Middle C (44 page)

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I don’t know what I’d do without me.

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That Portho person took out a dirty blue bandanna to wipe the chair he’d chosen as if it were the seat of a public toilet.

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The pencil’s point should not be too fine. Otherwise it will scratch the paper and leave a trail that no eraser can rub away.

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I don’t like weather you can’t put a name to.

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Nobody has worked harder to get nowhere than I have.

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I hear that during the Depression famished poor kids used to eat library paste in their art classes. If you’re hungry enough you’ll eat earth. I wonder what sort of sounds they make, those inflated bellies? Do they growl? squeal? Can they catch cold? Can they cough? Not in the library. Of course anything you can hear in here I hear.

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I’m told your concerts in the church basement are pretty pop, Marjorie said, with an inquiring smile. I’m told you play gospel, too, as if you were born to be black.

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Good boy.

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I’m not sure I like the way you listen, Joey. You let me talk about myself until I feel bad.

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I never had it in for her, you know. My eye just caught her picking up the pennies and peering at the dates on them … or she was looking for Indian heads. So what, I thought. Until I caught her sneaking a dime from the overdue box. I bet she bought gum. We used to chew a lot of gum in here, we got so bored sitting at the front desk like an ink pad, you could have filled sacks with our yawns, but when I took charge I put a stop to it because it set a bad example for borrowers, you know, put ideas in their heads, we had enough trouble without aiding any of it, it didn’t need any aiding, so I put a stop to it. Full stop. To it.

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I hate Kleenex. If you blow your nose you put your blow in your purse. But no. Into a library book the soiled fold goes, stuffed between pages and infecting the words. Tissue with lipstick on it wedged between pride and prejudice. Pardon me, Joey, but you know what they can wipe with it.

•

Before me, nobody thought about things. She didn’t. She sat here and smiled, stamped your book and smiled, said, Have a wordful day. Her smile was wan, though, with no conviction to it, not even a smile-filled smile, just a little twitch that widened the mouth, disturbed the lips. Wan, I would say it was. And have a wordful day was said in a whisper, as if it were between her and the book. Me—I have my great gray eyes. I look you in the face to say my say and I say sometimes, Have a nice day, okay, sometimes that’s what I say, I remind the moms, the kids, the occasionals—This book is due the twenty-first, remember—but you never know, I might say, Go away and jibber your jabber elsewhere, babble to your chums of your little life and loves, make out in the car, Carl—was that the skinny redhead’s name? who taught—would you believe it?—fencing.

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I aspire for you, Joey. I have hopes.

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I hate hairpins. I’ve got plenty of hair. People who come in comment on how plenty. No pins. Not anywhere. So where do these little wires end up? They end up keeping somebody’s place in somebody’s book. Put a crimp in the page. Scratch the paper. Ugly things to find in the midst of your reading like a fly in the ear. They don’t own the book. It’s not theirs. So what the hell, they think. No need to care.

•  •

I took out a penny for a postcard. And that Marjorie Bruss slithers over and says, I saw you, I saw you take money from the overdues. I say, I need a penny for a postcard. Not from the overdues, you don’t, she says. Just consider it, I say. Just consider what you’ve said—how silly it is,
how childish, not to say cheap, how niggling, that is the word, niggling, petty, that is the word, how petty—and aren’t you sorry now you’ve said it, because it shows off your soul, as if your soul were out walking and it were Easter.

But she says she’s going to report my actions to the library board, so I inform her that there was only one action in question, but her plural suggested others. Well, she did have others in mind, plenty of others, my improprieties, to report. That’s another reason why I call her Major. Oh, do they? don’t they? will they? won’t they? put people on report. They wear white gloves that hunt for dirt like pigeons peck crumbs. Have you a dossier, then, on me, I ask her, and she says right back and boldly in my face, Oh yes, I’m keeping accounts. That’s in the plural, too, I remind her. Neither of us has ever married. Notice that, dear, I ask of her, which sets her back, back in surprise she is rudely taken. Her face starts to redden, and I understand reddening to be a warning. Everyone knows why I’m not married, why I’m a librarian. They look at me and know, but you, Missss Brussss are well made, have hair, and speak easily to the world. What could the reason be? For our joint chastity? I am a witch, Missss Brussss, as anyone can see, but you are a bitch, as everyone will learn. Well, Mr. Joey, at that she screams that scream she screams, and I know I have added one more rude word to her report.

