Second Skin (New Directions Paperbook), page 8
Canary yellow slacks, bare feet, a man’s white shirt with open collar and sleeves rolled above the naked elbows. Oh yes, here was the second glimpse of her and she was on the floor in front of the fireplace, was kneeling and sitting back on her heels —wicked posturing, rank mystery of the triangle, bright and brazen cohesion between the rump and calves and canary yellow thighs—and her shoulders were thrown back and her powerful spine was a crescent and her broad hands were cupped on her knees. Her eyes were turned to the door and fixed on mine. No smile. Surrounded by leaves of an old newspaper. A tall glass of whiskey and a box of blue-tipped wooden matches waiting within reach on the brick apron of the fireplace. She waited and then jerked her head slightly toward the radio-phonograph, and I saw the picture of the dead soldier mounted upright in a silver frame on the cabinet.
“The Horst Wessel,” she said above the din of the conquering music. “Don sent me the record.” And then listening, abstracted in the pleasure of the loud marching song, slowly and with level eyes still on mine, she reached out one white hand, seized the full glass of whiskey, raised it in a salute in my direction: “Old Grand-Dad. Bottle’s in the kitchen. Help yourself.”
She was waiting, watching me, and now I was bracing myself against the doorjamb, leaning against it, sagging against it, stood there with one wet shoe tapping time to the march. “Thanks. But I don’t drink.”
“Oh. You don’t drink. Well then, you can light the fire.” And she tossed the box of matches at my feet, put the glass to her mouth—thick glass, white teeth, burnished whiskey—began to pull at it like a man, and her neck was bare, bold, athletic, and her rump was a yellow rock in the saddle of her calves, and under the white shirt her breasts were crowned with golden crowns. I thought of poor Sonny and his rum and Coca-Cola, I thought of poor Gertrude stealing frantic sips of gin out of her cheap little cream cheese glasses, I thought of poor Pixie’s milk curdling in the kitchen sink. But Don’s widow was sitting on her heels and drinking, and all the young German men were singing for her, marching for her. I failed to see the spinning wheel and bumped it, that construction of brittle cobwebs five feet high, and thought it was going over. Then I stooped down quickly and stuffed a few leaves of newspaper between the logs and struck a flame.
Iron pot on a hook, iron spit for the impaling and roasting of some headless blue turkey, a little straw broom and dusty heart-shaped bellows, and on the andirons great solid brass balls fit for the gods. Suddenly the tall swallow-tailed flames and crackling puffs of orange and deep green light between the logs threw all these hand-forged or handmade engines into relief, set them in motion, brought them to life, and I smelled the damp bursts of smoke and the widow was warming herself at the witches’ fire. Beside the bellows was a coffin-shaped legless duck—faded decoy carved with a knife—that stared me down with two tiny bright sightless chips of glass. Fire in the antique shop. Dead duck. Smoke in my eyes.
“Take off your shoes, for God’s sake,” she said, and the mellow voice was loud above the chant of the SS men, the firelight landed in yellow lozenges on the slopes and in the hollows of her slacks, “you must be frozen. But go ahead, warm your toes while I tell you about Don.”
And I could only nod, tug at the wet laces, free my heels, roll down the socks, wring them out—drops of steam on the hearth—could only make room for her and sit beside her on the cold wide naked planks of that floor with my hands propped behind me and my white feet and hers thrust into the heat. She dropped down on an elbow, crossed her long straight legs at the ankles, held out the whiskey glass—but it was not for me, that whiskey, at least not then—and breathing deeply, straining at the nostrils, shirt binding and slackening across her breasts, she began to wheeze. To wheeze! The big white knuckles of the fingers holding the glass, her crowned breasts, the mighty head of black hair, the stomach girding her in front like the flexible shape of a shield, the fluted weight of neck and arms and legs, all the impressive anatomy of this Cleopatra who could row her own barge, this woman who could outrun horses on the beach or knock down pillars of salt, everything about her revealed perfect health, denied this sudden swirling of mud or rattling of little pits in her chest. But even above the raucous melody of the eager Germans and their impossible military band I heard it: the sound of obstructed breathing, tight low crippling whine in the chest. Yet her eyes on mine were direct and heavy and dark, were large and black and fierce and cracked by spears of silver light. She wheezed on, mocked by the competitive fire, waiting for the steel needle to descend once more into the grooves of plodding Reichstag hysteria, and then whacked herself once on the uppermost yellow thigh and began to talk.
