Toad, page 14
“Angelina is a virgin.”
Her voice was sleepy. Aimed at nobody. Her head was rested against the wall and her eyelids drooped.
Sam smiled. She smiled back. I didn’t want that starting up again, so I asked, “Are you still working?”
Sam flashed a grin and lifted his eyebrows in horror. “You mean, I didn’t tell you about that? What a scene. Listen, it seems that pipes are like diamonds. They’re very tough, unless you hit them in a particular way. Then they go to smithereens. It’s like dynamite. Nitroglycerin. You can drop it off the George Washington Bridge or run trains over it sometimes without anything happening, but if just the right combination of stresses and forces occur together, a fly landing on it will set it off.
“Well, I came into work one day last week. I put on my apron and put the glue on the hot plate to warm up. Mr. Zendke was very pleased that day. He was humming and bustling. He’d got a couple of really good pipes to work on. I told you before that he likes pipes better than people. His entire social life consists of playing with pipes and talking to them. If he gets a cheap pipe in he tsks and groans as though it were a criminal. If it’s cheap and also smells of rum and maple, he snubs it completely. But this day we had two real aristocrats. Well-educated, high-principled, wise old pipes. He was fantastic. When he stuck the pipe cleaner in you could almost hear him say, ‘Excuse me.’ And he wiggles it around, intent on what he’s doing, and then pulls out the cleaner and pats the pipe and actually says, ‘There now, it’s over. Isn’t that better?’ I was amazed. I’d never seen him with a really fine pipe before. But we’d been getting on very well. He told me all about his wife, who died twenty years ago, and I told him about going to college. He’d never studied and he has this superstitious reverence for anyone who has. He couldn’t believe all the politics and talk that are really what counts in any school. So anyway, he’s holding this pipe as though it were the Star of Kuala Lumpur or something, and he gives me a wink and says, ‘Would you like to clean the bit?’ He was giving me a treat, you know? So I say, ‘I sure would,’ and I take it from him and the phone rings and he says, ‘Be very, very careful,’ and off he goes to answer it. Well! By that time I was really nervous. I was scared I’d drop the thing, so I put it in a little vise on the workbench. Then I take this little tool for scraping the sludge out of the bit and I go at it very carefully. But my hands are shaking. It was like I was a brain surgeon working on Einstein. You can’t help but wonder if you’re up to it. Then there was a little snap. Just a faint little sound, but the pipe split in two, right up the stem. I don’t know exactly what I did. And I don’t know why it never occurred to me to take the bit out of the pipe. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you clean it. I wanted to hide it all, throw it in the garbage and tell Mr. Zendke that a masked man had taken it from me at gunpoint. But he came in and saw me standing there with the pieces in my hands. It wouldn’t have bothered me so much if he’d yelled and jumped up and down. But he just came up to me and took the pieces out of my hands very tenderly. Then he kind of moaned. Then tears came out of his eyes. I felt really bad. We stood there for a while and I wished I could disappear. Then he says, in a very soft voice, ‘Oh, boy, I guess you’d better go away. I’ll send your check.’ So I took off my apron and left. It’s one of the worst things I ever did in my life. It was murder, as far as he was concerned.”
Carlotta was asleep against the wall. Her mouth was open a little, a faint purr coming from her throat. Rennel sucked his chopsticks gravely and examined Carlotta’s bare legs. Lichtenstein watched Sam with ponderous eyes. His lips parted in preparation for something profound.
“If you suffer for material losses you don’t suffer in spirit.”
Sam nodded. “But you see, to him it wasn’t just a fine old Kapp and Peterson. It was a living thing that he loved.”
They talked. I was tired. My legs were going numb. The record played softly. I picked up the bowls and the chopsticks and the pot and carried them out to the sink. When I came back for Carlotta’s plate, her eyes were open but she hadn’t moved. Angelina slept in her lap. I smiled and took the plate.
Carlotta whispered, “You look like a cat.”
As I put the plate in the sink I remembered that Carlotta hated cats.
