Three Short Novels (36 page)

“What? Dolores?” her mother called, sitting up.

She fell to her knees by the bed and took her mother in her arms, and her father sat up and switched on the lamp above them.

“Nothing's the matter,” she assured them because everything was the matter but no one thing could be named.

9

T
he evening of the day her mother died, Naomi went for comfort to her brother Cort's house, knowing that no comfort was to be found there. She sat in the living room, she sat in the kitchen, she sat in the boys' room and read to them as they lay in crib and bed, she ate a small supper and drank several cups of coffee and talked with her brother and his wife, but found no comfort. Pauline was downcast and uncomfortable because she had disliked the old woman, Naomi knew, and must be feeling guilty now. Naomi saw the girl as the stranger of five years ago, and the small, forgotten discords of the girl's physical self were apparent again, like Pauline's sunken cheeks at odds with her large, round breasts. Everything, that day, was without a reason and in no need of a reason. Naomi sat on the sofa next to Pauline, and, as the girl bent forward to pour more coffee into the cups on the low table, she wondered if it were dampness that was causing the girl's fingers to curl back at the tips. Was dampness a sign of life? Like the blood, sweat, and tears Churchill had called for during the war? The pockets of Naomi's jacket were stuffed with damp tissues. The boys had come out from the bath wet, leaving wet tracks, dragging wet towels. All day she had sipped tea
and coffee, and wept because her mother had grappled with life and it was like grappling with water.

“Yeah, she had a hard life,” Cort said, over in the heavy chair. His face was long with sorrow and he couldn't look anybody in the eyes.

That's true and yet it isn't, Naomi thought. She had reminded herself during this day that there were millions of people who spent half their lives in prisons, in the places for the insane, there were men and women and children mutilated by bombings and those mutilated in their souls by cruelties, and that, back in the Depression, before the war, the hungry roamed the streets of every city, and in Europe a death corps rounded up thousands in one night. It might be impossible, she thought, to compare one person's pain with somebody else's.

“Yeah,” Naomi agreed, obligingly pondering his remark. “She sure did.”

“She had more than her share.”

“Yeah, she had more than her share,” Naomi agreed, though she didn't know what a share was, how much it was, and why there should be suffering like a law and a sharing of it.

“She expected a lot from Hal,” Cort said, his legs stretched out far, elbows close, peering into the aperture that his curled hands formed close to his eye while the other eye was kept shut.

“Yeah, that was the worst thing.”

“Jesus,” he said, shifting in his chair, his long, thin body jerking with sudden anger. “Then that guy you married! Jesus, you could've picked somebody decent, Naomi.”

Her laugh shot up out of her throat and collapsed. “When you get as old as me,” she began, twisting her shoulders like a senile coquette.

“Oh, hell,” he said. “You're not old. It's just you don't have much experience with men, and the first one who lays his hand on your knee . . .”

The restraints upon sorrowing were too harsh. The shamelessly loud cries she wanted to release would serve as her defense of her
husband. They'd combine her sorrow over the loss of him and her mother. But another laugh shot out. “Yeah, that's the way it was. He put his hand on my knee and old stupid Naomi thinks this is it, this is it.” She blew her nose.

Pauline's long, agitated fingers pushed strands of hair behind her ears. “Oh, he wasn't that bad,” she said, embarrassed by her ambivalence toward Naomi.

The boy in his crib began to cry, a sudden waking-up crying.

“You want to see if you can shut that kid up, or shall I go?” Cort asked his wife.

“Let me go,” Naomi said, rising. “I'll tell them goodnight again. Then I got to be running along.” With pinching fingers she jerked her skirt straight.

“You got a nice shape, Naomi,” he said. “You always did.”

“Oh yeah, old knock-em-dead Naomi.”

The older boy began to call for his mother to quiet his crying brother.

“You tell them both to shut up,” said Pauline, generously giving over to Naomi some authority to wield.

Naomi found the older boy sitting up in his bed and the younger one sitting up in his crib, and in the sudden light from the hallway they quieted down, waiting to be told to be quiet. She hadn't wanted to come in here again, this blue room with its pile of dirty clothes, broken toys, and the humid ammonia smell of diapers. She knew that when they were to be her age she would mean nothing to them, only a speck of an aunt in the past. “Your Aunt Naomi wants to kiss you again. She's going now.” Clowning, she gave them loud, smacking kisses.

“You want me to drive you home?” Cort asked her in the hallway.

“You stay right here,” she said. “It'll do me good to sit in a bus. People around.”

He followed her as she gathered up her coat and hat and gloves
and purse, and helped her with her coat, docile, considerate, because he had wounded her. Pauline kissed her on the cheek. Naomi had always felt intimidated by this young woman, by her uneasiness, even by her tallness. Isobel, Hal's wife, had also intimidated her, but Isobel had done it with her prim, schoolteacher ways, and most of all by being Hal's wife. They turned on the porch light for her. She stepped around a toy on the path, wondering crazily why the toy, left where someone could stumble over it, showed their disrespect for her mother's memory.

She sat at the back of the empty bus, and when she got off at the corner where she was to transfer to another bus, she went into a bar instead. In the bar's glowing, watery, slowly swirling colors, she might find what her mother had told her she would never find and that she needed now when her mother was dead—comforting from strangers. A small table by the entrance was empty, and she sat down and gave her order to the waitress, a woman her own age, with bleached hair and dangling earrings. She sipped her drink and felt the warmth spread down to her toes. The music on the jukebox vibrated along the floor. She gazed up at the hanging lamp that was like a metal ostrich egg pricked by holes through which the globe within shot out stings of light. She thought of how the life in her mother had sunk down and away, and fear of this sinking made her hand so shaky she almost knocked over her glass. She drank down the rest in a hurry because its effect was a rich swelling of life in her face and breasts and belly. She was filled now with her own presence, herself, whose eyes must resemble the lamp with the stings of light.

