State of Grace

21

Sweet Grady gave me a feeler gauge. I’ve had it with me all this night in the pocket of my hip-hugger pants. The pants are tight. It’s left a mark on my leg, like a burn, where it’s been chafing. I take it out and hold it safely. If Grady were here, I would laugh with him, I would say, “The answer is 1-5-3-6-2-4 and what is the question?” And he would know. He would say that it is the firing order of the cylinders. Such a game would delight him. Crazily, he would think that by knowing things he would know himself better. He would be so happy, proud of his hands and his quick bright head.

There’s blood on my hand. I don’t mean to appear overly dramatic but there is blood on the palm of my hand, the one I grasped the fence with on my wedding day. I’ve always favored it. I disconnect the radio and go into the bathroom. A sister has just left it. The toilet is still running. Burnt matches float unflushed. They think that sulphur masks it. They’re always thinking here. For example, they’ve planted lemon trees over the septic tank and grease traps. Still, one can’t help but sniff. Childlike absorption with the barnyard.

I go to the faucets. My hand drips a little. I drop the gauge to suck on it and of course the worst happens — the gauge falls down the drain and disappears.

22

On the balcony, Cords and Doreen sit, sometimes hugging. There is a fountain beside them, two feet tall of marble, a lion’s head with a sealed tube for a tongue, the tile basin all fuzzy green from the rains. They’re there each dawning. This is what they were doing the dawning of the day I began the baby, the day the train bore Daddy down, the day that brought the night my Grady held me for the first time. I turned away. I’d seen it before. Cords dropping her hand down Doreen’s spine. Dropping her hand in a rubber glove so tight that you could see the smashed cuticles all bunched behind it. They’re doing it now. All those months gone by. The hand pats Doreen’s bottom. The hand travels up again. I try not to listen to them. They’re saying the same thing. Corinthian Brown is walking down the street outside on his circuit to Glick’s and Cords is calling him Pellicle Pete. This is what I heard once. This is what I hear today.

“Pellicle Pete,” she sings softly, “you wanna come up and help the girls make brownies?”

I turn away and try to listen to Grady instead but everything gets in the way. All that’s happened. The words. The Jaguar planing through the woods. Do you understand? I enjoyed it thinking I was dead. But I tried to hold his hand. Not to hold him back. To let him know … I was with him. But my touch. It seems my touch got in the way. It tampered with the angle.

I listen but he is not saying anything to me any more. He has stopped. There is just the sound of his breath sprinkling from his sides. His face is so fragile. It is as though they have strung small pale bulbs beneath his skin. The color blue, the wattage fifteen. His sex is raised and swollen beneath the sheets, pulsating beneath the sheets. It’s cool. I could wrap my hand, my lips, around it. A glass of water …

I wish I were not so thirsty and famished all the time. I would like to starve to death. If only more foodstuffs were like bananas I would be on my way. I’ll tell you I’ve never been able to eat a banana. The thought that a male banana tree and a female banana tree are necessary to produce little bananas has always upset me. I never eat anything that has been born or pollinated. If this were only so! It’s true I’ve tried it off and on. I only lie when I am very tired. I want to starve to death but the hunger, the hunger … Ninety pounds. Then less. A child weighing no more than an empty trash can. Then to barely toddle. Then six pounds at birth. I would be present at my birth …

Oh, the dreariness of it all. I already was on hand once and I’ll tell you, the demands start immediately. Mucus in their throats, the cord still dangling from their tummies and baby girls are ovulating. Within a day there’s blood in the swaddling. And it isn’t nature’s first mistake, this premature menstruation. The egg drifts down. Five hundred to go or so. Is there nothing that has not been going on forever?

23

“Pellicle Pete,” Cords sings from the balcony. She raises her arm from Doreen’s back and waves. I imagine Corinthian going by below, windmilling his arms because he thinks the moving air is good for his skin and sometimes running and sometimes reading while he walks in the thin and eager light of dawning. I can see him now, all of a pattern. Even in full sunlight his form is rakishly checkerboard; even in total blackness, it’s full of shade and innuendo. Sometimes he looks at the girls on the balcony. Most often he doesn’t.

“She thinks she’s so smart, that girl,” he told me, “well I knew what it meant the first time she said it and I bet she had to look it up before she started to use it.”

“Whyn’t you come up?” Cords calls.

And in that part of the morning that was so long ago and in the part that is now, Doreen is clamping a pink hand over her mouth and dropping it to Cords’ knee and saying,

“Why we dasn’t do that. We dasn’t let him into the house, he’s a cullud boy.”

“Gracious,” Cords says, “it’s so.”

“I thought that ee-u-nuchs were always fa-et,” Doreen drawls.

“He’s not a eunuch,” Cords says. “The flesh means nothing to him.”

“And that’s why he’s losing it,” Doreen crows. “Jest like an ol’ snake.”

Cords’ hand floats back to Doreen’s shoulders. Her voice is solemn.

“Have you been dreaming about snakes again?”

“Oh no,” Doreen says, aghast, “I couldn’t do that after what you said. It was just so awful what you said, it scared me out of dreams altogether.”

“Dream of snakes one more time and you’ll wake up deaf and dumb. Dream of swimming and you’ll lose that which was dishonestly gained.”

“I never got anything that wasn’t gotten proper,” Doreen says.

“Dream of machines and you’ll be rendered Pellicle-like.” Cords sighs, snapping her arm away. “No more human intercourse. No more salvation through the flesh.”

Doreen shuffles her eyes from one part of Cords’ face to the other and then down to the street where Corinthian had been walking. Cords was always telling her things she couldn’t make head or tail of. Nevertheless, she felt that she had an instinctive appreciation for just about everything that was offered. “Ha,” she breathed.

“Po’ pure Doreen,” Cords smiles. “You’ll be sacred to us all. It’ll be you the sisters will activate to and not that lady of the rolling eyes in the warped picture frame. Pearls will cascade from your armpits thick as dusting powder and semiprecious stones will rim your box. Catherine,” she twitters, “Cathy baby, we’ve found us a true dee-ciple.”

“Ha,” Doreen says.

“But there’s no reason for you to be down on Corinthian Brown, insulting him and what not.” Doreen blinks but doesn’t object. Thoughts are acts, Cords has told her. Attitude is all. “Because Corinthian Brown is going to help us,” Cords goes on. “He’s got the cat that’s going to make you Queen. You’ve got to be nice to folks, Doreen. You’ve got to treat them right.”

“Oh, I know!” Doreen says, heartfelt.

“Without that leopard, my presentation of you will not be as effective. But Corinthian will come through because our Kate will convince him that he should. Kate will help us out.”

“Never in my life,” I hear myself saying as I lie in my bunk bed, “have I ever been a help to anybody.”

“She’ll do this for us,” Cords says. “It’s such a small thing. She needn’t even consider it a favor.”

“I’ve seen myself sometimes walking in Hollywood,” Doreen exclaims. “I’m wearing those terrific sunglasses that terrific women wear out there, you know those huge sunglasses tinted pale blue? And I’ve got a leopard on a leash. Wouldn’t that be something? I’d bring him everywhere and even when I entertained, like, you know, he’d be in the room.”

“You’ve seen that, have you?” Cord says.

24

I lie on my bed, fully clothed. Alarm clocks are popping off all around me. The girls are getting up, sniffing themselves, squeezing out the hairs that have incredibly grown out overnight in this loamy clime. Cords and Doreen step in off the balcony. I am not listening to any of them. Is it over? Grady said. The floor empties. Now the girls are all in the kitchen. They eat standing up. I can see them in my head. Splashing water on the instant. There is Beth with bruises on her legs and a short flat haircut. She smells like a chlorinated swimming pool. She applies her nails to her scalp and scratches. Then she nibbles on the scratchings. There is Debbie eating a piece of bread, jogging carefully around the edges with her teeth. It is a perfect circle, becoming smaller and smaller. It is as though she is eating on the moon.

I can see it all, it being what it was I saw before. On the highway, the tourists are stroking through the technicolor morning. They are travelers traveling, making time. One little family in a station wagon sit beneath a cloth deodorizer in the shape of a skunk.

Cute.

It hangs by the neck, absorbing the odors of thighs and caramel corn. The skunk is working like mad, doing everything it was created for, but like the power of evil, it can only last for seven days. The power of good is everlasting. Then it must be replaced. Everyone is stuffed with ham, quaint grits and papaya juice. They are heading for the Last Supper, which is being enacted somewhere in the middle of the state.

See, the little girl is counting Mercedes automobiles. One two, three, a diesel, a 190-SL and an error for it is actually a Rolls-Royce. The small boy has soiled his pants and is changed at seventy miles an hour. It looks funny. Greenish. Curdly whey. The mother is distressed. Before she had children she had never thought about it, but now it seems that she is always examining shit. Is it pasty and odorless or cheesy and foul or slippery and shiny or fat and dull? It seems … to fall into certain patterns. It seems to have a tale to tell. She has found that shit will often supply the answer when all else fails. She even has the suspicion that shit is the lane-end into heaven and so on, the lost key opening and so forth.

She peers at it, slides it around in the diaper. She is alarmed and expectant. In the past, everything has reverted to normal before she can apply the remedy. She joggles the diaper up and down. Her gay young womanhood passes before her eyes. She shows it to her husband.…

Now here is something I really am an observer of because I have arisen myself now and am standing on the balcony. A hint of Doreen’s perfume is there with me. Now I am not supposed to be here, observing on the balcony. One is supposed to do nothing on the third floor except get in and out of bed. For this purpose, there are fourteen bunks arranged against the walls. On the top are the smaller girls and on the bottom, I’ve found, are the ones with problems. In the center of the room is tastefully empty space covered discreetly with a Persian rug. Above each bunk is a window. The girls on the bottom see the sky when they look out and the girls on top see strangler figs. Some of the windows are painted shut and around them the smell is terrific.

I am on the balcony, looking at the morning through the strangler fig and stinking cedar, and watching the highway over them.

They were all tourists, Father said, excluding myself.

There is a caravan of Airstream trailers, heading north. They have been in town for their annual powwow. Each year they meet in a field just outside of town and for three days they cook hamburgers and play volleyball. Then they drive off. Freddie and Gussie from Stillwater. On the road, making soup of turtles and small warm things, grinding up pollen and seeds. They identify themselves to everyone. Jack and Cherry Lane from Portland, Maine. To all the relicts sickly eating straw in the roadside zoos, to the babies playing on the fallen privy door, to the waitresses biting ketchup off their hands in Dew Drop Inns … The Fergusons, Donald and Shirley.

Hullo, hullo.

25

I believe that our modest home, Grady’s and mine, was an Airstream. It wasn’t in Grady’s style but there it was, and it was his. We spent the days of our married life therein, his sperm warping the floor boards and my cooking blackening the walls. It was perfectly concealed in the woods. I can’t understand how it ever came to be in there and it was obvious that in order to get it out, several large trees would have to be chopped. It would be most reasonable to assume that the trailer was there before the woods were, which is absurd. Just another mystery like the boat in the bottle or the one in Revelation sitting on a throne and looking like a jasper and a sardine stone. So much mystery but no surprises. I can’t understand it.

I have to get back to the trailer. Grady would expect me to. All my things are there, my picnic basket and wine glass, my card

Hi! I’m Rh negative

What are you?

But Grady is not there. It is difficult for me to keep this in the front of my mind. He is in Room 17, Section C. The exploded view, that’s what I saw, just as he used to show me in the Jaguar manual. The servo unit, exploded view, the worm-shaft end float adjustment and bearing pre-load exploded view. Just as it was in the diagram, the car flew into all its parts. And it was I who was running. It was Grady who was sitting still. One of us was running. Relativity is not reasonable! Part of the car was driven into Grady’s side. A pin or a bolt. Part of the Jaguar is missing in my Grady’s side, beside the lung. And there are slivers of metal in his head and jaw. Shavings peppered shining in his blond head. They’ve excised all that was visible; now only the missing remains and they won’t touch it. It is over, Grady’s breathing said as I ran and I had to say not yet.

