The Collected Stories, page 10
I continued. I hear they don’t even look like Jews anymore. A bunch of dirt farmers with no time to read.
They’re your own people, Pallid accused, dilating in the nostril, clenching his jaw. And they’re under the severest attack. This is not the time to revile them.
I had resumed my embroidery. I sighed. My needle was now deep in the clouds, which were pearl gray and late afternoon. I am only trying to say that they aren’t meant for geographies but for history. They are not supposed to take up space but to continue in time.
They looked at me with such grief that I decided to consider all sides of the matter. I said, Christ probably had all that trouble—now that you mention it—because he knew he was going to gain the whole world but he forgot Jerusalem.
When you married us, said Pallid, and accused me, didn’t you forget Jerusalem?
I never forget a thing, I said. Anyway, guess what. I just read somewhere that England is bankrupt. The country is wadded with installment paper.
Livid’s hand trembled as he offered Pallid a light. Nonsense, he said. That’s not true. Nonsense. The great British Island is the tight little fist of the punching arm of the Commonwealth.
What’s true is true, I said, smiling.
Well, I said, since no one stirred, do you think you’ll ever get to work today? Either of you?
Oh my dear, I haven’t even seen you and the boys in over a year. It’s quite pleasant and cozy here this morning, said Livid.
Yes, isn’t it? said Pallid, the surprised host. Besides, it’s Saturday.
How do you find the boys? I asked Livid, the progenitor.
American, American, rowdy, uncontrolled. But you look well, Faith. Plumper, but womanly and well.
Very well, said Pallid, pleased.
But the boys, Faith. Shouldn’t they be started on something? Just lining up little plastic cowboys. It’s silly, really.
They’re so young, apologized Pallid, the used-boy raiser.
You’d both better go to work, I suggested, knotting the pearl-gray late-afternoon thread. Please put the dishes in the sink first. Please. I’m sorry about the eggs.
Livid yawned, stretched, peeked at the clock, sighed. Saturday or no, alas, my time is not my own. I’ve got an appointment downtown in about forty-five minutes, he said.
I do too, said Pallid. I’ll join you on the subway.
I’m taking a cab, said Livid.
I’ll split it with you, said Pallid.
They left for the bathroom, where they shared things nicely—shaving equipment, washstand, shower, and so forth.
I made the beds and put the aluminum cot away. Livid would find a hotel room by nightfall. I did the dishes and organized the greedy day: dinosaurs in the morning, park in the afternoon, peanut butter in between, and at the end of it all, to reward us for a week of beans endured, a noble rib roast with little onions, dumplings, and pink applesauce.
Faith, I’m going now, Livid called from the hall. I put my shopping list aside and went to collect the boys, who were wandering among the rooms looking for Robin Hood. Go say goodbye to your father, I whispered.
Which one? they asked.
The real father, I said. Richard ran to Livid. They shook hands manfully. Pallid embraced Tonto and was kissed eleven times for his affection.
Goodbye now, Faith, said Livid. Call me if you want anything at all. Anything at all, my dear. Warmly with sweet propriety he kissed my cheek. Ascendant, Pallid kissed me with considerable business behind the ear.
Goodbye, I said to them.
I must admit that they were at last clean and neat, rather attractive, shiny men in their thirties, with the grand affairs of the day ahead of them. Dark night, the search for pleasure and oblivion were well ahead. Goodbye, I said, have a nice day. Goodbye, they said once more, and set off in pride on paths which are not my concern.
2 A Subject of Childhood
At home one Saturday and every Saturday, Richard drew eight-by-eleven portraits of stick men waving their arms. Tonto held a plastic horse in his hand and named it Tonto because its eyes were painted blue as his had been. I revised the hem of last year’s dress in order to be up to the minute, chic, and au courant in the midst of spring. Strangers would murmur, “Look at her, isn’t she wonderful? Who’s her couturier?”
Clifford scrubbed under the shower, singing a Russian folk song. He rose in a treble of cold water to high C, followed by the scourging of the flesh. At last after four hots and three colds, he was strong and happy and he entered the living room, a steaming emanation. His face was round and rosy. He was noticeably hairless on the head. What prevented rain and shower water from running foolishly down his face? Heavy dark down-sloping brows. Beneath these his eyes were round and dark, amazed. This Clifford, my close friend, was guileless. He would not hurt a fly and he was a vegetarian.
