Toad, page 23
Or the silver-haired schoolteacher in the wedge-heeled oxfords who declared to her nearsighted colleague, “I could never have married. After eight hours in public each day, I spend the whole evening farting.”
There was the awkward couple on the banks of the River Charles, her skirt rucked up and his fly undone, the King James Bible (Red Letter) open on their communal lap.
And the old man and the young girl, each in silver lamé shoes, tap-dancing together on the echoing tile floor of the ladies’ room in the train station at two in the morning.
And the small pale boy who calmly told the bus driver that he wished everyone in the world were dead so he could cross the streets by himself. “There wouldn’t be anyone to drive,” he said.
To all these things I feel myself respond, some rising bubble of recognition, an excitement that these mysteries exist. I despise them less now, or not at all—the humans. They are intriguing. They keep secrets for years and then announce them suddenly, if only to strangers. Now this “everybody,” far from being a threat, is a perpetual consolation. And if I yearn for a banquet in my honor, or hate my neighbor because she embodies every virtue that I lack, or hold the direst grudge against those who have helped me in my most desperate time of need, I will announce it to the mailman. And if I choose to dine on ice cream and mysteries for the fifteenth day in a row, and glory to feel my last two teeth wobbling in their sockets, and find my patchy hair coming out in wads on the brush, I will mention it with pleasure to my brother when he calls. The mailman will give me a dirty look, my brother will lecture me and go out for a bag of oranges, but later, alone, I know they will feel some echo in their chest of the truth I have offered them, they will feel some enjoyment of their own oddities in recalling mine.
* * *
The summer session was over at the college. There was no one there but the janitors and the lady on the switchboard. The fat Russian cook was in charge of the snack bar. I stood for half an hour watching her make sandwiches for the men who were wiring the new wing of the library. She’d been promoted from the big potato masher in the main cafeteria. She was very proud and she spread tuna salad onto slices of bread carefully and quickly.
“It’s the first bite that’s important,” she explained to me. “I spread thick at the corners so the first bites will all be nice. It can be a little thin in the middle.”
She had The Brothers Karamazov propped open in the steam tray. A tangerine held her page. I stood peering blankly at the strange print, the peculiar forms of ink on paper. She shook her head at the book a little sadly.
“He’s my last lover. He doesn’t care that I’m dry and sagging. But he’s very self-indulgent. It’s like being loved by a boy. Only his madness is ravishing. I think it was real. Too many people pretend to be mad. They think it hides their dullness and allows them to be self-indulgent.”
She gave me a tuna sandwich and sent me away.
“The men will be coming. They don’t like to see a girl in the kitchen with long hair and no net. I don’t mind, myself, but if they saw you here they’d be opening their sandwiches looking for hairs. It would be an insult to me.”
I walked over to the municipal golf course and sat by the pond to eat my sandwich. The corner bites were very good.
My room was empty when I got back. The stench of the summer’s cigarettes sat on the walls. There wasn’t much comfort in the blankness of the skylight that day. I felt like being nice and having people like me.
I plugged a dime into the phone in the hall and called Jean, my brother’s wife. She said don’t be silly, of course I could come out for the weekend. She was making jam.
I took a bath and washed my hair, put on clean clothes. Sat under the skylight to dry, waited for my brother to stop by for me on his way home from work.
He howled, “Sally!” up the stairs; he’d never climb them all with his bad knee. And he was probably afraid of what he’d find at the top. I thundered down fast. He stood on the porch with a steel helmet tipped back on his head. A red mark from the sweat band had formed on his freckled forehead. I could smell his sweat. He wore scarred, steel-tipped boots. There was a red triangle at his throat, where his open collar let in the heat of his welding.
“This dump is just kindling. Can’t you get a room lower down? You’d be cooked up there if it ever caught fire.”
There were boards and pipes and tools in the back of the pickup. Sitting high in the cab, I looked down on the cars streaking past. Spike was thinking of buying land in Canada. His oldest boy would be eligible for the draft soon.
“Remember how Ma jerked us onto the farm when she thought I’d get drafted during the Korean War?”