I will not go back to the trailer. If I had been taken there immediately by Ruttkin … but it would have been difficult. It was night then. Never had I left the woods except with Grady. Never had I come back to them except with him. I don’t think I could have found the trailer by myself. It was his life there, you see, that he took for a time with me. Only the stupor was mine.

And Sweet Tit Sue may be there now. That is a very real consideration and one I could not face. She may have repossessed it. She may have left her own little cabin recently hacked out of the woods, introduced out of nowhere by five pastel concrete squares and taken the trailer again, found our bill of sale in the Rimbaud, you know the part, it went we-wandered impatienttofindtheplaceandtheformula, that was where it was when we drove away last night, found the bill of sale and held it under moving water and taken the trailer again. Wherever she will be, I could not face her again, having done so once. My manner excites disgust, I know.…

I did not have the smallest difficulty in finding Sue’s cabin. In relationship to the trailer, its location was clear. I knew where it was and I found it. Five decorative steps leading up from nothing and dogs lying beneath the porch but not barking and chickens pecking in the brush. I found it myself. I never got lost. A little less than two miles down that river but with no view.

I set out one morning the instant Grady left. If Sue started right away, I felt that I could be back at the trailer before he returned. I took a fall, I would have told him. I think I’ve hurt myself. I didn’t care if she did it well. Badly, I would have preferred. I ran through the woods. The cedars were dropping their sweet berries. Grady was on the highway. Until recently, suicides were always buried on the highways. They were not allowed respectable graves. This was not my thought as I ran through the woods, but the fact remained. Until recently.

Please, I had said to her. Sue had a child of her own, a boy eating rice and cookies as I talked. I don’t know what you’re wanting, she’d said clearly, each word a soft explosion. They told me she wouldn’t do it in her own place. They had told me that you had to name the place and she would come there and do it. They had told me that she took it away. We don’t know where, they told me but you should just see how green her garden grows. I ran through the woods. EVERY SECRET THING SHALL GOD HAVE JUDGED.

I was told you could help me, I had said. How green her garden grew. The boy finished eating and went into the little cleared yard, picking up the eggs the hens had laid. Sue was making a brine, throwing salt into the water. I was still running with the momentum of reaching the cabin. I had had a plan and the plan seemed perfect but I could not think on it for long. If I could lose the baby, would there still be something in me that would tell, that would talk on and on in punishment?

You are nothing but trouble, she had said. I could see the first time you were nothing but hard times.

Then give me something I had said.

Suicides were buried on the highways and nothing stopped for them.

You can just take a lot of anything that’s handy, she had said. It probably won’t make no difference but you just keep eating on a quantity of something and get sick and keep eating a quantity more. She shrugged. Sugar, she called to the boy, You bring Momma an egg here for her brine. You got it all wrong from somewheres, she had told me, I ain’t never done it, not even once. I haven’t never stopped a baby.

Her boy came in, holding an egg gracefully in each hand, between thumb and forefinger. She took one and eased it into the pan. She added more salt until the egg floated up. The boy was holding the remaining egg carefully enough but he somehow stuck his thumbnail into the shell. Blood swelled up over his finger as though he’d been sliced and he dropped it, the thing spreading dismally outward on the floor all broken up and scattered, all its colored jellies and beads trembling in a small and violet pool.

Ahhh, Sugar, Sue had said. One of the dogs came in to lap it up. I stepped off the last orangey steppingstone back into the woods and was back in the trailer by eleven o’clock. Hours still, before Grady would return. I had several drinks but nothing in excess. Whenever I closed my eyes, I could see the baby floundering out of the womb. I didn’t close my eyes for several days that I can recall and when I did at last, I could see the curve in the road flaunting my Grady. It was not my thought that it was a curve at the time. It was just the shape my dreams took thereafter until now.

26

Here, it is quarter past noon. All the clocks say this, more or less, on the third floor. The sisters have eaten lunch and are all coming back up here for song practice. I hear their babble as they tramp up the stairs. I realize quite clearly that I am, at present, in the sorority, in my bunk bed. Soon, I will get up and go to Grady who is in Room 17, Section C. I realize this, nevertheless, something untoward happens, my head whirrs and it is Grady touching my shoulder, waking me up. I am so happy. I shudder with relief. It is Grady, saying,

“Miss, the movie’s over.”

And it is. Everything’s shut off. Kinugasa’s Crossways, I think it was, or more likely, something with Tom Mix. There was a chase and an open air setting. Something was resolved. I see the screen for the first time and am annoyed to note that things I believed to have been imperfections in the film were, in fact, freckles and streaks upon the screen.

“They’re closing up.”

He says. It’s true. They’re locking all the doors. Someone has pulled a sheet over the concessions. I’m sore all over. I have a cramp. And he must help me up the aisle for I’m hobbling. My leg is still asleep. They won’t be showing another picture for hours and there’s nothing to do except go off with Grady. He’s barefoot but his feet are remarkably clean. He takes me to his car which is moored directly beyond the door shimmering like a yacht in the heat. We drive to a liquor store. It’s almost night but everything is still hot to the touch. Grady takes off his sunglasses and exposes to me two dim rims around his eyes.

He leaves but returns immediately with a bottle of gin, a bag of ice cubes and two paper cups. We sit in the liquor store parking lot and drink. I request some bubbly water. It’s filling up. Men and women, single women, men and men. We’re all sitting in our allotted slots, watching each other and drinking. It’s very pleasant. Four carpenters drink pints of peppermint schnapps. A tanned lady, very pretty, an older lady, refined, drinks brandy. Potato chips fall out of her mouth. Someone kisses me. It’s an awkward moment, but we have another glass of gin. I can remember it all. Every detail. It gets dark. The sky was a patched-up tent. The lot is lit indirectly from the liquor store on one side and a nursery on the other. A green growing thing for everyone and something for every place, for sand, muck, marl and rocky soil. A sprinkler works its whippety way across the plants and dribbles water across the hood of our car. Beside us, a few children in the back of a truck protect their candy bars from the spray.

Yes, it’s very nice. There were three children. Three candy bars. I could tell by the wrappers that they were Zeros.

The last time my very best friend saw me, she said.

I’m fine I’m fine but where is the grapefruit you promised to send.

? and this was in a dream. Things that I have loved have vanished into acts I can only accept. Someone lays his tongue between my breasts. I am falling, falling, and kiss the belted hip of the man I love, but everything is controlled for I know how it goes. We are not to rely on what we can do to insure our acceptance with God. We are to accept God’s acceptance of us. There are boundaries within which the worst can work. And I’m working. Yes, I was made to work, if nothing else.

I’m in a controlled fall for how far can an orgasm take you? My chum on the airwaves said only to me,

“An orgasm and seventy-five cents will get you into the silent pictures …”

We return to the movies. The gin is all gone. Upon going back, we pass a pimpled boy, running. And then a gentleman in a white smock and elevator shoes. We piece it together, Grady and I. The gent’s a druggist, making a prescription. Everyone is yelling. The boy skids around a corner and a bar of soap falls out of his sock. The pursuers seem satisfied with this and turn back, although no one picks up the soap.

As Grady parks the car, I slip behind the pneumatic door of the movie theatre. Everything is holy and works upon the principle of exhaustion. In and out. Open and close. Win or lose. No one can gain from this experience. The door closes behind Grady too. We can’t see; the floor slopes. Once again I’m guided to my seat. I feel smug but nervous for I didn’t have to pay. I came in after the show had started. The cashier had turned her head. I never paid for anything.

And there on the screen is an empty beach. Blurred. High green water. Puddle of dark pine trees on the sand. There may even be some snow, strings of ice in the grasses. A crib is set up beneath one of the pines. Solidly constructed. Fine craftsmanship. Brahm’s First Piano Concerto is playing. The part that goes

da taa taatee ta

What a foundation that crib has! The legs are set in concrete that lies buried but may very well run the entire length of the coast. This was made to last! It’s very cold. Of course you cannot feel this, but you can tell simply by observing the elderly Dürer hare at the lower left, in the wind slough behind a dune. His eyes are frozen shut. There’s no one there. Everything is white, brown and green — indigestible colors. There’s nothing in the crib but surely with a little imagination, a baby could be placed there.

The film has been terribly preserved. It’s Delluc’s The Silence. And something’s wrong with the projector. At this rate it will be tomorrow before we get out of here. And how do we get out of here? Ingress or egress. Who’s to give permission? Ahhh, what I thought was the cause is instead the consequence. Here.

The sisters assemble themselves in the middle of the room, obliterating the Persian rug. I stay in my bunk even though I will be fined for this. Fifty cents for the first absence, one dollar thereafter. I owe the sisterhood a fortune. The girls would like to send this money to the Indians in the Everglades but they don’t. They bought a Waring blender. Before that it was a fake brass fixture for the jane. Sweet God, the “jane.” Some things I refuse to bear.

The girls link arms and start to chant

“Lean Mean Doreen

Our Jungle Queen”

It’s all a lie of course. Doreen’s a dish and brainless as a cracker box. She comes leaping out in a rattan bikini and does a few bumps and grinds. The skit is very flashy, very complex. Cords created every detail. It involves extensive props, including a rented leopard and a burning bush. Ha. Pardon. A gyneco-holy term. A smutty synergism. Rather it’s a burning hoop or something through which Doreen will emerge while the sisters wail

“She’ll eat up your heart

And that’s just the start

Doreen will make you burrrnn.”

I slip out of bed unnoticed and go down to the kitchen. The room is cool and empty. The floor’s waxed. The day’s recipes are taped to the butcher block table. There are some fresh greens there with dirt still on them. Very nice. And some red and green peppers. And a bull’s tongue, all black with trauma at the tip.

I go outside and ask directions to the hospital from a passerby. As the days go on, I am able to find shorter routes.

Good-by, good-by.

27

OH THAT MINE HEAD WERE WATERS AND MINE EYES A FOUNTAIN OF TEARS THAT MIGHT WEEP DAY AND NIGHT …

But the stupor was all that was mine. Only the stupor.

Now Daddy … always … told me that my ruinous life was quickly and immediately determined. He did not elaborate. Now I wouldn’t say that I agreed. I was a simple child! Daddy used to say, Beware the wrath of the Lamb but daddys say that, you know. It was just a little joke. But I was a simple child. I was always straightening my drawers, for instance. I was always arranging, arranging … Now it’s true I suffered from lack of sleep. I dreamed but did not sleep. Daddy was mistaken there. He saw me pretending, I suppose. They say all children maintain this, but I want to tell you, I never slept. I would be the last to say I saw it all, but never was I sleeping.

It’s true I often had fevers. Daddy told me I had fevers but he always brought me back to health. It was the house that did it. The house was always cold and I was chilled. The elements were always falling in the rooms. Or some of the rooms. The rooms I liked to play in. Snow, and in the summer it was rain that fell on me.

But I was a simple child. One incident is very clear. I was swimming with Daddy, splashing in the shallows while he watched, and little fish swam into my hair and caught there, you know, in my tangled hair, for Father did not always brush my hair, and the little fish had died by the time that we discovered them. It’s very clear. It seems I was unconsolable.

But I was tired, so tired. It seems I could hardly keep my eyes open. All night, I would walk through the rooms. And I would hear the sounds of living, those unmistakable sounds of growing, you know, as all things do, toward their death. Obscure, obscene sounds. None of it ever spoke to me. They told me I would walk through the rooms the way that Mother used to. It surprises me now. What did we think was possible? What chance of finding anything that was ours? I’d never do it now, I’ll tell you. I wasn’t much of a child, to be truthful, even then.

