Second Skin (9 page)

She set down the glass and filled her lungs and said: “Good God, I married him for his humor. Because he was light on his feet and light in his heart. And because he was quick and talented and because he was just a boy, that’s why I married him. Why I gave him a lift and followed him to Galveston, Texas, and married him. Don. Three dozen roses, a brand new hot plate, a rented room outside Galveston, and one day Don telling me he had been elected company mascot—what a sense of humor, what a winsome smile—and that night our celebration with a spaghetti dinner and bottle of dago red. I should have known then that it couldn’t last. My God. …”

The golden foot was struggling against mine, the perspiration was as thick as rain on her lip, her shirt was wet and through it I could see the sloping shoulder, the handsome network of blue veins, the companion to the black brassiere that was still hanging in the john upstairs. Stretched full-length at my side she was wheezing and staring into the light of the fire, and now there were dimples, puckers, unsuspected curves in the canary yellow slacks, and now her chest was maniacal, was as trenchant and guttural and insistent as the upturned German record itself. So I looked at her then, forced myself to return the stare of those vast dark eyes, and she tried to shrug, tried to toss back the thick length of silver hair, but only glowered at me out of her stricken heaviness and abruptly tapped herself on the chest.

“Asthma.” Tapping the finger, squaring the jaw, watching me. “I get it from too much thinking about Don. But it’s nothing. Nothing at all. …”

I nodded. And yet the fire had fallen in and the pot and spit were glowing and her knee was lifting. Her lips were moist, pulled back, drawn open fiercely in the perfect silent square of
the tragic muse, and I leaned closer to smell the alcohol and Parisian scent, closer to inspect the agony of the muscles which, no thicker than hairs, flexed and flickered in those unhappy lips, closer to hear whatever moaning she might have made above the racket of her strangulation.

“What can I do? Isn’t there something I can do?”

“The secretary,” she said. “Bring me the box in the middle drawer. Saucer too. From the kitchen.”

So I embarked on this brief rump-swinging bare-and-warm-footed expedition, and with the woolen pants steaming nicely around my ankles and the checkered shirt pressing against my skin its blanket of warm fuzzy hairs, I glided heavily to the little chair, the papers, the oil lamp—God Bless Our Home etched on the shade—and calmly, backs of the hands covered with new warmth, licking my lips and feeling that I might like to whistle —perhaps only a bar or two, a few notes in defiance of the
Horst Wessel
—I returned to the cold kitchen with hardly a glance, hardly a thought for the remnants of poor Pixie’s breakfast and lunch and dinner. Solicitous. Professional search for a saucer. Long-faced scrutiny of the cupboards. The hell with the nipples.

And then I was kneeling at her side, leaning down to her again with the box in one hand and the dish in the other, and though she was heaving worse than ever with her eyes still shut, nonetheless she knew I was there and tried to rouse herself. “What next?” I asked, and was startled by the quickness of her reply, shocked by the impatience and urgency of her rich low voice.

“Put some powder in the dish and burn it. For God’s sake.”

Sputtering match, sputtering powder, glowing pinpricks and smoke enough to form a genie. I tried to fight the smoke, the stench, with my two wild hands. But it was everywhere. And now her voice was coming through the smoke and for a moment I could only listen, breathe in the terrible odor, keep watching her despite my tears.

“I don’t really believe in this stuff,” drinking in enormous whiffs of greasy smoke, “but sometimes it helps a little. Don told me about it, found an ad in the Galveston paper,” filling her lungs with punk and dung and sparks, “he was such a sweet
airy little clown. Five months of marriage to Don,” swirling, sinking, drifting now on the fumes of the witches’ pot, “and then a land mine in Wiesbaden or some damn place and no more Don and me a widow. …

“I’m a widower myself,” I said, and I stood up carefully, avoided the large white hand that was reaching for my trouser leg, stared once at the little unmoving face of the dead soldier, and started out of the room.

But just as I approached the door: “Well,” I heard her say, “we’ll make a great pair.”

And when I reached the upstairs hallway Pixie was screaming in her cradle and Cassandra was wrapped in a musty quilt and stood trying to coil up her hair before the oval mirror. I heard the gasping breaths below turn to laughter and for a long while hesitated to enter my icy room. Because of the dressmaker’s dummy. Because she had placed the dummy—further sign of industry in the island home, rusted iron-wire skirt and loops of rusted iron-wire for the bold and faceless head, no arms, torso like an hourglass, broad hips and sweeping behind and narrow waist and bang-up bosom all made of padded beige felt, historical essence of womanhood, life-size female anatomy and a hundred years of pins—she had placed this dummy at the head of my bed and dressed it in my naval uniform so that the artificial bosom swelled my white tunic and the artificial pregnancy of the padded belly puffed out the broad front of my official white duck pants which she had pinned to the dummy with a pair of giant safety pins rammed through the felt. Cuffs of the empty sleeves thrust in the pockets, white hat cocked outrageously on the wire head—desperate slant of the black visor, screaming angle of the golden bird—oh, it was a jaunty sight she had prepared for me. But of course I ignored it as best I could, tried to overlook the fresh dark gouts of ketchup she had flung down the front of that defiled figure, and merely shut my door, at least spared my poor daughter from having to grapple with that hapless effigy of my disfigured self.