“There were other ways to get out of it. I think Sam claimed he was psycho or wore pink underpants to the physical or something.”
“He’s still planning to move out into the woods. He worries me.”
“I haven’t seen them in a while.”
“Jean goes over pretty often. She’s trying to get his wife to bring their laundry over to our place. See, the thing that bothers me is it’s not impossible to live like Aram wants to. My friend Little George has a place in the woods and grows his own food and just goes out logging a couple of months a year for the cash he needs. But I don’t know if Aram can do that. He’s a city boy. Seems to think if he can read a book about something and talk about it, it’s as good as done. I don’t see why he wants to be a trapper, anyway. He wasn’t raised to it, and it’s a hard life.”
Spike turned the truck off the highway, through the one intersection of the little town, and up the steep hill. Toward the top, their house perched on the slope. Rooms and wings had been added as the children came, and windows peered out of unexpected places.
Three bicycles lay in the gravel of the drive. Spike pulled the truck up short, stuck his head out the window, and whistled. The boys appeared and scuttled off with their bicycles.
“Sorry, Dad.”
“I’ll sorry your ass!” He pulled the truck up to the garage and climbed out.
“Send me down a beer. I’ve got to finish a trailer I’m building for the guy who wired the basement. You know him. Old Brodigan.”
Inside, Jean stood over a pot of sweet-looking purple goo. Her face was pink.
“How are you? Taste this. I’ve been smelling it all day and can’t taste it anymore. Does it need sugar?”
I licked the spoon of grape jam she offered and smacked my lips.
“You can go with the kids for blackberries in a little while. Does he need beer?”
She emptied the jam into small, shining jars, and topped each jar with wax from a smaller pot. The hot jam sizzled and popped as it was poured, and began to thicken as soon as it was silent. The wax formed a scum atop the jam. The hot kitchen excited me.
Jean wiped her face with a cloth and retrieved a beer from the refrigerator, snapped it open, and poured it against the side of a glass.
“Want me to take it to him?”
“No. I haven’t seen him all day. You can wash the pot. Did he tell you we’re going back to high school?” She chuckled at the glass of beer in her hand.
“What?”
“He wants to get his equivalency. The union’s cracking down. Even with fifteen years seniority he can’t get the best jobs without a diploma. It’s a night course.”
“What about you?”
“Oh, I just thought it’d be nice. The damn kids are getting snooty about how well-educated they are. Keep calling me a dropout.”
She laughed her way down the steps to the basement. Listening, I heard the smack of his palm flat on her ass.
The sun was low when we set out for the blackberries. The kids wrestled in the back seat. Buckets bounced in the trunk. Jean pulled the car off into the grass and the crowd tumbled out.
“This is Mrs. Wright’s place. I make her bread every week and we get all our fruit here in return. Her old man died a few years ago and she’s letting the place go. She’s too old to keep it up.”
We walked through an apple orchard. The fruit lay soft and putrid on the ground. There was the steady glum sound of bees. They flew heavily and moved out of our way reluctantly as we walked. At the edge of the trees the brambles had taken over. They had mounted the fence and formed a solid tower, six feet high. The berries were thick and sweet and crushed each other in our buckets. “I don’t care how much you eat as long as I get at least two quarts from each of you.”
“Mama! I’m afraid of the bees.”
The children’s voices were soft in the air. They wedged their small bodies deeply in the crevices of the huge bush. I worked away from their voices. The thorns clung and scratched my skin. I walked along the edge of the patch and picked the low, easy bunches. The pail’s wire handle dug into my arm as I filled it.
A line of gray trees marked the edge of the river. They were dead here, like at Sam’s, so I figured it was the same stretch of trees. The blackberries thinned out and I climbed down the shore, balancing the pail on my arm. I moved a little farther on, a few steps more through the tangled brush. I could see the clearing across the river, and a small gray figure was hunched at the edge of the water. It was not far. Ninety feet. Eighty feet. The gray water looked thick and moved slowly. The figure rocked back and forth, and little splashes rose from her hands in the water. Her shawl slipped back and I could see the faint white of the part in her hair. Carlotta. There was a pile of white beside her on the bank. She lifted a white rag out of the water, shook it, wrung it in her hands, and dropped it on the pile.