There was nothing in the house then as I walked. Daddy had taken it all away. They tell me Daddy wanted to encourage no bad memories. But isn’t that the hope of the smallest of us … to become another’s memory? But, regardless, everything was nothing in those rooms. So much broken and so little repaired … The snow, as I’ve said, would fall in on us while we danced, melting on our faces …

And things were always out of my hands. I have always been grateful for that.

28

The dream is always the same.

A woman is riding sidesaddle. There is no space involved, no scenery. Just a woman in a long black gown and sweet old-fashioned beribboned hat riding a galloping horse. She is holding a baby in one arm and there is a dog running beside them. It is quite apparent that the dog is going to leap upon the child and eat it. I always imagine that if I could successfully preclude this intimation, I could alter everything. The dog jumps upon the infant and eats it. Or rather, he rests on the woman’s lap and tears busily at the blanket in which the infant is held. Everyone seems calm about this. That is, the woman seems calm and I, who dream the woman.

It never varies. If I were not so knowledgeable about what was going to happen, the next scene would not result. It is obviously Dream Number Fifty-Eight with its natural sequel Forty. A hand extends a bunch of balloons to a figure whose face is turned away from me. The figure reaches for the bright balloons but fails to grasp them. They float up and out of the dream’s framework. No one dares to follow them with their eyes, least of all me.

It is obviously my non-viable dream. Although it always wakes me up, it brings me calm. Not any satisfaction and not my approbation but a calm. Certainly a calm of sorts.

I turn on the radio. Someone has changed the station.

“… a good man

Preaching in the bottom-land”

I garrote the song with a twist, but cannot find my chum, my crush, my sweetness, my answer action man. I twiddle with the dial for hours. I cannot pick him up. At last I hear an old man’s voice. A very old man. He is polishing stones in his rock tumbler. He refuses to turn it off while speaking. That is why the transmission is so bad.

“Yes,” “Action Line” says. “In answer to your question. The differences between rising every morning at 6 and at 8 in the course of 40 years amounts to 29,200 hours or 3 years, 121 days and 16 hours which are equal to 8 hours a day for 10 years. So that rising at 6 will be the equivalent to adding 10 years to your life.”

He seems a little repulsed at the thought.

29

I am lying on my bed. They’ve taken away the sheets to be washed. It doesn’t bother me. They expect me to become excited about that! They’re welcome to everything. It’s just my little radio I care to retain … it is looped ingeniously among the bedsprings. It’s all I have now. I was never much for having things. I was never very good at it.

Sometimes my answer action man comes to me after signing off. He is a dwarf with a vast soft head. Quite horrible.

I can’t make love now, I tell him.

Yes, he says.

I’m going to have a baby.

I understand, he says.

Now I know this is bad, his coming to see me like that, perching at the foot of my bed. He, and the fellows off the bottles, all the smiling men … It’s bad but it could be worse. They could stay longer. I could really insist that I had seen them. It’s bad all right, their being there, but it could be worse.

The sleeping room is empty except for Doreen and Cords who are lying on a bottom bunk several rows away from me. They are not doing much, just lying there, talking low. All the other sisters are down in the cellar, in the activation room, imparting the secrets of Catherine, our virgin patron lady, to nine pledges. They are all sitting on board and block benches in that stinking windowless hole, grasping hands, waist to waist, sculpted toe to pumiced heel, all in white and unadorned, listening to a sister who has an undisclosed, undiagnosed fungus and is not at her best this evening. Her runny voice swims up the fresh air ducts to me.

“… Catherine is said of catha, that is All, and ruina, that is falling, for all the edifice of the devil fell all from her. For the edifice of pride fell from her by the humility that she had and the edifice of fleshly desire fell from her by her virginity, and worldly desire fell from her by her despising of all worldly things. Or Catherine might be said to be like a little chain, for she made a chain of good works by which she mounted into heaven, and that chain or ladder had four steps which are innocence of work, cleanness of body, despising of vanity and saying of truth.…

“Yeh, yeh, yeh,” says Cords.

“Ha,” says Doreen. She is rubbing Tanfastic on her aureolas.

“Why aren’t you down in the activation room?” Cords says to me.

“You should be there too,” I retort wittily.

Sometimes my Answer Action man comes to me before signing on. He is never still. He has the high metabolism and temperature of a bird.

I can’t do it now, I tell him.

You needn’t make excuses to me, he says.

I’m seven months, twelve days along.

I understand, he says.

Two fat bronze palmetto bugs waddle across the mattress and over my ankles.

Your group should pledge hedgehogs instead of girls, he says. They love cockroaches and can be taught to answer to their names.

Whatever their names might be, I say.

Cords is speaking to me. “You look terrible. You’re nothing but skin and bones.”

“What you should do,” Doreen murmurs, “is make yourself a nice milk shake and put some yeast into it.”

“I’m fine,” I say.

“You’re terrific,” Cords says. “We’re going to have to call someone in to pour you off that bed and into a Mason jar.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re wasting away,” Cords insists. “You’re getting to be all conscience. Isn’t she just one skinny conscience, Doreen?”

“Uh-huh,” Doreen says.

“You’d really better put some weight on. Go down and spoon some jelly or something.”

“Ha,” Doreen says. She tosses her beautiful hair. It falls across Cords’ arm.

I lie on the bed and watch them. The sister’s voice rises up through the duct. The fungus is rising in her throat like blood, I would imagine.

“We here tonight have a responsibility to our womanhood,” she is saying.

Forty or so milky southern bosoms swell with pride and purpose, I would imagine.

“When is she going to get to the part about the wheel?” I say to no one in particular.

“She’s never going to get to the part about the wheel,” Cords replies. “It’s been dropped.”

“Wheel?” Doreen says. She is still dipping into the Tanfastic. “The wheel of love?”

“Four wheels of iron, all covered with razors which detrenched our poor Catherine over and over again and cut her up horribly in torment,” Cords elaborates helpfully.

“Ichh,” Doreen says.

“You like that part do you, Kate?”

“Oh certainly,” I say.

“Personally,” Doreen says, “I’ve never seen myself passing on.

I look at them. They’ve both taken off all their clothes and are lying there, not moving much.

“You’re jammed in neutral gear,” I say pleasantly.

“You should get out more,” Cords says just as kindly. “Loosen up. Circulate.”

I get up all the time. I eat and drink out. I go to the hospital. I see my friend Corinthian. At this very moment, I am getting out of bed.

“When you see ‘Pellicle Pete,’ tell him seventy-five dollars. Seventy-five dollars for ten minutes.”

“Better than a model in New York City,” Doreen says reverently.

“I’m not going to be speaking with Corinthian,” I say. “You’re crazy to want a leopard. That’s out of hand. Why don’t you settle for a great Dane or something?”

“I’ve seen myself walking sometimes, you know on one of those fantastic beaches in Mexico? And I’m wearing a silver lamé tunic like and silver earrings, and I’m barefoot in the shining surf.” Doreen is talking quickly as though she’s on to something.

“Doreen’s an eclectic,” Cords acknowledges.

“And I’m walking with two great Danes,” Doreen finishes breathlessly.

“No leopard.” I am walking downstairs.

“Oh, it has to be a leopard,” Cords calls after me.

Down in the kitchen, I open the refrigerator. There is nothing there but the prize steer of the county fair, rearranged in neat and mysterious packages. Daily, the cook pushes her hand into the cold. The result is uncertain. A gristly Ouija. It could be pot roast or brisket, eye of the round or sirloin tip. The steer has invaded their lives. He is everywhere. There is no room for the sisters’ diet-cola or for their underwear on sizzling mornings. They have been eating him for weeks.

From the cellar, the voice drones on. Someone whistles. The secret whistle, for god sakes. Such cheery girls. I had high hopes of becoming one of the bunch. And of course I am. One cannot deactivate. It’s not in the rules. Every girl remembers her activation day. Excuse me. There was sun. Later it set.

30

Corinthian is standing on a stepladder, changing the fly strips at Bryant’s Beasts.

“I have never seen a car like that one must of been,” Corinthian says.

I left the Jaguar on the curve. I have not paid the towing fee. I have not gone to Al Glick’s where it has been taken. The highway does not pass Glick’s. Only the railroad tracks. My head hurts now from the crashing. It didn’t hurt then but it does now. Glass is still breaking inside my head and my Grady is saying, no mistake.

“Never,” Corinthian says. The night is warm and there is juke-box music coming from the bar. All the windows are open in the menagerie and I can see people dancing in the bar. smooth.

I am sitting beside the shark pen. The water is oily and smooth.

“I can’t understand how you know if they are still alive or not,” I say, looking at the water. It shines off the cages, dappling the bars.

Corinthian shrugs. “I don’t even know how many are in there any more. Bryant puts new ones in that the fishermen give him and then he takes some out as well, so there’s no way of telling. I’ve stopped feeding them because the fish were all floating back up.” He climbs down the ladder and comes over to the pen. “I don’t believe there’s anything in there at all,” he says.

I look at the water. The South is full of things like this, I suddenly realize. Rotted and broken-down handmade cages and hutches and wire-wrapped boxes and tanks. Perched or suspended or shored up. Outside filling stations or drive-in restaurants or boatyards or vegetable stands.

And empty. Maybe a pan in it or a stick. And the quality of the disquietude is very complete and precise and centuries old.

“Never will touch a man’s head,” Corinthian mutters. “Will bite off the rest of him save for his head.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Sharks,” he says mildly.

“Don’t be a ghoul,” I say.

“It’s not me being ghoulish,” he says. “It’s the facts that are. Things are out to get a body, that’s the truth. There are some who’ve got just one thing waiting for them and there are others who’ve got ten, twenty things waiting for them. That’s just the truth.”

I don’t say anything.

“Once there were a lot of things I wanted to do, but lately I can’t remember any of them,” Corinthian says. He is drinking from a warm bottle of Coca-Cola.

I look at the animals fitfully. The cages are all occupied and the alarm one feels at this is accurate and ancient too. There is a kestrel here. The windhover. I cannot look at him. It is his eye that will not allow it. Not my own. The windhover. How free he must have been.

“Look here,” Corinthian says, “that box of books you brought here that time. Were they all yours?”

“Yes,” I say. My obstreperous retiree. My deep-sea diver with the butterfly stroke …

“Look here,” Corinthian says listlessly. He has gone into another room, a room where Bryant keeps the feed and hoses and brooms, and he comes back and hands me a book. It is Heart of Darkness. It falls open to a marked-up page. EXTERMINATE ALL THE BRUTES, someone has circled deeply in ink.

I don’t understand. I look at Corinthian and then at the book.

“It wasn’t me,” I say finally. “I didn’t do that.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Corinthian,” I say as clearly as I can. “You know very well it was not me.”

“It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t you.” He takes the book away and puts it back where he got it. He drinks his warm Coca-Cola. We sit and watch the animals. They are portents, like cards or constellations. The juke-box music stops. The lights go out in the bar. The only sound left is that of the aerator and the water slapping against the sides of the tanks.

Corinthian gets up and unlocks the leopard’s cage. After a while, the leopard walks out.

“How long have you been doing this?” I ask.

“Two weeks,” he says. “I did it for two months before he would come out. Now he takes water from my hands. You’ve been here when the cage was open and you didn’t even know it because he wasn’t coming out.”

The aerator seems to be assisting me with my breathing. Everything is effortless. Everything is simple and whole. The words are easy as I say them.

“Would that leopard walk beside somebody for a minute or so?” The animal is close enough for me to touch him. I rest my hand on his calm judicatory skull. He does not move away. His eyes are like suns.

