.” And because the aura of her loss surrounds her and because they are astonished at the subtleties that Sophie is able to add to their drawings, they stop chattering, stop arguing. Monkey-man shuts off one of the CD players. Ju-Ju shuts off the other. Monkey-man and Ju-Ju have emerged as the leaders of the class, both gifted, dominant personalities. A hierarchy has evolved, based on gift. Monkey-man draws women.  Ju-Ju draws children. There is the throb of sex in Monkey-man’s work. There is innocence in Ju-Ju’s.

Monkey-man is a spidery dark-skinned boy, fifteen years old or so – he lies about his age – and today he wears a Bulls tank top and new stiff jeans. His lanky hair falls around his face. She hopes to learn something from Monkey-man – she suspects he knows who killed Chanti. Or knows someone who knows. When they are all busy drawing and the silence is honeyed, hypnotic, she moves among them, thinking that they will let something out in a whisper.

She avoids Tony.

He’s there at a back table, smirking, peeling a wrapper from a Slim-Jim.  After a half hour, Tony says, “Soph. Help me.”

She makes her way to the back. His drawing is jazzy, impromptu: a fast food kitchen scene. She says, “Looks good, Tony.”

He whispers, “I need to talk to you.” His voice sets her on edge; it is a little like Chanti’s – family. But he’s agitated. “You hear me?”

Her mouth feels dry. A mildew odor rises from the corners of the room.  She has kept her cool with them all these weeks. Emma tried to talk her out of teaching Chanti’s art class, but Sophie never questioned the impulse. When she is with the students in the cramped, musty basement at Casa Verde, with the floor tiles broken, and the windows spotted with dried rain, and the overhead florescent tubes blinking and buzzing, she hears Chanti instructing. She can imagine what he would tell each one. The way he would lean over each drawing, suggesting more nuanced shadow or cross-hatched light, adding a line around a mouth or nose. And like it or not, she’s tethered to his mother Magda upstairs.

Now she feels sort of faint; she wants to sit down but that would mean relinquishing power. “Not now,” she says to Tony. She makes a show of stopping at each student’s drawing on her return to the front of the room. She doesn’t play favorites.

Ju-Ju is pregnant. She wears a soft flowered skirt with an elastic waistband below her satiny belly. Her hair is cut in slashes. She is so alive, with baubles and chains and beads tinkling. She draws her baby as she sees him. She draws herself, big-breasted and nursing. She has been a small-breasted girl and she never misses a chance to say, “Look at these tits, you guys.” And strangely, surprisingly, the boys treat her with respect. They are teenage voyeurs, their lives not yet begun. They are amazed at the way her belly expands weekly. 

Sophie wants to say, “I’m pregnant, too.”

Ju-Ju, a stick of charcoal between her fingers, says, “Sophie, help me, would you, girl?”

Their frenetic energy surges, pools, in the room, drawing, putting pen or pencil or charcoal or pastel to paper – they have good paper, Chanti insisted on that, he wanted them to feel the way real artists feel – and for this brief time, the students dazzle each other. Sophie always says, “Surprise me,” if they ask, “What should I draw?”

Sophie hasn’t told anyone. She hasn’t even bought a test at the drugstore. She just knows: this is the moment she claims her pregnancy.

No more Benadryl. No more gin.

 

 

Later, she climbs the polished steps to Magda’s office on the second floor. Magda, who has foresworn her favorite bright clothes. She’s wearing a plain brown skirt and a white blouse, almost like a nun. She’s reading the newspaper at her desk. The window behind her is cracked, patched with black tape. The office smells of stale coffee and paper supplies, old textbooks. An A/C window unit huffs and wheezes.

“Magda?”

She looks up tenderly. “Si?”

“How are you?”

Magda flicks the newspaper away, her charm bracelet tinkling. She shrugs. “I wish you would come to see us Sunday. Won’t you? Es neccesario. We miss you. I can tell you’re at the house – esta bien – but we miss you.”

“It’s hard.” Sophie thinks about the word mother.  I will be a mother. I am a mother. It’s too soon to tell, too soon to bring the wrath of weeping down. The news is fragile, but unambiguous. The first unambiguous thing since.

“We’re family,” Magda coaxes. She opens a desk drawer and pulls out a carton of Twix bars. She proffers the box. But it seems to Sophie that she stiffens, withdraws. “What should I tell Arturo?”

"Tell him it hurts. It hurts too much."