“Did you see that?”
Jean stood behind and above me, her bucket sagging against her shoulder. She squinted at the figure across the river.
“What’s she doing?”
“Laundry.”
Jean climbed down and stood beside me.
“I don’t know where she got those rocks. It’s all mud along the bank there.”
“What rocks?”
“Those. She puts one just under the water, puts the diaper on it, and then beats it with another rock. I keep trying to get her to bring them over and put them through my machine but she won’t. That water’s filthy. At least she promised to boil them after she’s done them in the river, but I don’t know if she does or not. The baby seems okay. I don’t understand why she couldn’t do them in the kitchen sink.”
“It’s against her religion or something,” I volunteered.
“She’ll think about religion when her kid’s screeching with a rash.”
Jean set her bucket down. She slid the last few feet down the bank into the water and grabbed a naked stick to steady herself.
“Carlotta!”
Her shout rolled out over the water. Somewhere farther up it echoed slightly. The little figure on the far bank uncurled. Carlotta stood, secured the loosened shawl, and said, “Hi,” in a conversational tone that carried easily between the banks. Jean giggled, embarrassed. The sun was low, tipped strangely in the sky.
“Come on over and get some of these blackberries!” Jean called.
Carlotta shook drops of water off her arms. “Can’t hear you. From that side you have to yell. The wind’s wrong or something.”
“Come get blackberries!”
Carlotta still moved as though she was pregnant. The shawl and the long dress ballooned around her as she stepped to the bush where the tired boat was tied. She pulled it up, stepped in gingerly. She knelt in the center of the boat and tipped an oar out, caught it just before it fell out completely. She pulled on it, and the slow current carried her a few feet from us. Carlotta stuck the oar in the mud on the downriver side to hold the boat. There was a sheen of sweat on her face. I nodded at Carlotta. She nodded back. Jean examined her bucket and mine.
“I’ll give you this bucket. Sally’s smashed all hers. They’re only good for jam now.” She swung her pail to Carlotta, who set it on the bottom of the boat.
“Thanks very much.”
“Don’t eat too many in one day. I suspect too much fresh fruit gives a nursing baby colic. They make great pies when you’re sick of eating them with cream. How’s your little boy?”
Carlotta smiled and lifted the shawl. Beneath, strapped below her breasts, was a sling. Carlotta bent forward and the bundle swung out from her body like a hammock. She lifted the cloth away from the child’s face. We crouched to look. He slept. Eyelashes. A faint beginning of dark brows. The newborn lumps and wrinkles had smoothed; now the face was fat, the skin clear. The child’s pouted lips were swollen, and a white blister ran the length of each.
“How come his lips are blistered?” I asked.
Carlotta flicked the cloth back over the little face and leaned back. The shawl fell over her breasts, and she covered the sling.
Jean tapped my shoulder. “That, spinster, is from the sucking. All babies get that. It doesn’t bother them. He looks really good. He’s gained a lot of weight. Have you named him yet?”
Carlotta nodded. “Yes. Ishi.”
“Ishi Rommel. Well, I’ve heard worse.” Jean flicked dust from her hem. “When are you coming over? How about tomorrow? Bring Aram and come for lunch. We’ll have barbecue.”
“That’s nice. Maybe. I’m not sure we can.” Carlotta smiled.
I took a step closer. “How is Sam taking everything?”
Her eyebrows raised slightly. She looked vaguely at the other bank. “He’s with Lichtenstein in the cabin. They’re planning something.”
“Mama! Let’s go!” A sharp shout from the slope behind us.
“Go get in the car!” Jean called. “We’re coming!”
“Carlotta! Can we see your baaaaby?” The smaller ones started down the hill. Jean hoisted her skirts and ran, climbing, jumping, to head them off.
Carlotta shifted the oar. The boat began to move sideways down the stream.