As always, he was glad to see us. He had wrapped a large sun-bathing towel around his damp body. “Behold the man!” he shouted, and let the towel fall. He stood for a moment, gleaming and pleasant. Richard and Tonto glanced at him. “Cover yourself, for godsakes, Clifford,” I said.
“Take it easy, Faith,” he called to the ear of reason, “the world is changing.” Actually propriety did not embarrass him. It did not serve him. He peeked from behind the rubber plant where his pants, under and over, were heaped. When he reappeared, snapped and buttoned, he said, “Wake up, wake up. What’s everyone slouching around for?” He poked Richard in the tummy. “A little muscle tone there, boy. Wake up.”
Richard said, “I want to draw, Clifford.”
“You can draw any time. I’m not always here. Draw tomorrow, Rich. Come on—fight me, boy. Fight. Come on … let’s go, get me. You better get started, Richy, ‘cause I’m gonna really punch you one. Here I come, ready or not!”
“Here I come,” said Tonto, dropping his horse, and he whacked Clifford hard across the kidneys.
“Who did that?” asked Clifford. “What boy did that?”
“Me, me,” said Tonto, jumping up and down. “Did I hurt you bad?”
“Killed me, yes sir, yes you did, and now I’m going to get you.” He whirled. “I’m going to tickle you, that’s what.” He raised Tonto high above his head, a disposable item, then pitched him into the air-foam belly of the couch.
Richard tiptoed with the teddy bear to a gentle rise, the sofa cushion, from which he crowned Clifford three times.
“Oh, I’m getting killed,” cried Clifford. “They’re all after me. They’re very rough.” Richard kicked him in the shin. “That’s it,” said Clifford. “Get it out! Get it all out! Boys! Out! Out!”
Tonto spit right into his eye. He wiped his cheek. He feinted and dodged the teddy bear that was coming down again on his bowed head. Tonto leaped onto his back and got hold of his ears. “Ouch,” said Clifford.
Richard found a tube of rubber cement in the bookcase and squirted it at Clifford’s hairy chest.
“I’m wild,” said Richard. “I am, I’m wild.”
“So am I,” said Tonto. “I’m the wildest boy in the whole park.” He tugged at Clifford’s ears. “I’ll ride you away. I’m an elephant boy.”
“He’s a lazy camel,” screamed Richard. “Bubbles, I want you to work.”
“Pretend I’m the djinn,” said Tonto in a high wail. “Giddap, Clifford.”
“Me, me, me,” said Richard, sinking to the floor. “It’s me. I’m a poison snake,” he said, slithering to Clifford’s foot. “I’m a poison snake,” he said, resting his chin on Clifford’s instep. “I’m a terrible poison snake,” he swore. Then he raised his head like the adder he is, and after a prolonged hiss, with all his new front teeth, he bit poor Clifford above the bone, in his Achilles’ heel, which is his weak left ankle.
“Oh no, oh no …” Clifford moaned, then folded neatly at all joints.
“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy,” cried Richard, for Clifford fell, twelve stone, on him.
“Oh, it’s me,” screamed Tonto, an elephant boy thrown by his horse, headlong into a trap of table legs.
And he was the one I reached first. I hugged him to my lap. “Mommy,” he sobbed, “my head hurts me. I wish I could get inside you.” Richard lay, a crushed snake in the middle of the floor, without breath, without tears, angry.
Well, what of Clifford? He had hoisted his sorrowful self into an armchair and lay there lisping on a bloody tongue which he himself had bitten, “Faith, Faith, the accumulator, the accumulator!”
Bruised and tear-stricken, the children agreed to go to bed. They forgot to say it was too early to nap. They forget to ask for their bears. They lay side by side and clutched each other’s thumb. Here was the love that myth or legend has imposed on brothers.
I re-entered the living room, where Clifford sat, a cone like an astrologer’s hat on his skin-punctured place. Just exactly there, universal energies converged. The stationary sun, the breathless air in which the planets swing were empowered now to make him well, to act, in their remarkable art, like aspirin.
