Fruit of the Month (18 page)

I played the usual game with Carla, I simply told her we were leaving but then went on as if no such thing were happening. One evening that week, I dropped my daughter at a friend's house for dinner and stopped for a red light. Winter was coming, the traffic was slow, a near-freezing mist dropped out of the sky. David was home, putting dinner in the oven. As was usual during the final days of packing I was feeling impatient, so instead of waiting for the light to turn green I turned right and found myself on Carla's street. There I parked the car and made for her house, head bowed against the wet cold.

Carla's was a three-family house with a common entry. From the vestibule, where the families stored their tricycles, strollers, and boots, stairs led to the upper apartments, but Carla's door opened directly. Ordinarily it was left ajar, so that Carla had a view of who was coming and going, and so the upstairs tenants, on their way into and out of the building, might stick their heads in Carla‘s living room to see what was on TV. However, on this particular evening the door was closed. The vestibule's ancient radiator hissed and spat, and the damp, floppy linings of the unzipped boots steamed.

Removing my gloves, I knocked on the door and waited a minute. Nobody came. Then the radiator clanged and was still, and in the sudden quiet of the hallway I heard the children yelling, and Carla's own shouts clamoring above them for control.

“Well then, bring Lizzie your truck and then you can play with hers.
No, Theo
. I am
not
going to dry your hands, you're big enough to do it. This is crazy. She's not accepting it. Stop elbowing!”

Soon only one child screamed, the youngest. But the others never quite stopped jostling and whining, and I swear the door vibrated under my hand. I could feel Carla's patience waning.

So I opened the door and stepped in. It seemed the natural thing to do. At once I yelled, “Hello,” and took off my coat and draped it round my shoulders. I nearly overlooked Carla's husband. He was slouched in an armchair. At first I supposed he was sleeping. But he was watching the television set, which wasn't on. He ran splayed fingers through his hair, drank beer, and sat there and did not acknowledge me, while in the adjacent room the skirmish renewed itself.

“I said stop elbowing,” Carla pleaded, and the baby screeched with new force and astonishment. Something fell with a clang. Carla's husband drank away the head of his beer, then wiped the froth from his mouth with a sleeve and vomited. In a minute I was back in my car, sitting in the dark. “What gets me is this,” I said later to David, over our dinner. “Did he come home and get the beer from the back porch and pour it into the glass himself, or did Carla pour it for him? Did she have it waiting for him when he got home? But there's no place to put a glass of beer in a house like that without knocking it over.”

David chuckled. He had just told me that we weren't moving after all, not this week anyway, or the next, for he had been placed with another crew. Yet still I felt geared for the move and hoped vaguely not to see Carla again. When she phoned I went over there and said in an offhand way, “I came by the other night but the kids were screaming. Mike was watching television.”

“Puking his ass off” was what Carla said.

In January Carla had a yard sale. The sale took place in the vestibule, since there was snow outside, but the sale goods spewed into the living room as well, making it difficult to discern exactly what was for sale and what wasn't. Carla seemed actually to decide these things on the spot, at the very last minute. When someone asked if she was selling the couch, she said, “Oh, no”; then, “Well, how much will you pay for it?”; then, “But I can't sell it. What would I tell Mike?”—because Mike was not supposed to know about the sale at all. He was squandering their money, in Carla's words. “He's squandering me, too,” she said good-naturedly. The children had been ill through Christmas and kept Carla awake for nights needing rocking and stroking. Throughout, Mike dreamt with his head down under the sheets as if nothing could move him, and in the morning he told Carla his dreams. He said he'd dreamt she was thin, with a feather cut. Then he gave her twenty dollars for a dress to be bought when she'd lost some weight, and ten for the beautician.

“Ten!” Carla yelled.

She put the two bills inside a Whitman's chocolate box, fastened the box with a rubber band, and hid it, like a dog burying a bone.

It was the meagerness of this stash that encouraged Carla to plan the yard sale. Of course she had no intention of cutting her hair, which was coarse, long, and fuzzy with red highlights flashing fitfully, like sparks from a bunch of live wires. Nor did she seem to care about losing weight. The yard sale, she supposed, would provide her with several hundred dollars, and when she had this money, she would know what to do with it. Something long-term, she speculated. I feared she would bury it along with the rest, to be lost or thrown away by mistake. However, I was discouraged when only forty-two dollars' worth of stuff had been sold by noon on the day of the sale, and I stared around, hoping to find something to buy myself.