“Where’s the other oar?”
“Lost.”
“Can you make it?”
She nodded. Her arms and shoulders struggled with the long heavy oar. The sling rocked gently back and forth with her movements. Eventually the boat moved backward into the stream. Once she was near the opposite shore, Carlotta turned to wave.
“Goodbye!” I screamed.
And her soft voice calmly answered, “Goodbye.” She climbed out of the boat and carried the pail. With her other arm, she scooped up the dripping diapers. She walked slowly up the bank through the gray trees.
There was black mush in my pail, a lot of juice slopping around the berries. I grabbed the handle and ran up the hill to where Jean and the children waited in the car.
Sam and Carlotta didn’t come to the barbecue. Spike went over in the evening to see if they were all right. He took cream to eat with the berries. I didn’t go along. I watched Jean place the lucid jam in the kitchen cupboard.
Spike came back with a friend he’d found on the way. He said Sam and Carlotta had been having supper when he arrived. They seemed fine. He went down to the basement to mend a drill the friend had brought. I fell asleep on the sofa watching an old movie. They didn’t wake me when they went to bed.
Rennel
No man has ever pretended to pine for love of me, or sweat in fear of me. I believe in all my life the only sleepless nights I’ve caused have been my mother’s. And it wasn’t my goodness that prevented me from occupying men’s thoughts. It was not my sweet consideration or spreading love. There are times when I indulge in wild self-flattery: “Ah, how I wounded So-and-so when I said such-and-such,” “Oh, poor Whatsit, when I left him he must nearly have died,” “How cruel I was to flaunt that in Thingama’s face.” But the truth is that I was the bloodied and scourged and deserted one. I chose that role deliberately, rather than be ignored entirely. My pride was late in developing. I am a little ashamed, now, to think of who I’ve pursued and how. It occasionally occurred to me that there were alternatives, but they always seemed vague and impracticable. And I should specify that this retreat of mine, this very comfort and solitude, had involuntary origins. Precisely this life was always one of the horrifying thoughts that ripped me when I had recently been mislaid by one of my beauties. “I’ll become a hard-faced old maid,” I would moan, “and never feel or be touched again. I’ll keep a cat and take a vow of silence.” And finally it happened, without the cat. And now I seem to talk to myself incessantly.
No, I have never been a type to inspire love. No passions have burnt themselves out, only substantial flesh. Only a number of undirected lusts. And it’s just as well; I would have despised anyone who purported to love me. I felt confidence only in those who needed me for something in particular.
The goldfish are suitable companions for me now—and even they antagonize me. They’re livelier when their bowl is clean, but that’s the only gratitude they express. I demand more from them than I would of any human. I’ve been daydreaming about their being dead. Not about killing them, but simply about carrying their corpses on a dustpan out to the compost heap and tossing them onto it. I can see them the next day with their eyes sunken and grayed, the color fading from their scales, and the flies busy over them. The trick is that in my fantasy the toad catches all the flies. He is sitting on a rock near their bodies, and as the flies lift, glutted from the rot, he flicks out that negligent tongue. His eyes disappear into his head as though to look quickly inside to see what he’s got, and then reappear. This is not an exhilarating fantasy, nor is it depressing. It is just a recurring picture, as though I passed it ten times each day for years, like the snapshot of my aunt Erma wiping ice cream from the mouth of an unidentified boy in front of the roller coaster at the 19— World’s Fair. That photograph is browning now. It is stuck in the corner of the hall mirror and I note, each time I see it, the fragile angle of her arm and the tidiness of her waist. I have never wondered who the boy may be. Perhaps the goldfish do not even wonder about me.
Only Rennel still wonders about me. And finally, to do him honor and to comfort myself, I have broken all my rules and invited him to spend the night. He knows too much about fish and complains about the jug environment I’ve provided. He knows too much about plants and snorts at the condition of my shrubs. But in all this month I have spoken to no one, and no one who knows me has spoken to me. Today Rennel came, as he always arrives on the last Saturday of the month and prevails upon me for tea.