“We’ve got to have a serious talk,” he said. “I really can’t take those kids. I mean, Faith, you know yourself I’ve tried and tried. But you’ve done something to them, corrupted their instincts in some way or other. Here we were, having an absolutely marvelous time, rolling around making all kinds of free noise, and look what happened—like every other time, someone got hurt. I mean I’m really hurt. We should have all been relaxed. Easy. It should have been all easy. Our bodies should have been so easy. No one should’ve been hurt, Faith.”
“Do you mean it’s my fault you all got hurt?”
“No doubt about it, Faith, you’ve done a rotten job.”
“Rotten job?” I said.
“Lousy,” he said.
I gave him one more chance. “Lousy?” I asked.
“Oh my God! Stinking!” he said.
Therefore, the following—a compendium of motivations and griefs, life to date:
Truthfully, Mondays through Fridays—because of success at work—my ego is hot; I am a star; whoever can be warmed by me, I may oblige. The flat scale stones of abuse that fly into that speedy atmosphere are utterly consumed. Untouched, I glow my little thermodynamic way.
On Saturday mornings in my own home, however, I face the sociological law called the Obtrusion of Incontrovertibles. For I have raised these kids, with one hand typing behind my back to earn a living. I have raised them all alone without a father to identify themselves with in the bathroom like all the other little boys in the playground. Laugh. I was forced by inclement management into a yellow-dog contract with Bohemia, such as it survives. I have stuck by it despite the encroachments of kind relatives who offer ski pants, piano lessons, tickets to the rodeo. Meanwhile I have serviced Richard and Tonto, taught them to keep clean and hold an open heart on the subjects of childhood. We have in fact risen mightily from toilets in the hall and scavenging in great cardboard boxes at the Salvation Army for underwear and socks. It has been my perversity to do this alone, except for the one year their father was living in Chicago with Claudia Lowenstill and she was horrified that he only sent bicycles on the fifth birthday. A whole year of gas and electricity, rent and phone payments followed. One day she caught him in the swiveling light of truth, a grand figure who took a strong stand on a barrel of soapsuds and went down clean. He is now on the gold coast of another continent, enchanted by the survival of clandestine civilizations. Courts of kitchen drama cannot touch him.
All the same, I gave Clifford one more opportunity to renege and be my friend. I said, “Stinking? I raised them lousy?”
This time he didn’t bother to answer because he had become busy gathering his clothes from different parts of the room.
Air was filtering out of my two collapsing lungs. Water rose, bubbling to enter, and I would have died of instantaneous pneumonia—something I never have heard of—if my hand had not got hold of a glass ashtray and, entirely apart from my personal decision, flung it.
Clifford was on his hands and knees looking for the socks he’d left under the armchair on Friday. His back was to me; his head convenient to the trajectory. And he would have passed away a blithering idiot had I not been blind with tears and only tom off what is anyway a vestigial earlobe.
Still, Clifford is a gentle person, a consortment of sweet dispositions. The sight of all the blood paralyzed him. He hulked, shuddering; he waited on his knees to be signaled once more by Death, the Sheriff from the Styx.
“You don’t say things like that to a woman,” I whispered. “You damn stupid jackass. You just don’t say anything like that to a woman. Wash yourself, moron, you’re bleeding to death.”
I left him alone to tie a tourniquet around his windpipe or doctor himself according to present-day plans for administering first aid in the Great Globular and Coming War.
I tiptoed into the bedroom to look at the children. They were asleep. I covered them and kissed Tonto, my baby, and “Richard, what a big boy you are,” I said. I kissed him too. I sat on the floor, rubbing my cheek on Richard’s rubbly fleece blanket until their sweet breathing in deep sleep quieted me.
A couple of hours later Richard and Tonto woke up picking their noses, sneezing, grumpy, then glad. They admired the tick-tacktoes of Band-Aid I had created to honor their wounds. Richard ate soup and Tonto ate ham. They didn’t inquire about Clifford, since he had a key which had always opened the door in or out.
That key lay at rest in the earth of my rubber plant. I felt discontinued. There was no one I wanted to offer it to.