“That’s him in the picture,” she said without moving, without pointing, merely assuming that I had seen it when I entered the room. I nodded. “That’s Don. Young, good-looking boy. He stepped on a land mine, God damn him. In Germany. He took a wrong step and then no more Don. Poof. I met him in South Carolina. There he was, toward sundown standing at a country bus stop in South Carolina. The end of nowhere and burning up at the edges. Nothing but the road, a tree smothered with dust, the little three-sided shed where they were supposed to wait for the bus, a field full of scarecrows. And in front of the shed and surrounded by perhaps twenty cotton pickers, there was Don. I saw him. Short, limber, smile all over his face, head of tight blond curls, overseas cap like a little tan tent on the side of his head. Bunch of tattered damn black cotton pickers out for blood and this wonderful bright little guy with his smile and curly hair. Don. A little angel in South Carolina. So I gave him a lift. Sense of humor? My God, he had a sense of humor.” And suddenly she was choking on a snort of laughter, choking, gasping, giving my now toasty bare foot a friendly push with hers. And now her wheezing had found another depth, and each word came out shrouded in its cocoon of gravelly sound, its spasm of spent breath, and there were streaks of moisture at the hairline and on her upper lip. She took another slow drink of whiskey and the silver strand of hair hung down, the voice was deep.
She set down the glass and filled her lungs and said: “Good God, I married him for his humor. Because he was light on his feet and light in his heart. And because he was quick and talented and because he was just a boy, that’s why I married him. Why I gave him a lift and followed him to Galveston, Texas, and married him. Don. Three dozen roses, a brand new hot plate, a rented room outside Galveston, and one day Don telling me he had been elected company mascot—what a sense of humor, what a winsome smile—and that night our celebration with a spaghetti dinner and bottle of dago red. I should have known then that it couldn’t last. My God. …”
The golden foot was struggling against mine, the perspiration was as thick as rain on her lip, her shirt was wet and through it I could see the sloping shoulder, the handsome network of blue veins, the companion to the black brassiere that was still hanging in the john upstairs. Stretched full-length at my side she was wheezing and staring into the light of the fire, and now there were dimples, puckers, unsuspected curves in the canary yellow slacks, and now her chest was maniacal, was as trenchant and guttural and insistent as the upturned German record itself. So I looked at her then, forced myself to return the stare of those vast dark eyes, and she tried to shrug, tried to toss back the thick length of silver hair, but only glowered at me out of her stricken heaviness and abruptly tapped herself on the chest.
“Asthma.” Tapping the finger, squaring the jaw, watching me. “I get it from too much thinking about Don. But it’s nothing. Nothing at all. …”
I nodded. And yet the fire had fallen in and the pot and spit were glowing and her knee was lifting. Her lips were moist, pulled back, drawn open fiercely in the perfect silent square of the tragic muse, and I leaned closer to smell the alcohol and Parisian scent, closer to inspect the agony of the muscles which, no thicker than hairs, flexed and flickered in those unhappy lips, closer to hear whatever moaning she might have made above the racket of her strangulation.
“What can I do? Isn’t there something I can do?”
“The secretary,” she said. “Bring me the box in the middle drawer. Saucer too. From the kitchen.”
So I embarked on this brief rump-swinging bare-and-warm-footed expedition, and with the woolen pants steaming nicely around my ankles and the checkered shirt pressing against my skin its blanket of warm fuzzy hairs, I glided heavily to the little chair, the papers, the oil lamp—God Bless Our Home etched on the shade—and calmly, backs of the hands covered with new warmth, licking my lips and feeling that I might like to whistle —perhaps only a bar or two, a few notes in defiance of the Horst Wessel—I returned to the cold kitchen with hardly a glance, hardly a thought for the remnants of poor Pixie’s breakfast and lunch and dinner. Solicitous. Professional search for a saucer. Long-faced scrutiny of the cupboards. The hell with the nipples.
And then I was kneeling at her side, leaning down to her again with the box in one hand and the dish in the other, and though she was heaving worse than ever with her eyes still shut, nonetheless she knew I was there and tried to rouse herself. “What next?” I asked, and was startled by the quickness of her reply, shocked by the impatience and urgency of her rich low voice.