I tell Corinthian about the Queen Serenade. He is reluctant. But the words are easy. I convince him. I am impressed how his concern and gentleness are changing the beasts. Is it not true that they are changing? Have they not responded to his love? I become very animated. I reassure him. It is all arranged. Corinthian’s mood lightens. We talk cheerfully until morning. We are friends.

31

I go to the hospital daily, to the smallest wing in the hospital, the old wing. Everyone seems to shun it, being more interested in the recent additions. Small men move about, pushing floor polishers down the hall. It is not sanitary here. For example, only the corridors, where the patients never are, have been tiled. Tiny tiles in a random design of fake slate. The rooms have brown rugs which absorb oxygen and which, a helpful candy striper told me, could be fatal if brought in contact with vinegar. Vinegar thrown on these rugs would produce copper acetate which is poisonous. This, she told me, is true in any hospital whether it be a Memorial one or not. I’m telling you this because you can’t be too aware.

The candy striper was very tiny although not young. She had a tiny pocket in her apron from which she took a miniature snapshot, the type that is responsible, if you ask me, for all the cataracts going around. It was a photo of her cat which had since been smashed flat. She also offered me a tiny piece of gum. It was not the real thing. Lewis Carrol, who as you well know, was as well not the real thing, once invented a substitute for gum. I believe that this was that.

This place is not at all favorable to health. The pitcher beside my Grady’s tape-wrapped hand is only one half full with gray water. Their excuse is that the water table is down. There is a bureau in which there is a mirror (this discourages me, but when I make inquiries, I am told that it’s for the patients’ primping), three wash rags, a pencil upon which is stamped VOTE FOR PARIS SHAY LEVER 2, a half-gone sponge cake and a bedpan. All these things belong to the hospital. Nothing here belongs to Grady but me.

He is so tiny. Everything here is so small. The white bed made of skinny noodles of iron. The sheets with their tiny mends folded just so across his chest. On the window ledge are tiny rods which one uses to open the windows. One inserts them in a tiny hole and cranks. The protozoans in this room! The energy! It is difficult to remain calm. Around my Grady’s eyes are hundreds of bruises. And tiny lines, all across his lips, his pale cheeks, visible for the first time. In the hall there is a little cart laden with tiny plates of food. Tiny Foo-Yung. Tiny breaded veals. And for the less able, cups of broth, 1- by 1-inch squares of Jell-O. Let me tell you about Jell-O. Any new mother (of one or two days) could but you do not have any new mother. You have me. I will tell you about Jell-O. The secret of it. The Cult. Its importance to healing and the rhythm of life. In remote communities, families often worship Jell-O in lieu of anything else. There has even been buggering of Jell-O. It is a protean item. Its true importance, however, lies in its presence at our hour of birth. For you are aware, I’m sure, of the passages in literature and in films when the woman is in labor and the order goes, bring clean towels and heat a pot of water. The water is for Jell-O.

The wheels of a hospital are greased with Jell-O. It mends a man. It comforts the nurses who administer it for they feel that they are truly doing their part. No one gives my Grady Jell-O. They bring his lunch in a soft plastic pouch which resembles the bags of fresh livers you buy in groceries. It takes a little over an hour and a half for him to eat. I wait. Down the hall, someone is playing the greyhound scores on a radio. A nurse comes in and looks at me, sitting on the floor by the molding. There is no room for chairs in this ward and thus no need for visitors. Nevertheless, I am one and, crouched by the molding, am trying to be careful. The nurse can’t help but see me, I am so gigantic. She goes to the bed and moves it out a bit from the wall. Behind it is a nickel and a few hairpins. She picks up the nickel and leaves. Grady has finished eating. I am trying so hard to be still. I am making such an effort to not be disruptive in here. Everything is so small. I could hold the whole place in my hand, even on the tip of my finger. There is a light which has been on ever since I arrived even though the room is naturally bright with noon. I get up and lean over Grady. The floor creaks. The tubes and hoses swing in my wake. I crawl into bed beside him. There is sweat on his temples. There is a hole beneath his jaw. It is covered with bandages but the hole’s presence remains. Nothing fills it properly. It glows through the most professional and cleverly wrought wrappings. I place my lips lightly on his pillow which is clean, crisply ironed but blotchy, with small colorless spots. I pull the sheet up over us. I can hear the radio. It announces the Big Perfecta. Through the wall a woman’s voice is coming.

“… thought the roast would be good for ten …” and close by, maybe directly over us, someone says,

“That poor young man. Doesn’t he have anyone?”

“I guess not. No mail either.”

“That poor young man.”

Beneath the sheets, I whisper to my Grady. His hair moves with my breath. “I’m sorry,” I say. “Don’t die, Grady. I love you and I’m sorry.”

No one answers.

“He’d be about the age of my Randy, I should think,” the woman says.

“Who could tell?”

“My rat Randy, my own son. Isn’t it nasty the way life turns on you?”

“Just be grateful he has all his faculties, not like this poor devil here.”

“He’s his faculties all right and uses them for nothing but tearing around and breaking his mother’s heart.”

I whisper to my Grady, “Don’t go, Grady.”

No one answers. The women leave. Beneath the sheet it is blue and rocking like the sea. “I could go with you,” I say. He is growing smaller still. I am so clumsy. My neck bangs against the ceiling. My kneecaps shoulder the door shut. This will alert them, I know. Doors are only shut after you here. “If we’re lucky we could be like radiolaria,” I say, “and become something really beautiful. They’re plankton and when they die, the cells disintegrate and they form pretty shells which almost always become fossils. Wouldn’t that be something nice to happen after we’re dead?”

No one answers. “Oh, Grady,” I say, “I don’t mean that. You musn’t believe what I mean. We don’t want anything to do with that oceanic ooze. Listen, Grady,” I say brightly. “Remember the river fog, the way it would come in the middle of the day and make things so bright and sharp, not at all like New England fog which hushes everything up. Remember how pretty everything was?”

I never cared for it myself but I am host to Grady’s loves. It is his world that is lacking in this ward, not mine. You’ve done the same I’m sure. For love. For the lingering. “You always loved me up so well, Grady,” I say.

No one says anything. My words are cumbersome as my sprawling body. I try to pull myself away from him but I am so monstrous now, I am so vast, and my words lie with us beneath the sheets, resting on Grady, pushing my Grady down. Between the bandages he is naked. In his prick is a long plastic rod, flat on the end like a golf tee. I kiss him. So lightly. And yet … a crust of flesh returns on my lips. I embrace him. So slightly. And yet my arms return coated with something like natural shinola. His hair is cold as though he had come out of the snow.

“Oh, love,” I say, “let’s begin again. Let’s be good to each other and careful with each other.”

Grady is deciding what to do … “if left my mind, I’ve life in a way; it would be worth the pain” … that’s the bun they try to peddle here. Baking in their brain pans daily. “Nothing’s too hard to endure but Death,” they shout over the racket of the machine shop as they discreate a hand, a foot, a nostril or perhaps a neck even though who knows it was just a mole that itched a bit, nothing that couldn’t have been helped by scratching. But Life’s the dish served here. As for drama, there’s not much. After all, if you won’t have that, there’s not a soul, licensed or what, who can help you. They wheel it in and drop it off. There it is. You regard it slowly. Oh, of course take your time, they say (and there’s little else to take at that point, they’ve got you at that point). And you say, May I take it into my privacies and look it over? May I have it and return it if displeased with no loss to me? Well, there’s a charge for that, they say. Well.

But my Grady will decide what to do. Watching him, my breasts ache as though I was in the days of weaning all my children. Even though I have none. Even though I am swollen with waiting. My head and stomach are tight as a drum and pounding with the waiting.

Grady turns his head a bit. Something black runs erratically out from someplace in his head. At first it doesn’t matter. It comes and goes. I can’t even remember it beginning, that’s how slight it was at first. In less than a minute, however, it overwhelms everything here, even though it is hardly anything, a trickle, very tiny, and a dull black. In less than a minute again it becomes a lake, very miniature, but enough to flood this room, and although I am here (or rather, although my stomach is here, my mountainous stomach spraddling this tiny bed), I dare not move for to do so would be to crush thousands of weeping invisible things, for the air is full of them. For this shrinking room where my Grady lies, into which an assault of personnel are coming to take me away, is crowded with things infinitesimal. Things annihilable and yet without end. Like the pain the evil suffered in Daddy’s pulpit hell, there is no limit to their reduction. And the very least of their reductions has a weight that the mind can’t bear—

It all stops. Three nurses come in. They are actually a little larger than I. The room becomes quite ordinary. White. Airy. I see the lacing of one of Grady’s boots trailing out of the closet locker. There’s a breeze and it shakes the shade. The nurses are very angry. Two I’ve seen before. One depilates her arms, but only to the elbows. The other is the novice who gave me the substitute gum. The third does all the talking.

“How did you get in here! It’s quite apparent that there’s to be no one here. You have to get a pass at the desk and the pass must be punched. It’s only good for the other floors. There are no passes accepted on this floor.”

“Oh please,” I say, crawling from the bed. “There’s something there on the pillow. Something that’s come from his head. Please.”

“That’s our concern,” she says.

“You’d better straighten up and start breathing deeper,” the shaved girl says, “or that baby of yours is going to come out harder than a watermelon.”

“That’s right,” the talking one says, “you’ve got to think of those who haven’t had their living yet. Put the other affairs behind you. Last summer I worked in the birthing ward and each night I’d go home, I’d like to tell you, with a song in my heart.”

32

I try to think of the baby once and for all but things keep getting in the way. I know this is my only chance, to think about him now, before he comes. I try to think of his needs. Things that I can buy that will define him.

I forced myself to go into a store. But I was stymied by a bib. A tiny drooling bib. And then a small washcloth. No bigger than a saucer. I stared and stared. I couldn’t think. Women came and went with casual assurance. Salespeople asked me again and again what I wanted. At last I was asked to leave.

It was not a success. Except for one thing. I learned one thing. Hidden beneath its blouse, each Raggedy Ann doll has I LOVE YOU printed in a heart upon its chest. I think that is one thing that more people should know.

33

It’s June third. Where has the time gone? Sometimes you can hear it overtaking you, making, while passing, small crunches, like owls breaking the backbones of mice. There’s certainly nothing subtle about it.

I’ve always disliked this date. It’s an anniversary of course, everything is. And every day brings back to mind something mean or blue. The man on the radio reminds one of this continually. Just before daybreak, the last caller calls in. Yes. The lady caller says,

“The parakeets nest each night in my punk trees and are driving me crazy and what can I do?”

“Action Line” is a little annoyed. After all, he’s answered this before, but he gives the proper reply as always and then it’s sign-off time, preceded by one minute of “On This Date.”

“Eleven years ago today,” he says, “a nurse shark in the Durban Aquarium threw up a human arm before the distressed eyes of visiting schoolchildren.”

On this date, the Japanese beetle was introduced to this country.

And 135 people simultaneously went mad in Sverdlovsk U.S.S.R. after eating rolls from a dirty bakery.

Then they stop transmitting. The man goes home, I suppose.

Well, I want to tell you something.

On June 3, 1844, on the island of Eldey, off Iceland’s southwestern coast, a nesting pair of auks were killed by Jon Brandsson and Sigourour Isleffson. Their single egg was smashed by Ketil Ketilsson and the great auk was forever lost to the world.

A CRIME AGAINST NATURE. At last, the proper use of the term. No one speaks any more about crimes against God. Perhaps they never did. And the auks were good creatures. Not wicked, like the types that attempt to defend themselves. As for the men, I imagine they had good teeth, warm clothing and sweethearts. Now where has all the time gone with them safe in their graves? I have heard that others wanted to claim the distinction. But were not accepted. Turned down by diligent research. Like the Hiroshima pilot, everyone wants a piece of the pie.