After that, more talk. A new stack of records. Lichtenstein rolled tiny marijuana cigarettes while we all watched. He lit one and the ritual passing began. Each of us with our distinctive suck, our individual methods of spending the time while we held in the smoke. Carlotta took one puff, passed the joint, and disappeared into the dark bedroom, holding her breath.
Lichtenstein left. Sam explained that he was living in the cabin to meditate for two weeks. We all meditated awhile. Angelina slept so still by the stove, she looked dead.
Rennel drove well on the way back to town. He didn’t seem to be thinking about it at all. He began, with a string of belches, “You know Aram’s taking a speed-reading course downtown so he’ll be able to study medicine really well.”
“Oh?”
“It’s only fifty dollars for six classes, but it really works. I think he’s beginning to take things more seriously.”
“Yeah. That must be what’s worrying me.”
“It’s the only thing that can save him from a descent into genuine psychosis.”
I grunted.
“It’s incredible that the human body can get so stretched out of shape.”
“You mean Carlotta?”
“She had a good figure before this. What’s she going to look like afterward?”
“Well, when the kid comes out, the belly flops down in a kind of bag. It’s big, it can hang to the knees. That’s why all women who have had babies wear girdles.”
“Christ.”
I leaned back and tried to sleep.
“Do you like Carlotta?” Rennel asked.
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because she doesn’t like me.”
The toad’s peculiar poison
I’ve been expecting my brother all week. I suppose now he won’t come. It’s my own fault for fuming at his wife. Stupidity. I used to pride myself on handling people. Another myth of myself expunged, and about time.
I wanted to reminisce. An orgy of nostalgia, a wave of fond compassion for the fascinating child I used to be and the heroic brother he used to be. No one is as good for talk of the old days as brothers, or, I suppose, sisters.
My brother, when he comes, brings a hammer and a couple of wrenches. He started that when I first moved back to Oregon. Checking up on me. Making sure. Of what? He goes around tightening the joints of pipes. He comes when my roof leaks at the peak, patches the holes and repaints the ceiling where it turns brown every winter from the seeping water. He fixed my locks, all of them. We don’t know each other. What we have each become is strange to the other. But our child selves are friends, and when we are together there is the awkward adulthood between us only for a first few moments before we are crowing or scowling over some long-ago escapade.
We sit gobbling tuna sandwiches and raisins, our heels kicked up on my garden wall with the plate between us. He’s been shoring up my chimney with cable and bolts. It seems natural to say, “If Ma saw you fooling around on the roof like that she’d have a fit.” And he, with only the picture and no interfering thought, grins and remembers the grape arbor where we used to hang upside down, giggling and whispering over and over, “If you break your neck Ma will kill you.” We’d go on giggling, gasping for air, for that was the ultimate joke, our mother’s method of dealing with her own concerns for our welfare. If we did something dangerous, we were switched till we wished we were dead, briefly. Although there was never a mark that lasted past dinnertime. He knew my mother, and the houses and toys and the fears and freckles and vicious subterfuge, and I knew his. And when we are together that old time is new and rich again.
But it’s only comfortable when there’s no one else around. Because it’s private. Because the things we can remember together nobody else could see, or could care about if they did.
I am getting old. I’ve longed for years to be old and now it’s coming to me. My knees and hips have stiffened, and they ache if I sit without moving too long. I get up and trot around the kitchen, run in place and feel a satisfying swag of my rear with every jounce.
I know my brother will be back. There’s no one else who remembers why he is called Spike. But I did want to ask him a question I can’t seem to answer. Was I called “Toad” as a child? It seems to me there was some time when that was a name of mine, but I can’t be sure. The thought occurred to me last week sometime, when I was sitting out in the garden easing my bunions on the grass and watching my bachelor friend. My brother will remember if it was ever true.