And moments later, scooping Pixie out of the cradle, tossing her into the air, jouncing her in the crook of my arm, smiling:
“Have a good sleep, Cassandra? Time to start the new day.” In the mirror her little cold sleepy face was puffy and pitted, was black and white with shadow, and the faded quilt was drawn over her shoulders and her hair was still down.

“What’s burning?” she said. “What’s that awful smell?” But in the mirror I put a finger to my lips, shook my head, though I knew then that the noxious odor of grief, death and widowhood would fill this house.

Shanks of ice hanging from the eaves, the wind sucking with increasing fury at the wormholes, Miranda standing in the open front doorway and laughing into the wind or bellowing through the fog at her two fat black Labradors and throwing them chunks of meat from a galvanized iron basin slung under her arm, the ragged bird returning each dawn to hover beyond the shore line outside my window, empty Old Grand Dad bottles collecting in the kitchen cupboards, under the stove, even beside the spinning wheel in the parlor—so these first weeks froze and fled from us, and Cassandra grew reluctant to explore the cow paths with me, and my nights, my lonely nights, were sleepless. I began to find the smudged saucers everywhere—stink of the asthma powders, stink of secret designs and death—and I began to notice that Cassandra was Miranda’s shadow, sweet silent shadow of the big widow in slacks. When Miranda poured herself a drink—tumbler filled to the brim with whiskey—Cassandra put a few drops in the small end of an egg cup and accompanied her. And when Miranda sat in front of the fire to knit, Cassandra was always with her, always kneeling at her feet and holding the
yam. Black yam. Heavy soft coil of rich black yam dangling from Cassandra’s wrists. Halter on the white wrists. Our slave chains. Between the two of them always the black umbilicus, the endless and maddening absorption in the problems of yam. It lived in the cave of Miranda’s sewing bag—not a black sweater for some lucky devil overseas, nor even a cap for Pixie, but only this black entanglement, their shapeless squid. And I? I would sit in the shadows and wait, maintain my guard, sit there and now and then give the spinning wheel an idle turn or polish all the little ivory pieces of the Mah Jongg set.

And marked by Sunday dinners. The passing of those darkening weeks, the flow of those idle days—quickening, growing colder, until they rushed and jammed together in the little jagged ice shelf of our frozen time—was marked by midday dinners on the Sabbath when Captain Red did the carving— wind-whipped, tall and raw and bald like me, his big knuckles sunk in the gravy and his bulging eyes on the widow—and when Bub waited on table and ate alone with Pixie in the kitchen, and Jomo—back straight, sideburns reaching to the thin white jaws, black hair plastered down with pine sap—sat working his artificial hand beside Cassandra. On Sundays Jomo worked his artificial hand for Cassandra, but I was the one who watched, I who watched him change the angle of his hook, lock the silver fork in place and go after peas, watched him fiddle with a lever near the wrist and drop the fork and calmly and neatly snare the full water glass in the mechanical round of that wonderful steel half-bracelet that was his hand.

Those were long Sunday meals when the Captain spoke only to say grace and ask for the rolls; and Bub stood waiting at my elbow and smelled of brine and uncut boy’s hair; and Jomo sat across from me, solitary—except for Cassandra at his side—and busy with his new hand; and Miranda drank her whiskey and cursed the weather and grinned down the length of the table at the quiet lechery that boiled in old Red’s eyes; and Cassandra, poor Cassandra, merely picked at her plate, yet Sunday after dreary Sunday grew heavier, more ripe to the silent fare of that cruel board. Dreary and dull and dangerous. So at the end of the
meal I always asked Jomo how he had liked Salerno. Because of course he had lost his hand in the fighting around Salerno. A city, as he said, near the foot of the boot. What would I have done without Jomo’s hand?