“Still hungry, boys?” I asked. “No, sir,” said Tonto. “I’m full up to here,” leveling at the eyes.
“I’ll tell you what.” I came through with a stunning notion. “Go on down and play.”
“Don’t shove, miss,” said Richard.
I looked out the front window. Four flights below, armed to the teeth, Lester Stukopf waited for the enemy. Carelessly I gave Richard this classified information. “Is he all alone?” asked Richard.
“He is,” I said.
“O.K., O.K.” Richard gazed sadly at me. “Only, Faith, remember, I’m going down because I feel like it. Not because you told me.”
“Well, naturally,” I said.
“Not me,” said Tonto.
“Oh, don’t be silly, you go too, Tonto. It’s so nice and sunny. Take your new guns that Daddy sent you. Go on, Tonto.”
“No, sir, I hate Richard and I hate Lester. I hate those guns. They’re baby guns. He thinks I’m a baby. You better send him a picture.”
“Oh, Tonto—”
“He thinks I suck my thumb. He thinks I wet my bed. That’s why he sends me baby guns.”
“No, no, honey. You’re no baby. Everybody knows you’re a big boy.”
“He is not,” said Richard. “And he does so suck his thumb and he does so wet his bed.”
“Richard,” I said, “Richard, if you don’t have anything good to say, shut your rotten mouth. That doesn’t help Tonto, to keep reminding him.”
“Goodbye,” said Richard, refusing to discuss, but very high and first-born. Sometimes he is nasty, but he is never lazy. He returned in forty-five seconds from the first floor to shout, “As long as he doesn’t wet my bed, what do I care?”
Tonto did not hear him. He was brushing his teeth, which he sometimes does vigorously seven times a day, hoping they will loosen. I think they are loosening.
I served myself hot coffee in the living room. I organized comfort in the armchair, poured the coffee black into a white mug that said MAMA, tapped cigarette ash into a ceramic hand-hollowed by Richard. I looked into the square bright window of daylight to ask myself the sapping question: What is man that woman lies down to adore him?
At the very question mark Tonto came softly, sneaky in socks, to say, “I have to holler something to Richard, Mother.”
“Don’t lean out that window, Tonto. Please, it makes me nervous.”
“I have to tell him something.”
“No.”
“Oh yes,” he said. “It’s awful important, Faith. I really have to.”
How could I permit it? If he should fall, everyone would think I had neglected them, drinking beer in the kitchen or putting eye cream on at the vanity table behind closed doors. Besides, I would be bereaved forever. My grandmother mourned all her days for some kid who’d died of earache at the age of five. All the other children, in their own municipal-pension and federal-welfare years, gathered to complain at her deathside when she was ninety-one and heard her murmur, “Oh, oh, Anita, breathe a little, try to breathe, my little baby.”
With tears in my eyes I said, “O.K., Tonto, I’ll hold on to you. You can tell Richard anything you have to.”
He leaned out onto the air. I held fast to one thick little knee. “Richie,” he howled. “Richie, hey, Richie!” Richard looked up, probably shielding his eyes, searching for the voice. “Richie, hey, listen, I’m playing with your new birthday-present army fort and all them men.”
Then he banged the window shut as though he knew nothing about the nature of glass and tore into the bathroom to brush his teeth once more in triumphant ritual. Singing through toothpaste and gargle, “I bet he’s mad,” and in lower key, “He deserves it, he stinks.”
“So do you,” I shouted furiously. While I sighed for my grandmother’s loss, he had raised up his big mouth against his brother. “You really stink!”
“Now listen to me. I want you to get out of here. Go on down and play. I need ten minutes all alone. Anthony, I might kill you if you stay up here.”
He reappeared, smelling like peppermint sticks at Christmas. He stood on one foot, looked up into my high eyes, and said, “O.K., Faith. Kill me.”
I had to sit immediately then, so he could believe I was his size and stop picking on me.
“Please,” I said gently, “go out with your brother. I have to think, Tonto.”
“I don’t wanna. I don’t have to go anyplace I don’t wanna,” he said. “I want to stay right here with you.”
“Oh, please, Tonto, I have to clean the house. You won’t be able to do a thing or start a good game or anything.”