It’s seven o’clock and the sun has come up as usual like a picture postcard. It’s June third, come around again for the first time. With just a slight dislocation, I feel that things could be better. A small act of substitution could make up our life. But the variance never comes. Each day has only enough difference in it to make what you’ve already learned unnecessary. We’re all left out of the years that might make the difference. Not scheduled. Scratched. We’re all just pieces of marbly meat, with great margins of white to our lives, not off to the sides where they belong, but running right through our best days.

Grady’s sleeping. They say it’s only sometimes that he sleeps. Other moments he’s doing something else. It takes a conscientious eye, however. It takes a practiced witness to tell the difference and I am neither. His lips rest on my face. His breathing whispers to me but it is almost impossible to understand. It rises in despaired intensity. I try to calm him by placing his hand inside my blouse. My nipples are shiny and like glass. His fingers fumble and slip off them. They are so bright. Like hard little spoons. Once I looked intently at them myself and found reflected there a child, baking obscene cupcakes. It’s only a toy oven but, nonetheless, everything works.

I kiss him. My mouth is tired. My lips swollen, my gums faintly metallic. I practiced my cornet for two hours one evening but that was more than nine years ago and surely my lip would not be exhausted still. I was a child then and now I am of course a married pregnant lady, waiting for deliverance and stinking dimly of milk. For weeks now I have been awakened by the cold wet sheet of my bed and the sight of my poor wilted breast, the left, squashed as a tube of toothpaste carelessly employed.

Deftly, I unbutton my blouse further and slip out a breast. I feed it to his cheek, hoping he’ll root for it, not that it would give him any nourishment certainly but it might mean something. But the gesture’s dry as my tit once was and someone comes in and interrupts the moment. I can tell they’re not going to like me in this place. They don’t like my attitude and they despise my circumstances. As Father said (of course about himself), easy to calumniate but difficult to imitate. And I’m my father’s daughter, born and bred in his love.

Father, of course, was the one who alerted me to this date, albeit in another season. He mentioned it at Mother’s service and drove the congregation wild. He said, FOR THAT WHICH BEFALLETH THE SONS OF MEN BEFALLETH BEASTS AS THE ONE DIES SO DIES THE OTHER THEY HAVE ALL ONE BREATH SO THAT A MAN HAS NO PRE-EMINENCE ABOVE A BEAST FOR ALL IS VANITY.

The people protested but it was difficult to disagree. Father quotes everything more or less, and is impeccable in his sources. The souls on that island were simple, good-hearted, ordinarily vicious. All they ever had were boats to catch fish from and a pot to cook the catch and a ballroom in the center of town where a five-piece band played monthly. They knew that all was worthless and that they were lost but they didn’t want to be as lost as the animals they shot. That was asking too much. Because they knew how they died. And they knew that their hides whipped from car antennaes and rotted on mud-room floors. They didn’t want any part of that.

But they honored Father in spite of what he said. Father was God’s instrument and we were all the instruments of Father. They respected him enormously, because in that land of silence, he managed to be more silent than them all. It was known that no one ever had a conversation with Father. The words he made had … great silences between them. Their lives depended upon the interpretation of the absence around them. And my life depended upon the interpretation of Father.

The people valued me too, of course. Our family was highly thought of. For eleven years we were the only ones on that island who were ever born or died. Sister and I were born and then sister and Mother and baby died. Nothing was going on all that while except my childhood, if you know what I mean. Everything else remained the same. Summer brought no rebirth there — just the same blighted berries and the same dry wind from the sea. The island swung in the Atlantic, out of time and out of season, and the only things that happened were to me. Of course all that has changed and the people there are dying now. Everything I ever wished for has come true. It all came out the only way it could and hustled me right along with it. No, I’m never left behind.

34

They are always driving me out of here. Grady’s awake now, I am told, although nothing has changed. There are two glass jugs, one leading in and one leading out, with the clear liquid lessening in one and gaining in the other. Not a drop is lost. It doesn’t seem proper that the stuff’s all the same. Healing should be different, don’t you think? The processes of life should be distinguishable from those of death. Wouldn’t you say?

Some woman leads me roughly to the door. Face pretty as a cardboard crate. They don’t even want to give me my postpartum pack although it’s required. They’d like to see me bleed to death. Problems like me can all be attributed to a great laxity of morals and a promiscuous admission to the Lord’s table. Father said that this has always been so.

35

I’m at the Siesta Pig, which is a convenience store, selecting a cup sundae when the bag of waters breaks. It’s not unlike the bottom of a bottle falling out and I can almost feel the color draining from my lobes, my lips, both inside and out. I push up closer to the freezer, at a loss.

A woman with a hearing aid pushes past from sherries. I drip discreetly. It’s pure water, I have nothing to be ashamed of and if it were bottled it would probably be a cure for something, God knows. Acne perhaps or gout or glossitis. “Thank yew,” the woman hollers.

It’s nothing nasty but I hustle out, alert to the manager’s possible distaste. I feel nothing except that my pants and skirt are soaking wet. I walk across the street to a gas station. I have to get the key to the rest room from the attendant. It’s hanging over his head on a plasic ring six inches wide.

“I’m sick of people like this,” he says, handing me the key. “They ain’t got no cars, they ain’t got nothing but full bladders.” There is no one in the place but me. I feel that he speaks to me at the expense of others in deference to my condition. I walk to the cubicle with my incredible key. It is not very clean but there is paper everywhere. In the holders and stacked against the walls. I try to blot myself dry but the water pours out and can’t be checked. I sit on the bowl and wait. I put my head on my knees. I may even doze a little. I can’t tell, I don’t feel anything. I know I am supposed to be lying down with my feet elevated. Moving around may injure the baby’s head. I don’t know. Nothing seems to apply. I am spurious and specious to the moment. The moment does not seem to be significant. I work my skirt off over my head and attach it as best I can to a chrome nozzle on the wall that dispenses warm air. Where is the deception and the shame? The water’s pure as tears. I saw Grady cry this morning. They disagreed but I wiped away the tear. They say the signs he shows can no longer be interpreted in the same manner as those exhibited by a living person. But he wept. It was only for an instant. I wiped away the tear.

That seems to lack significance as well. Nothing seems to bear. At times, all things seem to center on those parts of Grady’s arms where the tanning stops. Each afternoon I look first at his arms and I see the demarcation of the sun and then I sit and hold his arms. But that promises nothing one way or the other. It is suggestive of nothing. I enter Grady’s limbo when I hold his sunny arms.

The water stops at last. I put on my warm skirt and open the door. Half a dozen women are there in a ragged line and three little girls with their legs crossed. Waiting to enter. Vacationers all. Polite as refugees. I return to the Siesta Pig and complete my transaction with the sundae. It tastes greasy as though it were revolutionarily fried and frozen.

“Big doings at your place tonight, huh?” the manager says to me.

“Pardon,” I say. I can’t feel the baby any more. It as though I’ve misplaced him. I look around a little uneasily. I do not want him crawling around and knocking jars off the shelves and cutting himself.

“Those shows you girls put on at the school. They’re tonight, aren’t they?

The Serenades. I had forgotten. I was supposed to borrow a car and help Corinthian bring the leopard down.

“I always make a point of attending for good relations,” the manager is saying. “Besides that, it’s a nice break in the routine. In addition as well, some of those favors those groups give out are pretty nice. Last year I got four of those insulated mugs to keep your beverage cold for nothing. If I sold them in here I know I’d have to charge at the least two twenty-nine. And one of those sororities was just giving them away and another one of those sororities smarter yet was pouring free beer into them.”

I have to borrow a car. It is a small leopard but with wild, judgment eyes.

“What’s your group going to be giving?” the manager says.

“Thrills and chills,” I say.

“Nothing, huh? Well that’s probably not too smart.”

I buy a box of cereal from him and start walking toward the college. Several times before I arrive there I tell myself that the baby is going to be born soon. It doesn’t seem relevant. It is not that it seems impossible, it is just that it does not seem indicative of change.

At the hospital they are cutting Grady’s hair. I beg them not to, but they do it every week. They are always cutting his hair.

36

The girls are all on the top floor of the sorority house getting into their bikinis, and Corinthian and the leopard have been brought here by someone else and are in an old garage behind the house. The leopard is sitting on its haunches in a cluttered corner and is still as a statue. The garage is hanging with cobwebs and there are cobwebs spanning the leopard’s ears. Corinthian rubs them off with his fingers.

Just outside the bolted door of the garage, the housemother is straightening the garbage cans. She is wheezing and red.

“It disturbs me,” she says, “it disturbs me so. These men never put the containers back in the same place twice. Sometimes I can’t find the lids and sometimes I can’t find one of the cans. Sometimes there’s still garbage in the bottom. They won’t scrape it out and all they need is a stick. There are plenty of sticks around here. They wouldn’t take yard trimmings away if you begged them. Well, today I told them. If you don’t tell them, they think you’re not noticing and all the easier for them. Well, I spoke to them. I was up early this morning and I came out as they were banging around and raving at each other and I said, ‘I give to the NAACP, I send out their stickers on the backs of all my envelopes and I just want you to know that I am a member of that organization and I would think that a great many of the girls in this house are members too.’ So we’ll see. We’ll see what happens now. Miss Jenson down at Sigma Kappa says she puts a quarter on the cans each collection day and she never has a bit of a problem but I told her, I said, ‘That sounds to me like someone has bullied someone proper.’ I don’t know what kind of a budget some of those women have to work with but our budget here certainly doesn’t allow me to throw quarters away like that and I don’t think you girls would approve of me throwing away your quarters like that.”

She looks at me and realizes that I’m the one she does not care for. “Aren’t you going to get dressed and sing in the Serenade with the others?” she asks sharply.

“No,” I say.

“I suppose I should say, ‘Aren’t you going to get undressed and sing in the Serenade.’ ” Her head shakes heavily.

“No. I have a cramp.”

“You always have a cramp,” she says, chuckling. “You always look as though you have a cramp. You haven’t ever understood the idea behind sisterhood. Generosity of time and talent. Co-operation.”

She climbs the back steps into the house and just before she opens the screen door she says, inspired, and without turning around, “You are a cramp!”

I go over to the garage and look through the dirty panes at Corinthian. He sees me and raises his chin. I unbolt the door and go inside. I latch the door from within. Just a little hook and eye. The leopard is much smaller than he appears in Bryant’s. His paws, however, are the size of buckets. His flanks rise and drop imperceptibly. Around his neck is a light strong rope that’s been wound with purple velvet that the girls bought.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come out to get you,” I say to Corinthian.

He rubs softly at a bloom of scale on his jaw. He is so slim and peeling down to nothing. A suffering novitiate. “Did you forget?” he asks.

“I remembered when you were almost here, I guess.” It is not so bad that I forgot to get him. He is here and isn’t that the point? I sit beside him on the floor and open the box of cereal. Count Chocula. Some gruesome kiddy fare. The leopard shuts his eyes, deep in an animal music.

“That girl Cords came out in a van for us. She is a menace on the roadway. She doesn’t know her left from her right.”

“That’s Cords,” I say. “It’s a persistent mannerism.”

“It’s just in the last few minutes that he’s calmed down.”

Curiously, the leopard does not seem out of place here. He has made a jungle of the close air. A terror grips me.

“I’m sorry!” I say, panic-stricken. “I’m sorry!”

Corinthian stares at me wonderingly.

“I am a very easy driver,” I say more quietly. “I am very sorry that I didn’t come out to get you.” The terror fades. None of this is out of place. I have arranged this for Corinthian so that he can earn seventy-five dollars. He has brought the leopard down here and that is half the money and bringing the animal back is the other half and in the middle is just one minute and a half where Doreen holds onto the purple rope and walks the leopard between the singing sisters and the crowd.