•  •

You think you know what the life of an old maid is like because we are well represented in commonplace literature, in commonplace movies, in lady mags. We are leftovers from the Victorian family album, the homely sister who never hears a marriage proposal, who sits at home for dances, at parties leans against floral walls, is always a help around a complacent house, hair in a net as if each strand were a fish.

Yes, well, we aren’t alone there, most of us, at home sweet home, we are taking care of Mother, whom we have to dislike, it’s tradition. Father always dies first, like the first-picked fruit, and Mother languishes for years in an upstairs chair while her virginal daughter sits by her tatting and occasionally chatting but mostly glumly waiting out the silence through which Mother dozes between jolts of blackberry brandy.

Well, I like my little lonely world where I can keep my secrets and my skirts and my scrapbooks to myself. I liked sitting at the front desk, filing for future reference what everybody in my community was reading
and noting who is a sound loan risk and who is always tardy and who tries to escape the overdues even when only a few pennies are at stake. I didn’t shush. The Major does that. I didn’t stalk the stacks like a policeman on patrol. The Major does that. I didn’t read the riot act to every moist-nosed grubby-fingered kid who comes within my hearing. The Major does that. I lacked a stamp.

I kept my wits about me, though. I kept my counsel. And in my apartment, just three rooms, one is reserved for concocting spells. I also make my own valentines, Christmas cards, and those that wish ill people well and those that anoint them with a curse, as well as little stuffed figures I pretend to puncture with pins. The pleasure is not major, but it is quietly lasting. It cools the soup spite spits in. But I am speaking far too frankly, more and I shall have to prick myself—ha ha—ha ha—you see I am not serious about any of this, none of it is really true. And these days, Joey, how are you?

•  •  •

I sing one language Mr. Skizzen, but I speak several, depending upon the circumstances, just as I hold down several jobs in several different towns. I speak teddy bear, just to cite an instance. I can make my words as white as marshmallows. I can niggerate so thick you’d think I was from Africa last minute or a tar pit in Haarlem. As well as all seasons of speech in between depending on the climate in which I find myself. Honey, you are a baby in this world and don’t know how to howl yet.

•  •  •

We is a bod-ie. When we sing, we is one heart, one heart the shape of one lung, we make moves froms the movies, we sway, we shout it out, we clap the beat, we unison ourselves right into reality. We casts spells. And that’s how I sells cars.

•  •  •

I know all about the geography of money.

•  •  •

People call me Witch Hazel. I sorta like that. I rub myself all over with the stuff. What a lot of me there is. You know, you play better when you just play. My husband used to say my ears looked like my head was melting.
You hold your ears in as if you had just heard something alarming. He’d say, Hazel, you can sell anything. You have a nice dark-chocolate tongue. He died of his weight and I expect to die of mine.

•  •  •

I can be aggravated, but if I’m aggravated, I make sure, right then, that the causes are aggravated back. Even if it’s a fender. Rusting when it shouldn’t, like this morning in the wet air, overnight it seemed, and it was there, orange as the fruit, a wide patch like you’d sew on pants. Damn bad for business. Baked bad, the paint was, on it. So I scrape off as much of the color as I can with a finger file. I swear at it, too, a long complicated swear that would have peeled its paint if it weren’t orange as orange gets already. Poop. I’m nice in front of you. You such a baby. But don’t aggravate me by bawling about life. I’ll send you to sit my teddy bear. My teddy bear, darlin, don’t care.

•  •  •  •

You just fuss and find fault, Joey, I know you from womb to past noon, from even when your father lay upon me, if you can bear the truth. Well, I bore you and so I know you. Maybe I’m the only one who knows you because people think now you are a mal—a malcontent—a malcontent man of middle age—well, when you are really old the way I’m supposed to be really old, you know how harmless your kind of malcontentedness is.