In first-year biology, I dissected a toad, a big brown one from a stinging vat of formaldehyde. I flinched and cringed getting the corpse to the worktable and then pegging him down. But then, with that first incision, that sly peeling of the skin flaps away from the abdomen, I saw the delicacy of the beast. How lovely his belly muscle, a solid disc, pink and round. And the strong casing of the pelvis and the powerful bone of the leg, its stem turning like some fine imagining out of the joint. It seemed beautiful to me. It seemed a desirable thing to die and be hooked out of a vat, all puffed and brown, so some young girl could slice and insinuate into me, and be moved to joy by the turning of my thigh bone.
Toad. Witches’ brews, warts. The amazing Mr. Geddoes recommended an onion rubbed on the wart daily. It works. The thing just shrank up and tumbled off after a few weeks.
And once in another country, I rode in the back seat of a car at night, in the rain, and was stopped by a horde of toads, yellow, the size of plates, tidily winking as they crossed the streaming road. Dozens of them, there were, caught in the car lights, flopping in the sheeted water falling on the road, from one vineyard to the next.
My bachelor toad doesn’t do much. I watch him. He hangs on the rock wall. If I tap too close he pulls himself into a dark crack where I can’t see him. He sits in the sun waiting. When a fly wanders by he nonchalantly flips out his tongue, stubbier than I’d expected, and tips it in. When he swallows, his eyes convulse. That’s all. At night and in the early morning he sings, his pale throat fluttering. Not exactly a parade, not precisely a circus, but he’s entertaining enough when I’m sitting out there in the dirt with my skirt rucked up, the sun warming my thick veins, and my bunions cooling in the grass.
Mr. Geddoes once told me that toads secrete an odd variety of poisons from their skin in stressful situations. One South American tree toad oozes a curare-like toxin that the Indians use for tipping their arrows. It produces paralysis and death.
Mr. Geddoes said even common toads, if they are sick, turn brown and secrete a mild poison which tastes very bitter and acts in a peculiar way on the human heart.
* * *
Summer came. The chaise didn’t absorb my sweat. It got slippery. I shoved it to the edge of the room, into the wedge between the sloped ceiling and the floor, and pulled the bed into the middle of the room. I lay on it in the heat. I read and looked straight up through the skylight. At night I served coffee in the strobe-lighted cave where long-haired musicians met pudgy high school girls wearing color-coordinated skirts and sweaters. They would have preferred orange soda pop. So would I.
Rennel worked with autistic children at a county clinic. He puttered by on his motorcycle whenever he could get somebody to watch him. He drove out to Sam’s every few days.
Sam’s ten-dollar car had broken down and wasn’t worth fixing. Except when someone else drove out to see them, he and Carlotta stayed out there in the trees with the goat and Angelina. Sam went to a few of his speed-reading classes and came by my place afterward. He was excited about it and showed me how to move your fingers across the page in some special way to help you soft-focus your eyes. I kept threatening to test him. When the car broke down he stopped going to classes and didn’t try to get his money back.
On the Fourth of July, Rennel stopped at my place on his way out to Sam’s. He hadn’t been there in a week, but he said they were probably all right. Some rich girl was using the cabin and she had a car. I was sick of my skylight and ready for a party, so I went along.
There were four cars on the grass around the house. The day was fine and the music screamed from the open windows. I hadn’t seen Carlotta in a while. She stood wedged in the kitchen doorway as we came up. The red dress was tight on her belly now, and hung down shorter over her legs. Her long arms and legs poked out like candy apple sticks. She was the most pregnant woman I’d ever seen. She was alone in the kitchen and stood aside to let Rennel get by. She smiled a little to herself and leaned into a chair.
“It’s pretty big, isn’t it?” She stroked the top of her belly, her eyes half-closed.
“Is it twins?”
Her belly jumped and a protrusion developed, then disappeared.
“I think that’s his foot.”
“Have you been to a doctor?”
“No. We still phone when we go in to shop. But none of them will come to the house.”
The music careened around the little house. Voices sang in the living room, out of tune.
“We’re going to get married.” She didn’t smile as she said it.
“How come?”
She frowned slightly. “Sam’s parents wrote asking us to. They want us to come to New York and be married in their house.”