None of this is the point. There is nothing in Father’s house any more. There is nothing to reconcile any more. We are all somewhere. Even the baby and Grady are not nowhere and that is not the point.

I have arranged this for Corinthian so that he can make seventy-five dollars. I have tried to be a friend and I have tried to be a lover and I have disobeyed Father who always had the point.

“I will take you back as soon as it’s over,” I say.

“I am never going to do the likes of this again,” he says. “I have taken away any little bit of peace this animal has made for himself and I feel bad. I can see that this all is beneath him when it wasn’t at all beneath me and I feel bad.”

“I’ll take you back as soon as it’s over,” I repeat helplessly.

“I certainly would appreciate that as we are not about to get into any mode of transportation at all with that girl again.”

The light has stopped struggling through the windowpanes. It’s dusk. The leopard’s eyes are open in the darkening garage, glittering and isolated. His eyes are furnished by the coming night. With the night, he opens his huge floating eyes.

Corinthian and I sit and chew Count Chocula. I know I am not supposed to be eating anything. I am supposed to be lying down with my feet elevated and not eating anything. If I wish I may fill my head with numbers or conundrums. If I wish I may keep my mind occupied that way. There is a twinge deep between my thighs. Not of pain. It is nothing. Just a ripple. It stops. Corinthian doesn’t eat any more than a handful but I eat and eat. I weigh one hundred and seven pounds. That is not enough. I have been feeding something outside myself all this time. Some famished object took its form outside me long ago. I look at my arm. It’s a stick. My legs are sticks. I do not look at my stomach. I am so forgetful I want to starve to death. I remember between swallows.

Corinthian’s hands tap the rope nervously. He shrugs his shoulders sorrowfully, thinking to himself.

“If he were free,” he says aloud, nodding toward the leopard, “he’d be hunting incessantly.” He says the word with astonishment. “Incessantly.”

The animal’s eyes are fixed and emphatic, watching the fading light.

37

I tell Corinthian to put the leopard in the van as soon as Doreen has finished her walk with it. I will get the keys from Cords and meet Corinthian there and drive him and the leopard back. We will be there before Bryant returns from Miami where he has gone to buy a monkey. Bryant would not know that Corinthian had taken away the leopard until after he returned and everything was over and successful.

“I certainly hope that it is not a mandrill that he brings back,” Corinthian says.

“I certainly hope not,” I say.

“He wants to bring back something curious and ferocious so that people will feel it would be dull of them to stay away.”

I feel the twinge again. It is hardly anything. A hesitation is all, like the skipping of a heartbeat. Think of riddles, they’ll tell you. Think of the curiosities of numbers, of ellipses and enigmas. A concern with riddles, Father told me, is permissible. The oldest riddle on record is in the Bible.

Yes, Daddy. Judges 14:14.

That’s right, darling. It is summer. I am on his shoulders. He walks along the beach and into the frigid water. I am squealing with the cold. My hands beat upon his neck. I slip off. I start to drown.

“Perhaps we can take the long way back there,” Corinthian is saying. “I haven’t seen much of this town by car. Actually I haven’t seen a bit of it by car. All the time I spend sitting in those automobiles … Now if only they’d been moving, what places I’d have been.”

I agree to his suggestion greedily. I am an easy driver and will drive till the gas runs out.

“I can’t stay away too long,” Corinthian says, “but I thought a slightly roundabout route back would be nice.”

I tell him the long way back doesn’t take much longer.

The baby is coming soon. It will be here soon. It’s not a matter of much time. But if I am not there? Not present? If I have other promises to keep?

Father, wait for me

Father, wait for me The little wombless

Who is it that has forgotton my mother?

The little wombless …

How swollen are those eyes!

Wait till the little wombless comes.

I think of Father telling me a story once. It seemed just odd imagination. I am talking to Corinthian but I am thinking of Father. I see him sitting at the open window, watching the late spring sky. The house is empty of its past. There is nothing there, but Father has bought a cradle. It has been delivered and is on the dock. He walks through the streets, holding it. The wood is light and gracefully woven. He carries it in one hand. He enters the house and chooses a room. He puts the cradle in the middle of it, where the light falls. He buys a chair, a blanket, a picture for the wall. He attaches a string of Christmas tree lights around the window frame. They cast a soft and sourceless glow such as a child might find comfort in, waking in the night.

“What’s the matter?” Corinthian is saying.

“Isn’t it about time?” I say. I hear the distant sounds of crowds and music.

“Someone is supposed to come out and tell me.” He gets up and moves over to the leopard. He rubs his knuckles down the animal’s backbone. The leopard is impassive, indifferent. “How is that man of yours doing?” Corinthian asks me.

I feel leaden. Dust motes dance around the leopard’s perilous head. Grady’s boots are in the locker but they had to cut his clothes away. The laces are caught beneath the locker door, knotted and muddy and forceful. I try to think of Grady before he was so still.

I don’t answer.

“I am going to watch the Serenade from the porch,” I say. “I’ll see you in a little while.” I leave the garage. I walk through an arc of bougainvillaea. The sky is bloody with flowers. The petals on the ground are as delicate as rice paper. I try not to step on them. I make every effort to avoid the sound of breakage.

38

I pass Cords. She looks at me indulgently but doesn’t speak. She has such curious, brittle ways — distasteful yet effective ways, for I had done what she requested. I had asked Corinthian for the leopard. They are here. I have stopped, I tell myself. I have stopped long before now, but the decisions I cannot make continue, subtle and unslaked.

In the bathroom, one of the girls is shaving off some of her pubic hair. She puts the bottoms of her bikini on, frowns and shaves off a little more.

I sit on the porch swing beside the housemother. She smiles at me gassily. Her lipstick bounces disembodied. The crowd mills about wooden and impatient, waiting for action. On the lawn is a deputy sheriff. It is Ruttkin. I lean forward.

“Ruttkin,” I whisper, “hello.”

He looks at me with a friendly lack of recognition.

“How is Ronald?” I persist shrilly.

This time he does not look at me.

“Do you know that young fellow?” the housemother says.

“I guess they all look alike in the dark,” I say. It seems the punch line to some joke. The jokes themselves are hardly necessary any more. The endings will suffice. I feel so heavy. My legs feel buttoned up in mattresses. Think of quizzes of all sorts, they’ll tell you. Keep your mind off the pain.

The answer is the time taken for the fall of the dashpot to clear the piston is four seconds and what is the question? The answer is when the end of the pin is approximately inches below the face of the block and what is the question?

Grady, Grady.

“These young fellows are the salt of the earth,” the housemother is saying. “My husband was an auxiliary highway patrolman and he knew them well. He always told me they were the salt of the earth. It was his life being in the Auxiliary. He was in the Legion too but that meant nothing to him. He only stayed in the Legion so he could be a member of the Auxiliary. Every Monday night and every Thursday night for fourteen years. They had uniforms just like the deputies but a little lighter, just a bit of a different shade. And that’s how I like to recall him best. Going out of the house in the dignity and responsibility of that uniform every Monday and every Thursday night.”

Her dog is between us, trying to bark at the crowd. The housemother swings forward and raps him on the head. He sits down and then lies down, resembling a rag.

All along the street, the girls from the various sorority houses are dancing and singing. Rented spotlights play across them, slide up the rococo buildings and empty themselves in the stars. In the South, there are men that rent these spotlights, big ones and little ones, surplus from wars and airstrips and stadiums. They carry them on flatbed trailers attached to ’62 white Cadillacs. These men can always be reached. In the South, there are always men available in white Volkswagen buses who will give you a blood pressure reading for twenty-five cents. These men are always present, though not obviously so, soliciting your desires.

The housemother and I sit on opposite ends of the swing. She is a tub and I am a stick, yet I hold my own end of the swing down. It is the baby that is accomplishing that. I imagine the baby inside me feeling long and tight and smooth as an ear of corn although actually I feel no such thing. I am detached, unanxious. I watch the men on the back of their white Cadillacs pan the spotlights past the sly faces of the crowd and rest inquisitionally on Corinthian Brown.

“They’re showmen those people,” the housemother says irritably. “They’ve always got to get into the act. There’s not a bit of reason for him to get into the act.”

Corinthian stands implacably in his T-shirt and work pants. The light picks up the hectic disorder of the hollows of his face and his face seems to be galloping toward some terrible realization that his body hasn’t reacted to yet, but he is motionless in the light. And the leopard beside him, as always, is motionless, although its tail is flickering in the air, showy as flame, but that movement does not alleviate the stillness as much as it reinforces it.

“Once I went on a tour of Beautiful Homes,” the housemother says. “I can’t imagine now why I ever bothered. I’ll never do it again. The silliness of those people with beautiful homes! Two of them had big china animals just the size of that one there sitting on the lanais. Strictly ornamental. You couldn’t use them for a single blessed thing. Never in my life have I ever had anything strictly ornamental.”

The sisters are singing. They are in a semicircle, facing the street, their backs to the porch, in rows of two, the fatter girls in the rear, a tier of flesh mostly, sparkling like fryers in a skillet. The crowd increases. There are a few whistles, an inflexionless yapping sound of children. The spotlight fades and is put out. I can hear, it seems, its rattle as it cools.

“There’s too much money and waste,” the housemother says. “Do you know what I do? I put a little pan under the air conditioner outside my room and it catches the condensation from the machine and I use that water to water my ivy. It takes a little thought but I think anything like that makes one a better person.”

With the spotlight out, the torches are visible, tall inventions of bamboo, and palm fronds and jars of gasoline. There are smatterings of fire and light everywhere now and the crowd is silent because they are impressed. They are impressed because this is all free and yet stagey and professional. Better than New Orleans they think. They are in the darkness and they are so silent, it’s as though the street is empty. They arc being courted and they are being entertained. Their opinion is being sought. And it is better than New Orleans and it is better than Miami. They feel their presence here tonight strongly. They are speechless with their worth.

And then Doreen becomes visible in her scant outfit of fake tatters, her long hair swimming to her thighs, and there is still no sound from the crowd. She is bony and beautiful and a little foolish. Her face in the cast from the torches changes from being pretty to not being at all pretty to being clownish. It changes so rapidly. She starts to walk, very pale and absorbed and ephemeral, and the effect is winsome and lustful and lost on us. The crowd, me. The housemother says,

“I don’t believe anyone’s at their best when they’re nine-tenth’s naked.”

Doreen walks, her face, out of the light, aged and predisposed. The leopard beside her has its muzzle almost on the ground. The motion is fluid with a hasty hesitancy. Doreen walks. She looks gorgeous and sulky. Her legs rise up pure white and impossible to her manufactured little loin rag. She turns. She starts back to Corinthian. The sisters bleat,

“Doreen’s the Queen

Who’ll make you scream

With wantin’ to get to know her.”

The cramp begins again and I shift myself on the swing. The housemother gives me a sharp look. The cramp moves up and encircles each breast, like a lover might, like Grady might with his warm hands. Think of mind teasers, they’ll tell you. Think of the ingenuities of language and rhyme. Cords has made everything rhyme. Her song is a fortune cookie, a penny horoscope. Think of a rhyme, they’ll tell you, for step or mouth or silver or window. Think of things that are diversive or exceptions to the rule.

The cramp is gone and I feel nothing. I see Father. It is summer. He brings a baby down to the sea. He sprinkles water across its sleeping eyes. The sea is opalescent with its fathomless order and law. They watch it, the baby, blind and cautious and still, and Father. Little flowers grow between the higher rocks. The littlest flowers I’ve ever seen.

