Nightwork: Stories (8 page)

In the early morning, me in the closet, standing in to dress out of sight of where the dying man worries what I owe him—inflationary calculations, sums figured in the sleepless night, the old harangue—I like it. I feel the luck of my good health, and walk past him wearing it, walk around the bed where the dying man lies, leashed and wounded, yapping at me.

Soon, I think, the dying man will be dead, or he will be gone to wherever it is dying men go in a city—to other women, to other apartments, to other parts of the metropolis.

The beginning is always so sweet. They bring good sheets from some life before and a saucepan, saying, “Can you use it?” Great-Someone’s dishes and one or
two trinkets from the mother-source, which I have sold, lost, broken.

I have done much damage.

“I told whoever called for you that you were dead,” the dying man says, home early and sitting on the bed.

I ask, “How are you now?”

He says, “What do you care?”

Everything in the bedroom is purely itself, doorknobs, windows, dishes of loose change—and I am afraid. I am afraid the dying man will always be here, picking at his scabs, sniffing at his farts, wiping at his face with this day’s dress shirt, leaving smudge and oil and threaded juices of himself on what surfaces he passes as he goes about his dying.

This is no place for children, I am thinking when I hear my son call out, “I’m home.”

TO HAVE AND TO HOLD

I
have accidents in the Fifth Avenue kitchen—cuts, falls, scaldings. What could I be thinking of when I scissor through a plugged cord? My sleeve catches fire on the burner, and all I do is watch its crinkling into nothing. Fast as paper, it burns, filling the kitchen with a stink of burnt hair, my hair, and that is what finally makes me run for the salt, the smell of me catching fire.

Worse things happen in the kitchen—my husband tells me he is in love with someone else, and what do I do? I go out and buy he and she gerbils to make us feel more like a family.

I hate the gerbils. Nothing about them is cute; they twitch and gnaw. The animals live in a plastic ight-glow cage set next to the stove, because this kitchen is small, even if it is on Fifth Avenue, and here they
scrabble and play and shred their tray paper—dirty animals that eat their own tails.

The girl was the first at it. One morning I found her dragging her rump through the shavings, scooting around the cage, past the boy. His tail was whole; hers was stubbed, pink, wet-looking. I saw her giddy chase of it. I thought. Maybe this is a mating ritual; maybe this is natural. What do I know? Except a few days later, some of the boy’s tail was missing; now both of these cannibals are nearly tailless.

This eating has nothing to do with making baby gerbils. I don’t think the two of them even like each other. When the gerbils escape from their cage—and they escape every night, squiggling through a gnawed-away part—I never find them huddling. I might find the boy under the sink, the girl near the warm and coiled back of the refrigerator. I catch them up with a dishcloth; I can’t stand to touch these addled savages—who could?—especially since they’ve started eating themselves.

I want to know why my husband picked this woman to love, this woman who has been in my kitchen, who once helped me dry the silverware. This woman my husband loves is always, always on my mind here in the kitchen, where she once hugged me good-bye in her fur and pearls. I split open the coals of feeling to feel the buckle on her belt heat up in my hand. I touch her skirt and the stitched spine of her high heels. I am in a kind of hurry. I snatch at her nylons, her bag. Her bag is the color of toffee; I could eat it; I could gnaw off the clip to where the lining
riffles with the scent of her perfume and pennies and lipstick. Would she want to trade her clothes for my kitchen? Does she want babies?

The Fifth Avenue kitchen is so bright and clean. My husband says the counters are still gritty with cleanser. He says the food is ashamed to be seen.

I admit it, I am driven. Last thing I do each night is wash my floor. One of the reasons the gerbils are such a problem is that they are so ridiculously dirty.

I should get out of the kitchen.

I should set the gerbils free.

I should let the scrub pads rust and the inky vouchers stain the counters. I should mess up.

My husband says the fridge door reads like advertisement. He says the door is not a bulletin board. He says, “Why don’t you get a date book, act like other people?”

I thought that’s what I was doing: acting like other people. So much space glinting off the white dune of Fifth Avenue: I thought. Other people must want this, but not, it seems, the woman my husband wants. She, he says, wants to pitch her umbrella elsewhere.