But your seed started me off down the garden rows, remember? Your packets of alyssum and other scrounged stuff you gave me for my birthday back when you hadn’t a penny for a pinch of sugar even, well, who knew what it would lead to, me with the spoon digging in the dirt like a child, but it was the miracle of that gift that gave me the peace your father took away from us all when he—they say here—vamoosed, a likable word. You helped make that maternal me you see in the garden, caring for my little sweet things and my big shameless blooms on stalks thick as thumbs. Your father, God rot his soul, used to walk me through the city gardens when we were—when I was betrothed, and in the hillsides, too, he would say the names of the flowers as we passed, the little yellow flavorings that came up between the sharp white rocks like surprises in the spring.

My plants are fastened to the ground. I like that. There’s no running off out of my garden except by the butterflies and bees, and they come back again as soon as they get thirsty. Then when all my beds are quiet—when there’s no humming or buzzing or waving from the breeze—and the heat is even heavy as the past is—all my beds are still green.

So you should be nice to your sister, Joey, even if she’s making a profit from potatoes because she is growing good things, too, or her husband is, since he’s always in the fields with poison to protect them. He and poison do make a pair, don’t they? Handkerchief across his face like a bandit so as not to breathe the foul fumes. But I say who can complain when it is beans and potatoes he is doing? who can put that profit down? so long as he’s there to spoon his soup and comes to bed like a person prepared to sleep, because most men aren’t like you, Joey, devoted to your mother the way you are, and I love you for it, God knows, though gardener you aren’t, but a man of peace and steady as a broom near to hand. You’ve done well by yourself and by me, with an upstanding reputation at the college, yes, you’ve grown respect, and that’s a splendid proud crop, Joey, no backseat to take there, spreading music around, too, like peat. Who knows what will come of it?

Then again it rains on sodden fields. Then again the rabbits make their meals out of my asters. Black spot and beetles, worms and rots and weevils, cut my yields. It rains on wet beds, on sodden fields. There is a sudden uncalled-for freeze. The daffs are snowed on till the stems bend, weary of the feathered weight of all those flakes. Then again the blooms brown beneath the relentless sun. Day after day goes by dry. Then again there’s hail. I want to cry and you don’t carry any sympathy for me because you think everything I do is futile, my trees and bushes fruitless as rocks. The weather will always worsen, you say. Due proportion is impossible, restraint, proper measure, are never nature’s way; it’s either heavy stillness or brief tornado. It’s either rags or riches, you say, while I curse the four corners of the sky, each one a
Karlkrautkopf
. Ach, but then again, Joey, in every year comes May.
Gott!
what did I just say? In every year May comes.

30

Some of us used to wonder whether the human race would escape the consequences of its own folly, but now we worry that our species will somehow go on indefinitely regardless of how wickedly it behaves
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This world is made of three kinds of stupid. The commonest stupid is so stupid it doesn’t know it is stupid but is content to be stupid; the second sort is the stupid who denies it is stupid and claims to be wiser than whiskey; the third bunch is convinced it is stupid, too, but knows it knows that much and wisely fears the worst. Among the stupidest of stupids, not knowing any better, a few will luck out because they won’t have the wit to perish properly
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Once upon a time there was a professor of music whose best instrument was hypocrisy, and who pretended to be concerned about the fate of the human race, when, in fact, he hoped it would vanish from the face of the earth the way a fog dense enough to obscure the landscape slowly diminishes, rising like steam from a damp land, so that the earth could smile again as it must have once, in the days of simple cells, titanic trees, or even reptiles with necks grown long in order to reach the leaves
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Joseph Skizzen wanted to go into his mother’s garden and shit upon the ground, but he realized that his shit would only aid the garden’s growth. Moreover, what he wished for was impossible because he could barely think shit let alone say it let alone deposit it or even shush it before it became evidently present
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The crucial problem facing any parasite is the health of the host upon which it feeds, whose substance it steals, and whose balance it upsets, because on the day that the host becomes a husk, sucked dry as dust, the parasite must be prepared to live on small bites bitten from itself, something the tapeworm may not be prepared to do but which the human worm has practiced its entire span, gnawing on the sweet knuckles of its young, cutting into small squares many of the members of its presumptive community
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