Doreen has almost reached Corinthian. A small spot comes on again and floods her prematurely. She is handing the rope to Corinthian. We all observe the deus ex machina. The error is corrected. The light goes out. Doreen is in shadow and suggestive once more. The crowd’s breathing becomes obvious. They are aroused on all the levels of their loneliness. And now the leopard rises, moves leisurely in a tall and searing spiral and attaches himself to Doreen’s shoulder. It is as though the animal is whispering some absolute secret in her ear and the beautiful girl is receptive to it. It is as though the beautiful girl bends a little to hear it, sagging against that singular coat.

Doreen screams. It seems frivolous. She screams and screams. The leopard leaps away into the darkness. The chaos is fixed and rigid. Ruttkin unholsters his gun but there is nothing to shoot at. Everyone is moving and shouting now. Doreen’s thin scream is the current beneath it all. I sit on the swing and raise my hand to my throat. I don’t feel anything. The night offered nothing to my eyes. It took nothing from me.

39

They put me in a white room in a white bed with high sides on it so that I cannot climb out. Nonetheless, when the nurse leaves, I climb out. There is a curtain in the room and a toilet behind it and I sit on that. I think that if only I can go to the bathroom that will be the end of the terrible seizure in my bowels and then I can get on with having the baby. I cannot do anything. Nevertheless, I feel much better. I climb back into the bed.

An adult female consumes seven hundred pounds of dry food in one year. No one ever tells you that there comes a moment when you have to pass it all.

I am in a seersucker nightshirt with little blue flowers on it. A prerogative of the ward. I have another contraction. Another moment gone. Something I could reflect upon now if I cared to. I think about it in a way. I think that they do not put nightshirts with blue flowers on patients who are critically ill. Once she cut her lip while shaving her legs. Once she fell while getting out of her underwear. Now how can a girl like Doreen be all cut up and better off dead?

The nurse comes back into the room. She has white hair and a white uniform and she puts her white face very close to my own as she puts her fingers up my vagina. She steps back, wiping her hand on a tissue. “Cervix has dilated this far,” she says, holding up three fingers.

“How wide does it have to be?” I ask, though having her dawdle there is the last thing I want. I want only for her to leave quickly so that I can sit on the toilet again.

“Seven wide,” she says. “One hour.”

It was said that one of my cousins was born in a chamber pot. It didn’t seem to matter. It was one of the few stories that Father ever told me and therefore I cannot comment on its meaning. I would say, however, that it was just a story that didn’t matter much.

40

I am a funambulist, the act, at last, proceeding without interval. They’ve placed an enormous clock on the wall for encouragement of a sort, the only kind there is. Time passes. And they have nothing else to offer, no matter what they claim.

“I can see the head now,” the nurse says. “Half an hour.”

My eyes are open and I am thinking of Little Red Riding Hood. Or rather not of her, that postiche pudendum, but of the wolf. They snipped his stomach open to get her out and then they filled him with stones and sewed him back up again. And when he got up, he died. Now that is very Freudian and shows the limitations and protractions of life.

“That was a good pain,” the nurse tells me.

“I only want the bad ones,” I say.

41

There are a great many lights in the delivery room but they are not doing much to dispel the darkness. Everyone here is masked against it, protected and shielded in beautiful popsicle green. I am left to see nothing but am urged to breathe freely. The smells here are unsuitable but quite obvious — erasures, mimeograph ink, chalk shavings. There is loss, there is banishment. The world in this room is skewered with a crumbling stick. The world in this room holds no promise or danger and the only hope of my own is for expungement. At last I may be punished.…

The nurse bends over me, smelling like a pressing board and pushes away the spots that rise and fall before my eyes.

“No, I still can’t play tennis,” the doctor says. “I haven’t been able to play for about two months. I have spurs on both heels and it’s just about wrecked our marriage. Air conditioning and concrete floors is what does it. Murder on your feet.”

A few minutes later, the nurse says, “Isn’t it wonderful to work with Teflon? I mean for those arterial repairs? I just love it.”

The doctor says, “They served cold duck with dinner. Would you imagine that, please? Cold duck?”

A few minutes later, the doctor puts the baby on my belly while he cuts the cord. The child has navy-blue eyes like a foal but does not look at us, having no interest in anyone here.

The doctor’s mask does not move. I cannot see his mouth making the words but I can hear the words,

“It’s a girl,” he says.

She is a success.

42

I want to tell you something. It’s not much. The fight for consummation isn’t much.

The girl in the bed beside me says, “I lost my baby.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“I think this is a heck of a place to put me, seeing that I lost my baby. In the maternity ward. I would say that was one heck of a place.”

“There was probably a mistake,” I say. I am sorry but I do not want to hear about it. Nevertheless, I continue to look in her direction, a gesture that connotes interest. I do not exist. I have had a child. It is the seal set on my own nullity.

The girl looks at me bleakly. “They said I had lost him yesterday night.”

“I mean it was probably a mistake that they put you in here.” The pads in this ward are double size. There are four gross of them in a box beneath my bed. They expect me to bleed a great deal.

“They make mistakes in this hospital all the time,” the girl says animatedly. “I had a friend and he came into Emergency with a broken leg and they set the wrong one.”

“I’ve heard that,” I say. You always hear that.

“I had a friend and he had one good eye and one bad eye and he had to have an operation to have the bad one removed and they removed the other one instead.”

“Which one?” I say.

She raises her bed until she is almost perpendicular. “What’s your baby’s name?”

“I don’t know yet.” I am aware that I don’t bleed much.

“Well, now that’s a funny thing because we couldn’t decide on a name for our baby either. Nothing goes with Apple. I mean my name is Jane Apple and my husband’s name is Wendall Apple and neither of those seemed to fit and nothing seems to fit. So we never did come up with a name. So it doesn’t seem as bad, although it is of course.”

“What?” I say. Outside, there is a laurel tree which they have pruned devastatingly so that its branches will not rub against the window.

“Just as bad.”

“The babies are coming!” a nurse cries vigorously. “The babies are coming!”

I rise dumbly from my bed and go to the sink to wash my hands. I return, dumbly. The girl pulls the curtain between the two beds and lights a cigarette.

They wheel the train of babies down. They distribute them. Later they are collected and returned to the nursery. Then there is dinner. Then it is night. At some time in the following hours, a figure invariably appears at the doors and says, “Anything for discomfort?” No one, to my knowledge, has ever replied one way or the other.

43

The baby is brought to me shortly before midnight. She is bitter, outraged. A core of willful heat. Her head is damp. She cries without moving, without hope of satisfaction.

“Why is her hair wet?” I ask.

“It’s not wet. She’s just been crying, that’s all.”

The baby and I lie and watch the butchered laurel tree. The baby nurses, frets, sighs. We hear ambulances arriving, doors slamming shut. Once, I think we can hear a nighthawk. It is probably not a nighthawk, but the sound of a part of the air folding shut resembles one. The baby is a strange companion in the night, fixed and exciting and untroubled.

There’s always the danger of falling asleep, they’ll tell you. In nursing, one should always assume a slightly uncomfortable position, they’ll say.

We lie and watch the laurel. Figures try to rise up between the branches but I drive them away. Somewhere in this town now, there is an animal that hunts incessantly. I tell the baby this. She is dispassionate. There are some objects that are notable by their absence from the trees. There is nothing that can be done to dispatch them. Little wombless, I say to the baby, but I cannot finish. There is no finishing.

Is it over, Grady’s breathing asks.

No, I am always answering.

The baby smells like bread. They take her away, down the dark hall. I can’t think of anything right to do, Grady had said, his words rising with the engine’s singing. The driving lamps swam against the curve ahead. There is nothing that’s right that’s left to me. I touched his hand. His hand was on the shift knob, closed against me. And then his eyes closed too. But I could see myself already beyond the curve and walking. Walking away and on the road back. Even then.

44

I turn on the radio. A woman is saying,

“I hope you will not think me vulgar.”

“Not at all,” “Action Line” says. He sounds a little halting, exhausted. He sounds a little querulous himself.

“My husband can only become sexually excited if he feels that some part of his body is missing.”

“Yes,” “Action Line” says.

“A finger or an eye or a leg. I have to pretend it’s not there.”

“Yes,” “Action Line” says. “Nature is one vast mirage of infinite delusion.”

45

The day after the tragedy, the housemother is standing on a street corner, waiting for the bus. Everyone is talking about Doreen. The town, or at least that part of it which deals with the college, is shocked. The feeling is that there must be some mistake. The entire incident is outlandish and certainly will mark the end of electing queens.

The housemother has had a fascinating day in town, talking to salesgirls and waitresses about it. She has had tea in six different restaurants and is exhausted. She is uncomfortable. She stands at the bus stop in brown low shoes, brown support hose, brown skirt and brown nylon blouse. She waits like an enormous brownie.

She cannot get over the fact that this has happened to one of her girls. She never expects anything to happen to them. Those that have graduated and gone north write and tell her that they have husbands and babies and live in carriage houses in Connecticut. She wonders what a carriage house is and why anybody would want to live in one. It seems a nigger could do better than that.

Her chin begins to move up and down. It has been doing that recently. Sometimes her entire face moves back and forth as though she is halfheartedly refusing something. When she realizes that her head is shuffling around like this on her neck, she immediately acknowledges it and turns the action into something she wants to do.

Waiting at the bus stop, the housemother sadly shakes her head. Of all her girls, Doreen seemed most eligible for a happy future. The housemother is becoming depressed. She thinks of the inaccuracy of life, of the folly and injustice of it. She thinks of the greediness of people, their rudeness and lust. All those people in Miami and Mexico and New York City, healthy and wealthy and doing sick things.

She is becoming exasperated waiting for the bus. She peers up the hot street. She does not like this part of town. It is almost in the area called Frenchtown, the colored section. Opposite her is a fruitcake factory where a northern lady was abandoned by her husband two years before. He, a gentleman in a white Oldsmobile, went to park the car and never returned. People said that the lady had stayed in and outside the factory for three days, being raped casually by roving bands of youths, and then finally and alone, had taken the train back to Forty Fort, Pennsylvania.

The smell of sugar and candied fruit hangs in the air. The housemother shifts her weight. She has to go to the bathroom. In the fruitcake factory is a machine like a printing press, pushing out loaves. Farther up the street is a bar called Daddy Meaning’s. Music drifts toward her from a record player.

My mother often told me

Angels bonded your life away

She said.

Inside, men are sitting on stools, staring at a jar full of eggs.

No one walks in the street. The housemother goes over the tragedy again in her mind. She is thinking how she will relate it in a letter to her best friend, a blue-haired widow who lives in a condominium in Sun City. Last night, before the Serenade, before poor Doreen went out to wow the boys, the housemother had begun her weekly letter. She was having a difficult time. There was not much to relate. She told her friend that she had in the act caught the cook stealing a box of graham crackers and a 100-watt bulb. She told her about the new novel she was reading, a warm and tender love story (but with some dirty words) that will touch your heart. She has difficulty reading because of her eyes. Many words are not clear. She thinks she may be misinterpreting some of them.

At last she sees the bus approach. In the last few seconds that she waits, she falls. She has broken her hip. But it is not when she falls that she breaks the bone, it is while she still stands. The hip has simply worn out. It’s tired, out of calcium and out of luck. They will tell the housemother this later in the nursing home. They will reassure her that it is not an exceptional occurrence.

46

I KNOW THY WORKS THAT THOU ART NEITHER COLD NOR HOT: I WOULD THOU WERT COLD OR HOT.

I met my love in a movie theatre. A silent film. Dim interminable images. It seemed as though I had been there for hours in a plushy seat leaking out its dreadful contents. Every place I put my hand it would come away with something on it. Thread or foam or gum rubber or whatever.