There was nothing, really. A heap of tenty clothing: smocks, caftans, voluminous duffel skirts and flimsy robes, all with failing seams, torn hems, loose buttons, and stained underarms, all Carla, Carla, Carla, as if she were still inside them, their pockets crammed with tissues and pistachio shells. Also stacks of mismatched dishes, lidless pots, and bent frying pans, all incongruously mixed, the boots with the pillows, the jars crammed with skeins of yarn, costume jewelry draped round the handlebars of a tricycle. I hit upon a thirty-cent sewing kit, containing several needles, some pins, no pincushion, no thimble, a few spools of pale tangled thread. For my daughter Jennifer, I thought. I'd give Carla a dollar and tell her to pay me back later—she never would.

Carla was laughing it up near the cash box, shaking the coins and chatting merrily with her customers, about childhood illness, crayon marks on plaster walls, burnt tea kettles, any number of small disasters. I had a premonition—there are people to whom bad things happen as a matter of course, and Carla was one of them.

Up I went with my traveling sewing kit, for I thought of everything in those days as a traveling this, a traveling that, and gave her the dollar, but Carla folded the dollar and handed it back, saying the kit was mine, she had meant to give me something anyway, for Christmas. Merry Christmas, she said, but I was not embarrassed for her. I looked at the kit and saw what I hadn't noticed, that the faint orange thread was not orange at all but a yellowed, aged white with a certain luster, really a lovely thing, like antique satin.

As I walked through the vestibule, I smiled; I imagined myself saying to David, “Come look at this threadbare thread,” so I was smiling when I saw it, among a jumble of toys in a cardboard box. My Kouvalias. How abandoned it looked, the string from a pull toy tangled round the springs, but in good shape, really, still glossy and bright. The tag read three dollars. I brought it to Carla, just for a joke, to maintain my good spirits, and said I would take it.

“Oh, I can't tell you how much it kills me to have to sell this thing,” Carla exclaimed. “I was hoping that no one would buy it! But come to think of it, three dollars—I don't think three dollars is enough for it, do you? It plays music, it's sort of an heirloom—I think five dollars, actually.”

“Carla …” I said, but she had wound the Kouvalias and held it high above her head so the others could hear, and sang along as usual; then, seeing my look of consternation, she said I could have it for four, a compromise. However I had only my dollar bill and a five. I gave her the five. Carla gave me the change in all sorts of nickels and dimes. Still I stood there, absolutely speechless—Carla could not bring herself to part with the toy. In fact she was so emphatic that I wondered if she knew. I had to wait until somebody purchased a lamp, distracting her, at which point she placed the music box on the table and I snatched it up and escaped. I was thinking, “You jerk, you
jerk,”
but I didn't know if that referred to myself or to Carla. At home I set it high on a shelf, not to be touched until several nights later, while Jennifer slept and David lay in bed, waiting for me. I prized that hour, when I alone was up, damp from the shower and dressed in a robe and slippers. Then I roamed from room to room and felt how glad I was. The rooms were brushed with quiet, neat and still. I did not turn on the lights, but the night sky glowed beyond the windows. There was the Kouvalias, so I wound it up and listened. A note was missing! It was the first syllable of “Monday” that was gone.

About this I complained on and off throughout the months: I should never have allowed her to take it, the children must have played handball with it, it was ruined, what a jerk I was, what a jerk Carla was.

Still, years later, if I wound the Kouvalias, I heard not the song but the missing note, like a gap in time and space, a brief, pinging silence.

I saw Carla only a few times more before early spring, when David and I moved away. She had made ninety-odd dollars with the yard sale, and with this money purchased a collection of unstrung beads from the estate of a deceased jeweler. Most of these beads were of glass, their insides awash with smoky whorls. All were quite old. A few were flat white and resembled melon seeds. Oddly, these delicate, modest ones were Carla's favorites; she had dug them out first, and strung them simply on strands of nylon thread, the clasp fashioned out of a loop of this thread and a seashell.

When Carla first showed me the beads, pulling open pouch after pouch behind the laundry area in the basement of her apartment building, she had not quite decided how to go about selling the finished product. In fact, she wore them herself, string upon string upon string, with a low-neckline blouse, so that the beads converged and fell between her breasts and disappeared. Carla laughed when she explained to me that Mike in his troubled state had failed to notice them. Mike had nearly lost his job, so he had cut down on his drinking, but still mooned about and slept defiantly in his armchair right after dinner. He seemed to have no interest in life, Carla said sympathetically. At night, if the children slept, Carla made her way down to the basement and stayed sometimes an hour, sometimes three, stringing beads with the aid of a naked bulb, her threads and pliers hidden in the shadow of the clothes dryer as it rumbled and spun. Now she pulled a length of thread from the spool, looped it round my neck to find the proper measure, cut it, knotted the end, and strung with intermittent bursts of concentration a Baggie-ful of multifaceted globes, clear like prisms, of diminishing and then increasing circumference, so that the smallest were in the center and the largest at the clasp. This unusual necklace I imagined wearing against bare skin in summertime, wherever David and I might be, in a city, I imagined, perched on a fire escape to watch the sun go down, our paper plates balanced on our laps.