Family and friends, then, gathering week after dreary week for the Sabbath, meeting together on the dangerous day of the Lord, pursuing our black entanglement, waiting around for something—the first snow? first love? the first outbreak of violence?—and saying grace, watching the slow winter death of the oak tree, feeling wave after wave of the cold Atlantic breaching our trackless black inhospitable shores. And then another Sunday rolling around and the sexton rushing to the Lutheran church to ring the bells—always excited, always in a hurry, can’t wait to get his hands on the rope—and once again the frenzied sexton nearly hanging himself from the bellpull and another Sunday ringing and pealing and chiming on the frosty air.

So the gray days died away and the hours of my lonely and sleepless nights increased, each hour deeper and darker and colder than the one before and with only the dummy—mockery of myself—to keep me company, to follow me through the cold night watch. Luckily I found an old brass bed warmer in the closet behind the trunks and every night I filled it with the last coals of the fire and carried it first to Cassandra’s room, devoted fifteen minutes to warming Cassandra’s bed, and then carried it across the hall—hot libation, hot offering to myself—and shoved it between the covers where it spent the night. And I would lie there in the darkness and everywhere, except in my feet, suffer the bruising effects of the flat frozen pillow and the cold mattress, and clutching my hands together and waiting, knowing that even the coals would cool, would remember one of Jomo’s phrases spoken when he thought I couldn’t hear—blue tit—and in the darkness would begin to say the phrase aloud—blue tit—aware that in some mysterious way it referred to the cold, referred to the way I felt, seemed to give actual substance, body, to the dark color and falling temperature of all my lonely and sleepless nights. Then I would dream with Jomo’s incantation
still on my lips. And I would dream of Tremlow leading the mutiny, of Gertrude’s grave, of Fernandez mutilated in the flophouse, and I would awaken to the sound of the wind and the sight of my white spoiled uniform flapping and moaning on the dressmaker’s dummy. Blue tit. And at dawn a hard tissue-thin sheet of ice in the bottom of the basin, big block of ice in the pitcher, frozen splinters like carpet tacks when I stumbled to the bathroom to empty the bed warmer down the john. Standing in that bathroom, shivering, blinking, bed warmer hanging cold and heavy from my hand, I would always lean close to the bathroom mirror and read the message printed in ornate green type on a little square of wrinkled and yellowed paper which was pasted to the glass. Always read it and, no matter how cold I was, how tired, I would begin to smile.

I would begin to smile, begin to whistle. Because it tickled my fancy, that prayer, that message for the new day, and because it was a talisman against the horrors of blue tit and saved me, at least for a while, from the thought of the black brassiere.

So the changes of those cold days. Until the local children became glum Christmas sprites and the first snow fell at last-sudden soaring of asthma powder stench, dirty little volcanoes smoldering in every room—and the night of the local high school dance loomed out of the fresh wet snow and I, I too, was swept along into the glaring bathos of that high school dance. Kissing in the coatroom. Big business out back in the car. Little bright noses in the snow. Jomo’s hook in action. Beginning of our festive end.

“Ready, Skip? Ready yet, Candy? They’ll be here any sec. …”

Even in the cold and echoing bathroom—lead pipe, cracked linoleum, slabs of yellow marble—and even with the cold water running in the tap and the snow piling against the window and
the old brown varnished door closed as far as it would go, still I could hear her calling to us from the parlor, hear the sound of her tread in the parlor. But though her voice rose up to us crisp and clear and bold—a snappy voice, a hailing voice, deeply resonant, pathetically excited—and though I resented being rushed and would never forgive her for daring to invent and use those perky names, especially for shouting up that cheap term of endearment for Cassandra when I, her father, had always yearned hopelessly for just this privilege, nonetheless it was Saturday night and the first snow was falling and I too was getting ready, after all, for the high school dance. So I could not really begrudge Miranda her excitement or her impatience. I too felt a curious need to hurry after all. And perhaps down there in the parlor—kicking the log, sloshing unsteady portions of whiskey into her glass, then striding to the window and trying to see out through the darkness and heavy snow—perhaps in some perverse way she was thinking of Don, though her chest was clear and though from time to time I could hear her laughing to herself down there.

Laughing while I was making irritable impatient faces in the bathroom mirror. Giving myself a close shave for the high school dance. Trying to preserve my own exhilaration against hers. And it was pleasurable. After a particularly good stroke I would set aside the razor and fling the water about as wildly as I could and snort, grind my eyes on the ends of the towel. Then step to the window for a long look at the black night and the falling snow.