The man's face was at a discreet distance, but its smile brought it as close as a breath touching her face. Something was wrong with his face. The dark eyes were set too deep and one chunky cheek was lopsided, but there was a kindness in his face, elusive but there for sure. “You mind if I sit here?”

She waved him down. “You sure can.”

“You crying for your mother?” He set his glass before him.

“How do you know?”

“The waitress told me.”

She remembered the waitress's solicitous question, but she hadn't guessed that her answer would be relayed to somebody else.

“What'd she die of?” The slight Mexican accent, the quick, jerky voice—were they tricks to hide his indifference?

“You don't know a person, why do you want to know what they died of?”

“I'm sorry I asked,” he said. “A person shouldn't ask. You're right.”

She let him buy her another drink. He told her his name was Victor and that he was born in Texas, and he wanted her to guess how old he was. She squinted, guessing thirty-six. He slapped the table. “That comes of hard living,” he said. “That comes of lifting sacks of potatoes up in Idaho, comes of being in the army, comes of digging ditches. I'm twenty-seven.”

“You're younger than my kid brother.”

“Don't treat me like a kid brother,” he said, warningly. “I didn't sit down here to get treated like a kid brother.”

She listened closely for signs of trickery in the blurry accent, and she examined closely his sidewards face and the shimmery, silvery stripes in his shirt, wanting to find him reliable despite the evidence against him. When they finished their drinks she went out with him into the street, and he put his arm around her and his hand into her armpit, implying that she had to be held up because of her sorrow.

“Have you got sisters and brothers?” she asked.

“I got a kid brother in the army. I got a sister, too. Fifteen.”

“Three kids in the family?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“That's like us.”

“That's a coincidence, uh?”

“Except one of us is dead,” she said.

He said nothing, showing no interest in the missing one.

“My brother,” she said. “Not the kid brother I was telling you about, but my other brother.”

“That's terrible,” he said, his voice jerky with desire.

“He was going to be President of the United States,” she said.

“Ahhh,” he said, exhaling sympathy.

“I could've been sister of the President. They would've given me a filing job in Washington, D.C., for three times as much as I make now. That's the way you do things, you elevate your family and all your relations. I would've been elevated.”

“It's too bad he died,” he said, giving her a deft push in the small of her back, guiding her toward a doorway.

She began to climb a flight of stairs to a hallway of doors that she saw above. Behind her on the narrow stairs, he lifted up her coat at the back, but before his hand touched her she backed against the wall.

“You know what he did, I'll tell you,” she said. Her purse slipped out from under her arm as she lifted her hands to shield her breasts from his heavy face. “You know what he did? He killed himself. Now there's nothing as bad as that, is there? That's what he did to his own mother. He threw his life right back at her.”

“Come on, come on,” he urged, picking up her purse and swatting her hip with it to make her turn and go up.

“That's what he did to Mama,” she said, climbing.

At the top, she was assailed by the picture of her mother waiting at home for the wayward daughter to return sometime in the night, waiting for the daughter who was her bosom friend, her dear slave, waiting in a cold, dark house for the daughter who wasn't coming home this night. The mother would have to stay alone this night because the daughter wasn't fit to come home.

10

O
n his last day with the company, Cort Costigan came home after work, bringing another employee who had also been weeded out, and two six-packs of beer. He brought the man, who had been barely more than an acquaintance, because the other's presence reminded him that he was not the only one fired, and he wanted his wife to be reminded of it. Pauline was sitting on the front steps in the sun, absorbing sun into her long body for the benefit of the child within her. When both cars drew to the curb she watched, unwelcoming. Cort saw, from afar, her rebuff of the visitor. She must have wanted him to come home alone on this last day of his job, wanting no spectator. She spoke sharply to the kids playing in the water sprinkler on the lawn, and by the time he and the intruder had come up the walk, she had already grabbed up the younger boy and was tugging up his wet shorts, scolding him because she couldn't scold Cort.

Cort introduced the fellow, who was so shy he seemed to bend away from her. They stepped past her and the boy and went through the house to the kitchen. Cort opened two beers, and the intruder sat down only after Cort sat down, and then with a joke and a mumble.
Sprawling in his chair to persuade the intruder to feel at home, Cort wondered why the man's timidity had never been so evident around the insurance office. The loss of his job and the unsmiling woman on the front steps must have caused him to collapse.

“Let's celebrate this promotion, boy,” Cort said, and the intruder clutched at his chest, his laugh as painful as a heart attack.

They drank their beer and, in the midst of their first swallowing, began to laugh again. Cort heard his own laugh go high and wild as it used to when he was a boy. “You ever think old Snyder, you ever think old Snyder . . . ,” bowing his head to the table, covering his nose to trap the snorts inside, “looks like a fish? Like one of those brute fishes, where their lower jaw comes up to their eyes? If you saw old Snyder lying among the other fish down at the Crystal Market, you wouldn't be surprised, would you?”

The intruder sputtered his beer. “I'd say slice that one for me!” pointing with his pale, stabbing finger that had no job.

“Ah, slice it!” Cort said.

“The girls . . . ,” gasped the intruder.

“Go on!”

“The girls, specially Rosalind, the girls, all the girls in the whole goddamn claims department—bitches, bitches! The only one I like is little Susie. She wrote me a note, hey, she wrote me a little note on her typewriter, says—here, read it—says, ‘You are one of the nicest people at Fidelity. I hope you find a position you will enjoy.' ” He clutched his face, spattering laughter through his fingers. “She's fresh out of high school, she doesn't know what she wrote. What I ought to do is write back, ‘Dear Susie, the only position I will enjoy is one with you under me.' Oh, great!”