However, the beads were not for me—they were for Christopher Curtis, who lived in the would-be parking lot. He had noticed Carla wearing her beads, come up, and brazenly pulled them from their hiding place, so that they popped out of her cleavage one by one.

“That I couldn't believe!” Carla said. “I kept waiting for him to put them back. So anyway this is for him. He can give it to one of his pricky girl friends.”

Then Carla put her linger to her lips, and the beads round her neck, for we were climbing the stairs again. Mike was not supposed to know about the hundreds of beads, because he hadn't known about the yard sale. How was Carla to suspect that a week later he would get it into his head to do a load of wash? Probably a guilt trip, Carla said. There he found the beads, the sacks and sacks, the finished strands wrapped up in scraps of velvet along with Carla's scribbled notes and the receipt from the jeweler's estate. How red in the face he was, when he finally came upstairs and threw beads like confetti round the house, out the back door like birdseed, and the rest in the garbage with an endless clatter. Oh, he was angry, and he wanted to know where she got the money. She said she'd borrowed it from me. So Mike came to our house and banged on the door, just as we were finishing our packing. We were to leave the next morning.

“Don't expect her to pay you back,” he was yelling.

I assured him I wouldn't, for I knew what must have happened. Then I tried to shut the door, but in he came asking for beer. I sat him down with David in the kitchen, at the table piled high with our stuff.

David calmed him, I don't know how. They bitched about jobs, I think. I went next door, for our telephone had been disconnected, and called Carla to come and get him.

Carla said she couldn't, the children were asleep. Then she said, “Oh hell, I'll come, they'll survive,” and showed up after nearly an hour.

“You gave him a beer,” she said, and smiled slyly.

I smiled back.

That was good-bye.

Houston isn't really like the world at all, because it's hard to think of people actually living here and carrying on in normal ways when every time you turn around there's some cheap steak house with a giant plastic cow suspended above and in the distance or just around the corner a neon hamburger blinking like a UFO. The place isn't zoned, and the highways aren't wide enough to hold the traffic, and the trees are too small—they look like weeds. But there we were, David and I, making the best of things. David had a job that paid for some technical schooling, and I found myself manager of a shop that sold the kind of necklaces that Carla strung. Ironically, I thought of her every morning, faced with tiers of funky earrings and bracelets of dense, hammered brass.

The shop sold stationery also, in tutti-frutti colors, and boxes of notecards featuring elaborately attired penguins. For Jennifer I would take home a package of Raspberry paper, along with Lemon envelopes, contenting myself with the notion that my daughter would not be like me, with no one to write to, a history of casual friendships vacated like rental houses. In fact I began to suspect that it was not the friend that mattered but the habit of friendship, which followed me wherever I went, to be picked up where it had been left off but with some entirely new person. Already I'd discovered this person in Houston, a girl who worked in a bookstore down the road from my shop, who interested me precisely because we looked so much alike and were so alike in style. Unfortunately, I did not really like her. I found her too cool. Still, we met for lunch and sometimes walked each other home along the sunny, impersonal streets, trying to talk about things that mattered. Once, when we were to have lunch together, I was thrilled that she didn't show up, that she had forgotten—this might be an opportunity for the two of us to hate each other. I read through the menu, glanced at the door, read the menu again, glanced again at the door, did not order lunch, just a cup of coffee, fumed when it came, sipped it, stared hard at the door, but nothing happened, my fury would not mount. I was happy to be alone. In my bag was the Raspberry bond I'd intended for my daughter, so I opened the package, naturally, as if I'd known all along that I was going to write to Carla. I wrote: “Dear Carla, Here we are in Houston, trying to make the best of things. David's in school and I'm managing a sort of gift/jewelry shop. Jennifer is fine. This is her note paper. We've taken her twice to a place called Aransas, a wildlife refuge southwest of here, where the whooping cranes do their courtship dance. You can see them from the observation tower, jumping and flapping their giant wings, whooping I suppose, although you can't hear them.”