Where?

I am standing here with the gerbils, who are loose again and scrabbling over my bare feet.

There is broken glass on the floor.

I can’t help what happens.

The kitchen is sprung like an army knife, and I am in a hurry.

I have thrown open the window and am moving fast to catch these gerbils with only my hands. First
the girl, who is trembling and trying to nip me—I swing her by the leg out the window; she is gone. Then I make for the boy, hiding in a corner.

I think he thinks he is safe; he doesn’t move. Lost, pointless, filthy boy.

I toss him underhand—just like rice.

STEPHEN, MICHAEL, PATRICK, JOHN

S
he wanted to touch the sister’s back as she saw it in the light beyond the door where she stood, breathing through her mouth, a spy on the sister in the sister’s house—yet waited for, welcome.

“You see that yard?” the sister asked. “That’s my garden.”

Gray morning yellowed here and here and pinched with ribbed red leaves. Impossible to believe that they had slept through to winter again or that this was April—and snow, she in the bedroom with the sister, and somewhere around the house the sister’s husband, caulking windows maybe, wrangling locks. Not much seen, this husband, but she sometimes heard him brush against the wall, bulked shoulders and the clack of buttons. The sound reminded her of parts of him, the
husband’s black hair shocked off his wide wrist, his hairy fingers fixing things.

The sister said, “I see a doctor now. I’m on a medication.”

“What kind?” she asked. “Since when?”

The sister said, “Since it happened,” folding blanket squares and sacks that crackled with static, the sister’s hands had snagged on the clothes. “And the sparks,” the sister said. Even pulled apart, hand-ironing, the sleepwear had stuck to the sister’s palm, and the tips of her fingers had felt coarse to the sister.

The sister said, “I raked the little clothes like leaves into giant bags and lugged them to the basement.” She said, “I tossed them. I didn’t care where they landed.”

The sister said, “Want to know how you can help? You can throw out the flowers. Burst tulips are obscene—black and dusted parts exposed. They don’t dry shut or turn to paper. They are never quite dead.”

She saw the husband in the yard was waving something away.

“Maybe the dog,” the sister said. “You’ll hear him howling. It’s all very gothic. The neighbors are afraid of us. Everyone, I think, is afraid of us.”

The sister said, “The food I buy spoils on the drive home, and you’ve seen what has happened to my doors. The strips of torn-up bedclothes are to warn off the birds. There is nothing we can do about the howling.”

The sister’s hands were cutting into pillows, when what she had expected—what she always expected—was
to see fleshier hands, the sister’s once, flushed on flushed breasts under cover of their bedroom.

She said, “What can I do to help?”

Tucking in the bed tight, beating the pillows, the sister said, “Talk,” and then they didn’t.

White sheets and pillows, white lace curtains very white, and the way the room was arranged, she saw, the high bed, the nightstands, the mournful dresser, all was familiar, was their mother’s room, early morning. The light was a salt in her eyes, but she kept blinking into it.

Spit-writing names on the wall, she remembered, and spying on their parents. The sister had dared her to look.

“What do you see?” the sister had asked her.

“Nothing,” she had said, when what she had seen was Mother heaving on the stairs, carrying her wrong babies low—Stephen, Michael, Patrick, John.

Her sister stood close to the mirror on the door. “I’m glad you’re here,” the sister said.

She said, “I hope,” and stood near enough to watch the way the soft powder caught in the small lines of the sister’s skin, the sister powdering, putting on lipstick—pain for a mouth.

She said the husband was lucky to have her, the sister.

“Really,” the sister said, dressed and on her way downstairs. The sound the sister made was of soft cloth on cloth.

“That?” from the sister in the kitchen when she asked. “That’s for bread,” the sister said. “I never use it.”

The sister said, “Most of our friends are afraid to visit, I think. I wouldn’t visit us if I could help it. I didn’t think you’d come.”

She said, “Please.” She said, “I’m sorry I wasn’t here,” but she couldn’t think of how to finish; she took out the plates instead.

The sister said, “No, he already ate,” and she leaned against the sink—they both leaned against the sink and looked out at the yard. They couldn’t find him, the husband. The sister said, “Maybe he went into town, or maybe he’s around the house too close for us to see.”