“Put some powder in the dish and burn it. For God’s sake.”
Sputtering match, sputtering powder, glowing pinpricks and smoke enough to form a genie. I tried to fight the smoke, the stench, with my two wild hands. But it was everywhere. And now her voice was coming through the smoke and for a moment I could only listen, breathe in the terrible odor, keep watching her despite my tears.
“I don’t really believe in this stuff,” drinking in enormous whiffs of greasy smoke, “but sometimes it helps a little. Don told me about it, found an ad in the Galveston paper,” filling her lungs with punk and dung and sparks, “he was such a sweet airy little clown. Five months of marriage to Don,” swirling, sinking, drifting now on the fumes of the witches’ pot, “and then a land mine in Wiesbaden or some damn place and no more Don and me a widow. …
“I’m a widower myself,” I said, and I stood up carefully, avoided the large white hand that was reaching for my trouser leg, stared once at the little unmoving face of the dead soldier, and started out of the room.
But just as I approached the door: “Well,” I heard her say, “we’ll make a great pair.”
And when I reached the upstairs hallway Pixie was screaming in her cradle and Cassandra was wrapped in a musty quilt and stood trying to coil up her hair before the oval mirror. I heard the gasping breaths below turn to laughter and for a long while hesitated to enter my icy room. Because of the dressmaker’s dummy. Because she had placed the dummy—further sign of industry in the island home, rusted iron-wire skirt and loops of rusted iron-wire for the bold and faceless head, no arms, torso like an hourglass, broad hips and sweeping behind and narrow waist and bang-up bosom all made of padded beige felt, historical essence of womanhood, life-size female anatomy and a hundred years of pins—she had placed this dummy at the head of my bed and dressed it in my naval uniform so that the artificial bosom swelled my white tunic and the artificial pregnancy of the padded belly puffed out the broad front of my official white duck pants which she had pinned to the dummy with a pair of giant safety pins rammed through the felt. Cuffs of the empty sleeves thrust in the pockets, white hat cocked outrageously on the wire head—desperate slant of the black visor, screaming angle of the golden bird—oh, it was a jaunty sight she had prepared for me. But of course I ignored it as best I could, tried to overlook the fresh dark gouts of ketchup she had flung down the front of that defiled figure, and merely shut my door, at least spared my poor daughter from having to grapple with that hapless effigy of my disfigured self.
And moments later, scooping Pixie out of the cradle, tossing her into the air, jouncing her in the crook of my arm, smiling: “Have a good sleep, Cassandra? Time to start the new day.” In the mirror her little cold sleepy face was puffy and pitted, was black and white with shadow, and the faded quilt was drawn over her shoulders and her hair was still down.
“What’s burning?” she said. “What’s that awful smell?” But in the mirror I put a finger to my lips, shook my head, though I knew then that the noxious odor of grief, death and widowhood would fill this house.
Cleopatra’s Car
Shanks of ice hanging from the eaves, the wind sucking with increasing fury at the wormholes, Miranda standing in the open front doorway and laughing into the wind or bellowing through the fog at her two fat black Labradors and throwing them chunks of meat from a galvanized iron basin slung under her arm, the ragged bird returning each dawn to hover beyond the shore line outside my window, empty Old Grand Dad bottles collecting in the kitchen cupboards, under the stove, even beside the spinning wheel in the parlor—so these first weeks froze and fled from us, and Cassandra grew reluctant to explore the cow paths with me, and my nights, my lonely nights, were sleepless. I began to find the smudged saucers everywhere—stink of the asthma powders, stink of secret designs and death—and I began to notice that Cassandra was Miranda’s shadow, sweet silent shadow of the big widow in slacks. When Miranda poured herself a drink—tumbler filled to the brim with whiskey—Cassandra put a few drops in the small end of an egg cup and accompanied her. And when Miranda sat in front of the fire to knit, Cassandra was always with her, always kneeling at her feet and holding the yam. Black yam. Heavy soft coil of rich black yam dangling from Cassandra’s wrists. Halter on the white wrists. Our slave chains. Between the two of them always the black umbilicus, the endless and maddening absorption in the problems of yam. It lived in the cave of Miranda’s sewing bag—not a black sweater for some lucky devil overseas, nor even a cap for Pixie, but only this black entanglement, their shapeless squid. And I? I would sit in the shadows and wait, maintain my guard, sit there and now and then give the spinning wheel an idle turn or polish all the little ivory pieces of the Mah Jongg set.