It was directly after Father left. A hot day. Imagine Father coming down by train in all that heat in his black wool suit, black blouse, black hat. With only a tiny tab of white at the throat to throw the costume into relief. It was soiled. Nodules of hair low on his neck. His hair was sweetly island ragged, like a boy’s, and he smelled like a boy too as he introduced himself to me. SO THEN BECAUSE THOU ART LUKEWARM AND NEITHER COLD NOR HOT, I WILL SPEW THEE OUT OF MY MOUTH.

Grady’s dead. In the operating theatre. Men in lime smocks and a few wine vests watching from the balcony. A few women too. And I swear I saw several taking notes.

Grady’s dead. They gave me the word but not until after it had happened. I expected as much from them. I expected no better.

47

Any changes in the information on the birth certificate must be made within six weeks, they’ll tell you. These corrections will be made for a fee of five dollars per correction. After six weeks, corrections will not be made.

They have released us from the hospital, the baby and me. The day is hot and still. The sky is full of rain. Every afternoon now it rains punctually at four. There is a sale on white whiskey. There is a sale on hams. There is a dead egret lying in the gutter. A man walks past us with his little girl.

“It must of been sick or it wouldn’t have come into town,” the man tells her. “It must of been sick or it wouldn’t have been hit.” This seems to comfort the little girl. She doesn’t look at it.

The first warm drops of rain fall. A guilt beyond memory. A threat that is not fulfilled by the rain. I walk into a department store, into Infants Wear. I buy a back pack, six little shirts, three dozen diapers, four little gowns. Nothing else is necessary. The baby is so weightless on my hip. It is as though someone has bandaged the crook of my arm.

We leave the store and walk through the rain to the grocery. I take a cart. We orbit through the aisles. Behind the delicatessen counter is a man in a white apron, packing potato salad into a plastic bowl.

“They got that nigger,” he says to his customer.

“Thank God,” the customer says.

The man in the apron bends over the counter and looks at us. “Why if that ain’t the cutest child I’ve ever seen,” he says. “Lookit all that hair.”

I wheel the cart back through the aisles. I have forgotten something. We travel past the same foods and bottles and boxes again and again. I have forgotton something irrevocable. I put a jar of peanut butter in my cart, a loaf of raisin bread. I have a great desire for ice cream. I must have ice cream. But I have no place to go. It will melt before I get there. My forgetfulness! The cart wobbles. The wheels will not turn. I abandon the cart and get another one. Blame must be placed. One of us has made a mistake. I put in another jar of peanut butter, another loaf of bread. The wrapper is torn. There is a small scissure in the crust. I continue shopping. There is bubbling in the canned fruit. There is movement in the yellow corn meal. There is sugar on the flour and glass on the cream pies.

I release the cart. Something terrible has been happening. Someone is responsible.

What have they done with my Grady? I ask this now but I did not ask it then. I had just been released, you understand. I inspire innuendo, if not slander, I know. But the door closed behind me and the tumult, before it did, only served to stupefy me. The paperwork, the bills that must be satisfied, the statements that must be signed. And I wanted to ask. It was up to me to contact the proper authority, I know, but the context of their conversation precluded it. There seemed no way it could be brought up. And it was not simply a question of transition or tact. I have difficulty in keeping up my end of a doctor’s dialogue. There seemed no way it could be phrased in a meaningful fashion. And then the door closed shut behind me and they watched me from the air-conditioned inside until, I suppose, I was out of their sight.

Lost. The heat followed me in a small traveling stream of silence. The baby’s eyes were squeezed against the sun. Her diaper stayed dry for hours and hours. Gone. In what parasitic place.

I did not ask a soul. And the accident was not mentioned. I never saw his friends after the accident. Even if I had seen them, the Fern Fellow and his wife, they probably would not have referred to our absence at dinner that night. They would have been hurt and insulted at our failure to show up. The man is particularly sensitive to slight. He would have put our unused glasses and plates back in the cupboard without a word. Larger servings for themselves would have salvaged the evening nicely.

I did not ask and no one spoke of Grady. Nothing on the radio. I gave them a day. I confess I expected some report, if only a line. The first night there was nothing. The second evening, I caught my Answer Man, my Action Line chum saying,

“The zone of life, the area which not only all that live and breathe and move inhabit but in which all vegetation is contained is a mere twelve miles.”

I turned it off, feeling a bit mollified. One has to learn to deal with the unspoken. As it turned out it was the only information offered. The newspaper was indecipherable as always. Something about a traffic light erection. Something about children milkeholics. Our own story was lost in overset I suppose, but I should have inquired further.

Thrown back upon myself, upon my own devices, I went to his room. 17. It was empty as I feared. I lay on the bed for a moment with the baby, although I was not tired. When I got up, I smoothed the sheets. I do not mind criticism but it seemed important that I leave the room at least the way I found it the last time.

They released me in three days. I might have mentioned it. Another holy number, fixed as any race. Its implications arose immediately. Father would have noted it. The three that bear record in heaven and the three that bear witness on earth. I could go on and on. The angel flying through the middle of heaven said, “Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of earth”—and three angels were yet to sound their trumpets and by these three, fire, smoke and brimstone, was the third part of men killed, and those not yet killed failed to repent of three things, their sorceries, fornications and thefts. And three unclean spirits came out of the mouth of the dragon, and the dragon and the beast and the false prophet constitute three.

Oh, I could have gone on and on but the door closed behind me. And I realized I had failed to ask where they put my Grady. In what terrible cold ground, his sunny arms.

48

I have left something behind. I have lost something and cannot find it. I am in a grocery. I clutch my stomach but the baby is in my arms. My hunger leaves me forever. The meat bleeds into the freezing coils. Body hair falls from the endive.

Everyone smiles at me as I start to leave. They smile at the baby. I am calm, for the baby has pinned my hands fast to her round chest. I pass the delicatessen. There are other customers now but the mangier is the same. He throws corned beef onto a scale.

“It’s just as well he won’t be seeing court,” he says. “It’s just as well for him it was done quick rather than long.”

“More mercy shown to him than to that lovely girl.”

There’s a woman there so short her head hardly musters past the onion buns. “Onct lovely,” she corrects.

“That’s right,” the man in the apron says. “They have got to take the skin off the tops of her legs and put it on her face.” He looks at me. “That sure is a cute new baby,” he says, “fresh out of the oven.”

Lost. The blood is pounding in my head. So thirsty. And they’ve shot all the poor beasts, I’ll learn as well. Carriers of disease. Torn the place down. Nothing to it. Dry wood termites. Seven minutes with two sledge hammers. The air has to turn no corners out at Bryant’s any more.

The rain has stopped and hasn’t left a trace upon the town. The heat is smothering. I walk outside and right away into a liquor store. Men are sitting at tables drinking blend. I buy two quarts of gin.

“Barfield must have been practicing because he only fired but three times.” The rhythm of the man’s words is soothing and confident. The sweat dries upon my lip.

“He only fired but three times,” he croons. “The first shot got the nigger in the knee but he kept running right toward Terry worse than a mad dog. And the second shot got him in the other leg and then he went screaming and foaming and then he started crawling toward Terry and the third shot got him right in the rig and that was that.”

The bartender coughs, jerking his head at me. The men shuffle and cough.

“You want anything else?” the bartender asks.

“Where can I buy a train ticket?” Milk is drying in dark circles on my blouse. In dream, the baby jumps a little in my arms.

“Right here,” he says. “I can sell you one right here to get on the train. And then when you get on you buy another ticket for wherever it is you want to go.”

“How much is it now?” I say.

“Fifty cents,” he says. “You only need one. A baby in your arms don’t need a ticket.”

“I suspected it,” I say.

49

The quickening train speeds past the junk yard. Pressed back against my seat, a Jaguar is in my range for just a moment, a Jaguar traveling toward me from the very edge of Glick’s boundaries, from the very corner of the world, through the flowers and the sparrows, its doors peeled off, its trunk and hood indecently flung open, caroming sideways. Broken. Gone.

My head rests on a clean white napkin. The baby is nursing. Fifteen minutes on the left. I shift her to the right. Ten minutes. She falls asleep.

Her cheekbones. Her cheekbones are Grady’s, I think sometimes. But I’ve left that all behind me, the bringing up of things that were. I won’t bring them up again, I assure you. Grady and Corinthian and Mother and baby and sister and others over the years that I haven’t kept up with.

People go, you know. It’s only you that remains. That’s the way it will be. That’s certain at least.

It takes years to learn to be still.

At another time, for instance, you might have expected something to fly up from that wrecked Jaguar as we passed. Butterflies perhaps. Or insects. But there was nothing. Nothing.

I run my fingers along the ridges of the baby’s cheeks which are high and hard. She opens her eyes, her deep and perfect eyes that don’t believe in anything.

A man in a uniform comes down the aisle of the car, an employee, asking me my destination. At another time this might have led to something. But I am still now. I am collected and the baby’s head is cool upon my breast. I feel cool all over from the baby’s head, and I tell him. While he is punching out the tickets, I say, “I’m going home.” I smile. I take money from my pocket. I am a young mother going home. A satchel beside me filled with simple necessities. Clean and cool, my hair combed nicely, my little baby with a yellow ribbon on her wrist. I am calm and neat. The baby is powdered and her diaper is tight and white and dry. I am responsible. A good risk.

“Well, that sure is nice,” the man says. “That’s what’s so satisfying about working on the railroad. You take so many people home.”

“It must be very rewarding,” I say.

“It sure is,” he says. He goes to the only other people in the car, a man and woman sitting several seats away. They buy a ticket for a place a hundred or so miles up the line. The woman has a bag full of hamburgers. She has a long and nervous and aggressive face. The man is handsome, with a generous suffering mouth. One can tell immediately that something is wrong between them. Something empty, long familiar to them. The woman takes a small bite from her hamburger, looks savagely at the bun, takes another bite. She pushes the mutilated hamburger into the man’s hand and turns away from him, watching the fields and the muckland soar by. The man eats the food slowly, looking straight ahead. He is facing me. I can hear his dry swallowing. I can see his eyes. Just before he finishes it, his wife opens the bag and takes out another hamburger. She begins to eat it, but becomes bored again, annoyed, punitive. She hands it to him to finish. The process is repeated again and again. Tears begin to roll down the man’s face.

I know that nothing is expected of me in this situation. I am well groomed, sitting straight, holding my baby, going home. There was a time when I would have offered myself to this man. But now I see the impropriety of it. I see that it’s just a dream. To know that it is all dream! To know that one has become free not to enter into it at last!

50

… And I am in Father’s house at last, all the journeying behind me, all the times the others paid for. Just before I arrived, my Answer man was there, but the words were gone, as I knew they’d have to be, and his head, wide as the night sky, became the night sky at last, as I knew it would.

One more thing. When I arrived at the house with Father at the window, I found something, some small mammal on the lawn. Recently dead. I was relieved. If I had arrived sooner it might have still been hopelessly surviving, in need of action, of some sort, on my part. One cannot simply put an injured thing in the shade of a bush if convenient or turn its head to face its nest if ascertained. One cannot simply do that. I am grateful that the choice continues to be not mine. Some would call it luck, I suppose. I would not.

Father has the baby now. He is downstairs with her and I am upstairs, resting. I can hear him speaking with her. At another time, I might have thought the sound was only wind. But here there is no wind. It is a still summer night. Even the sea is silent.

I lie on the bed. I banish each thought softly. There are no more memories to resist. There is only the baby. I think of her with abandon but then more and more carefully. I remove everything but the fact of her. She is outside with Father, swimming in his arms. I let that go. I let almost everything go. I concentrate upon something deep within her, deep within all that remains after I have let everything go. I am left with almost nothing, but I enter it. I enter it.

What peace.