“We’re not good company,” the sister said. “My husband is depressed. He sits up nights and drinks. I’ve called out, ‘Aren’t you cold? Aren’t you tired? Do you want anything?’ But he doesn’t answer, which makes me more afraid.”

The sister said, “Oh, why am I telling you this?”

The sister said, “I was the one who found the baby.”

She said, “I know. I am sorry,” and she touched the sister’s shoulder, put her hand there, softly at first, then firmly, finally to feel how feebly constructed, bones light as balsa wood for toys with daylong lives.

SEE IF YOU CAN LIFT ME

I
walk around to the other side of the bed we are sharing, and I put my face up close to hers and say, “Ann, please. Please,” I say, and her eyes open, and Ann sees me, I think, and she says, “Sorry” in a loud, steady voice, and she knows. She knows she has been talking in her sleep. In the morning, she will ask me, “Did I scare you?”

The dog, sleeping next to Ann, sleeps through it all. Good, loyal dog he is—this dog and all the others, for as long as I have known her. Ann holds the dog so close, I itch just looking at her bare arm slung around. The bareness of it, that is what snags me, and how she wears these slippery nightgowns—must be cold. Her arm, around the dog, looks very cold and white and dry to me. The dryness especially, I notice this, in contrast to the tops of her breasts, where the
skin, I think, is damp. No matter what Ann says, anyone would want to touch her here, but Ann tells me no, only the dog keeps her warm.

Ann says, “You do not know my kind of loneliness.”

Ann says, “You have a child.”

And so I have.

I used to say my skin smelled of girl from so much touching of my own. Ann remembers. Ann says, “That’s when I got my pooch,” and she takes his head up in her hands—Ann does this, all the time—and chuffs behind his ears.

Or else she says, “Don’t get near me. I smell of dog.”

I cannot smell a thing. In this bed again, on my back, I am not near enough to anything other than me; Ann is turned away. She is tucked against the dog, dog pressed against her hollows, which is not the right word for Ann there. Ann is full there. Ann can take hold there, and sometimes does, slapping herself in that place, which, when I am pressing on my own bones, I think of as hollows. The word is
hollows
, but what I see is the flatness of girls.

I see cow skulls.

I see hurtful blue sky and desert, cholla in bloom, places I have never been to but sometimes think I would like to live in with Ann: New Mexico, Arizona, parts of California. We talk about living in these places. Ann says she can see us now at a long table, feeding lots of children. We are feeding some women like ourselves, and some men, too. This part makes us smile, Ann and me, talking about all the people we will feed.
“And not only that!” Ann says. “Not only that. You can buy your girl a horse. Think about it,” Ann says.

I do.

I lie next to Ann in this bed and think about us in the houses Ann says belong to grown-up friends, houses with rooms unused for days, houses with two and three of everything, blenders and televisions—closets full of coats of every size. I think about Ann with a man in such a house and doing some of the things she has told me she once did with a man, and I have done, too. I think about breasts—his, hers, mine. I think hard on these breasts or else my mother’s breasts come into view, long and unmuscled, and sometimes my grandmother’s breasts or my grandmother’s shoulders or the way my grandmother hitched up her brassiere to show off her strap marks to me. My grandmother’s shoulders are polished nobs of bone and smell of—but I can only see the cream she is using.

Ann’s drinking, now this is something I begin to smell. I put my face into the back of her neck and shut my eyes and see it wavering off her arm like the oily heat that rises off the roads we hope to take fast and sober.

Some team we would make.

Ann drinks through much of the night and likes to eat bread for dinner. She picks at the soft center and dangles the crust for the dog. “I wish you would eat something, pooch,” she says; or else to me, “Are you sure?” Ann’s nails are the off-white of old candles or honey. They are not always clean—from keeping her hand on that dog all day, taking that dog with her
everywhere. I understand that she is tired, but I do not eat her food.

Sometimes Ann says, “Let’s have cookies for dinner.”

She says, “We are too old to be living like girls!” and we laugh because we
are
girls.

We are eating cereal at midnight.