And marked by Sunday dinners. The passing of those darkening weeks, the flow of those idle days—quickening, growing colder, until they rushed and jammed together in the little jagged ice shelf of our frozen time—was marked by midday dinners on the Sabbath when Captain Red did the carving— wind-whipped, tall and raw and bald like me, his big knuckles sunk in the gravy and his bulging eyes on the widow—and when Bub waited on table and ate alone with Pixie in the kitchen, and Jomo—back straight, sideburns reaching to the thin white jaws, black hair plastered down with pine sap—sat working his artificial hand beside Cassandra. On Sundays Jomo worked his artificial hand for Cassandra, but I was the one who watched, I who watched him change the angle of his hook, lock the silver fork in place and go after peas, watched him fiddle with a lever near the wrist and drop the fork and calmly and neatly snare the full water glass in the mechanical round of that wonderful steel half-bracelet that was his hand.
Those were long Sunday meals when the Captain spoke only to say grace and ask for the rolls; and Bub stood waiting at my elbow and smelled of brine and uncut boy’s hair; and Jomo sat across from me, solitary—except for Cassandra at his side—and busy with his new hand; and Miranda drank her whiskey and cursed the weather and grinned down the length of the table at the quiet lechery that boiled in old Red’s eyes; and Cassandra, poor Cassandra, merely picked at her plate, yet Sunday after dreary Sunday grew heavier, more ripe to the silent fare of that cruel board. Dreary and dull and dangerous. So at the end of the meal I always asked Jomo how he had liked Salerno. Because of course he had lost his hand in the fighting around Salerno. A city, as he said, near the foot of the boot. What would I have done without Jomo’s hand?
Family and friends, then, gathering week after dreary week for the Sabbath, meeting together on the dangerous day of the Lord, pursuing our black entanglement, waiting around for something—the first snow? first love? the first outbreak of violence?—and saying grace, watching the slow winter death of the oak tree, feeling wave after wave of the cold Atlantic breaching our trackless black inhospitable shores. And then another Sunday rolling around and the sexton rushing to the Lutheran church to ring the bells—always excited, always in a hurry, can’t wait to get his hands on the rope—and once again the frenzied sexton nearly hanging himself from the bellpull and another Sunday ringing and pealing and chiming on the frosty air.
So the gray days died away and the hours of my lonely and sleepless nights increased, each hour deeper and darker and colder than the one before and with only the dummy—mockery of myself—to keep me company, to follow me through the cold night watch. Luckily I found an old brass bed warmer in the closet behind the trunks and every night I filled it with the last coals of the fire and carried it first to Cassandra’s room, devoted fifteen minutes to warming Cassandra’s bed, and then carried it across the hall—hot libation, hot offering to myself—and shoved it between the covers where it spent the night. And I would lie there in the darkness and everywhere, except in my feet, suffer the bruising effects of the flat frozen pillow and the cold mattress, and clutching my hands together and waiting, knowing that even the coals would cool, would remember one of Jomo’s phrases spoken when he thought I couldn’t hear—blue tit—and in the darkness would begin to say the phrase aloud—blue tit—aware that in some mysterious way it referred to the cold, referred to the way I felt, seemed to give actual substance, body, to the dark color and falling temperature of all my lonely and sleepless nights. Then I would dream with Jomo’s incantation still on my lips. And I would dream of Tremlow leading the mutiny, of Gertrude’s grave, of Fernandez mutilated in the flophouse, and I would awaken to the sound of the wind and the sight of my white spoiled uniform flapping and moaning on the dressmaker’s dummy. Blue tit. And at dawn a hard tissue-thin sheet of ice in the bottom of the basin, big block of ice in the pitcher, frozen splinters like carpet tacks when I stumbled to the bathroom to empty the bed warmer down the john. Standing in that bathroom, shivering, blinking, bed warmer hanging cold and heavy from my hand, I would always lean close to the bathroom mirror and read the message printed in ornate green type on a little square of wrinkled and yellowed paper which was pasted to the glass. Always read it and, no matter how cold I was, how tired, I would begin to smile.