Wet hands on the flaking white sill. Sudden shock in nose, chin, cheeks, sensation of the cold glass against the whole of my inquisitive face. Kerosene stove breathing into the seat of my woolen pants, eyes all at once accustomed to the dark, when suddenly it coalesced—soap, toothpaste, warm behind, the cold wet night—and I smiled and told myself I had nothing to fear from Red and saw myself poised hand in hand with Cassandra on the edge of the floor and smiling at the awkward postures and passions of the high school young. I stared out the window, tasting the soap on my lips, watching the snow collect in the
black crotch of a tree—slick runnels in the bark, puckered wounds of lopped branches crowned with snow—that grew close to the window and glistened in the beam of the bathroom light, and I felt as if I were being tickled with the point of a sharp knife. Thank God for the sound of the tap and of Cassandra’s little thin shoe spanking across the puddles of the bathroom floor. I waited, face trembling with the coldness of the night.

“Skipper. Zip me up. Please.”

“Well, Cassandra,” I said, and turned to her, held out both hands wide to her, “How sad that Gertrude can’t see you now. But your dress, Cassandra, surely it’s not a mail-order dress?”

“Miranda made it for me,” tugging lightly at a flounce, twisting the waist, “she made it as a surprise for me to wear tonight. It has a pretty bow. You’ll see. It’s not too youthful, Skipper?”

“For you?” And I laughed, dropped my arms—antipathy toward my embrace? fear for the dress?—and wiped my hands on the towel, frowned at the thought of Miranda’s midnight sewing machine, stood while with straight arm and straight Angers she followed the healing needlework on my skin, traced out the letters of her lost husband’s name—did she, could she know what she was doing? know the shame I felt for the secret I still kept from her?—then by the shoulders I turned her so I could reach the dress where it hung open down her back. “Of course it’s not too young for you, Cassandra. Hardly.”

“And we’re not making a mistake tonight? We shouldn’t just stay home and let Miranda go to the dance alone with Red and Bub and,” pausing—moment of deference—whispering the name into the little clear cup of her collar bone, “and with Jomo?”

“Of course not,” I said, and reached for the zipper, probed for it, quickly tried to work the zipper. “It’s only a high school dance, Cassandra. Harmless. Amusing. We needn’t be out late,” pulling, fumbling, trying to work the zipper free, “and think of it, Cassandra. The first snow. …”

She nodded and plucked at the bodice, fluffed the skirt, put one foot in front of the other, and with each gesture there was a corresponding ripple in the prim naked shape of her back and a corresponding ripple in the dress itself. That dress. That green
taffeta. Flounces and ruffles and little bright green fields and cascading skirt. Taffeta. Smooth for the palm and nipped-in little deep green persuasive folds for the fingers. Swirling. Shining. Cake frosting with candles. For a fifteen-year-old. For a cute kitten. For trouble. Green taffeta. And when we went down the stairs together, Cassandra holding up the knee-length skirt, I following, steadying myself against the flimsy bannister, I saw the green bow, the two full yards of fluted taffeta with a green knot larger than my fist and streamers that reached her calves. Bow that bound her buttocks. Outrageous bow!

So I zipped the zipper and in the mirror full of contortion, mirror crowded suddenly with hands, elbows, floating face, I tied my tie and spread a thin even coating of Vaseline on my smooth red scalp—protection for the bald head, no chafing in wind or snow, trick I learned in the Navy—and grinned at myself in the glass and buffed my fingernails and struggled into my jacket and rapped on Cassandra’s door—exposure of black market stocking, gathered green taffeta hem of skirt, hairpin in the pretty mouth—and waited and waited and then escorted her down the dark stairs.

“Candy! My God, Candy! She looks like a dream, doesn’t she, Skip?”

Before I could reply or smile or make some condescending gesture they hugged each other, hooked arms and crossed the parlor to the fire, in front of the fire held hands, admired each other, babbled, swung their four clasped hands in unison. Girlish. Hearts full of joy. The big night. Miranda was dressed in black, of course—her totem was still hanging in the bathroom—and around her throat she wore a black velvet band. Her bosom was an unleashed animal.

“My God, Candy, we’re just kids. Two kids. Two baby sitters waiting for dates! And they’ll be here any sec! ”

“And me, Miranda?” Squirming, shrugging, raising my chin toward the cracks in the ceiling, “What about me, Miranda?”

“You?” She laughed, showed her big white knees, pretended to waltz with Cassandra in front of the fire. “You’re the Mah Jongg champion. Boy, what a Mah Jongg champion you are!”
And suddenly locking Cassandra’s face between her bare white hands, and swaying, smiling at Cassandra’s little downcast eyes: “My God, I wish Don were here,” she said. “I wish Don could see you tonight, Candy.”

“Watch out for the asthma,” I murmured, but too softly and too late because the dates were stamping on the veranda, banging on the door, and she was gone, was already rushing down the hall and kissing them, throwing herself on the sniffling figures standing there in the cold.

And under my breath, quickly: “First dance, Cassandra? Please?”