“I didn’t know they’d heard about the kid.”
“Sam wrote to them a while ago. They’d stopped sending money since he wasn’t going to school. I wrote to my mother, too.”
“So are they sending money now?”
“No. Just two plane tickets to New York.”
“You don’t look very happy. Do you dislike being pressured into it?”
“I just think getting married is a cheap thing to do.”
“Sally! Come in and get stoned! I’m getting married!” Sam called cheerfully from the living room. The music stopped suddenly. I looked at Carlotta. She stared down at her belly.
The room was full of people in denim pants, nodding their heads. Rennel sat in a corner, puffing strenuously on a joint, trying to catch up. Sam got up from a large, black silk pillow and took my hand.
“Did Lotta tell you?”
“Yes. Congratulations.” I hugged him and kissed his cheek.
“Isn’t it a great idea?”
“Sure.”
“Think of all the money you’ll get,” a man with curly hair contributed.
A round-faced girl in a mink pea jacket and torn Levi’s nodded and winked. “I’ll come to your wedding. We’ll all come. We’ll charter a plane.”
Sam nodded. “It’s true, we’ll probably get a lot of money. When my sister got married she got ten thousand dollars in cash and a lot of pawnable goods.”
Carlotta entered and crouched next to the cold stove. She had tied the leather thong around her head and slung a shawl over her head and shoulders. Our Lady of the White Wickiup.
“You know, Socrates was a very wise old man. He once said, ‘By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll be happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.’”
The rustling cushions and the smell of sweet smoke. Carlotta lunged up, her belly swaying. She went into the kitchen and I heard the outside door slam. I got up and went after her.
She lay flat on her back in the tall grass at the edge of the trees, her hands on her belly. Her eyes were closed, her face passive.
“Are you all right?” I sat down near her head and chewed blades of grass. When she spoke, her voice was nasty and sharp.
“I get so fucking sick of cool old men. Every time he goes to town he comes back with another ‘cool old man’ story. An old crock he gives a nickel to on the street. The fat fart who pumps the gas. If he doesn’t meet a new one he reminisces about an old one, Wittgenstein, or the art teacher in his junior high school. Every old turd in the milk is a wise man.” She sneered. Her eyes were dark and cold. It frightened me, until she started to cry.
“It used to be so good with us. Sometimes when we make love it’s still beautiful. But sometimes it’s horrible.”
She blinked and more tears slid down her cheeks into her hair.
“That Laura. With the mink. Aram really thinks she’s something. She’s staying at the cabin, but one night there were a lot of people here, her friends. They were all stoned, except me. I went to bed and when I woke up, Aram was beside me and there was Laura and some guy on the other side of me and a couple of people on the floor. They were saying, ‘Come on, Aram, show us how you fuck a pregnant woman!’ and he was trying, and Laura was doing it with this guy next to me, and I just couldn’t. Aram couldn’t, either, but he kept trying. Rubbing against me, all soft, till he was sweating. Then he jumped up and went outdoors and didn’t come back all night. I think he slept in the cabin. But all the others were passed out by then anyway. I went out and slept by the stove.”
She stared at the sky and calmly blinked out her tears. I put my face down on my knees so I didn’t have to watch for a while.
“The next morning Laura and all of them woke up really hungry and ate up everything in the house without even asking,” she went on. “Aram came in talking about how he was going to make a lot of money going around the woods gathering rare herbs. I don’t know what he wants. I just want to be happy and think about my baby.”
Her hands climbed the mound of her belly and kneaded it gently. The grass in the lawn was yellowed and stiff. It stuck up between our legs and cracked faintly beneath us. The sweetness was gone, but I pulled the grass slowly from its husk and chewed.
“The Indians sometimes had two or three wives,” she said. “The women always did whatever the men said, but they didn’t really have to pay any attention to them. You know what I mean? They’d cook and sew and take care of the babies, but they could really ignore the men except when they were actually screwing. The men were off hunting or having debates. They didn’t have much to do with the women.”
