Self-Help (Vintage Contemporaries) (18 page)

Ma-om! Jeffrey lets out a two-toned groan. That’s not how it goes.

Oh, excuse me, I apologize. You’re right. He says: Let us be married, fair dozing one. And I shall make you my princess. And Sleeping Beauty says: Oh, handsome prince. I love you so. But I have been asleep for a hundred years and am old enough to be your grandmother.

Jeffrey giggles.

The prince thought about this and was just about to say, Well, that being the case maybe I’ll be running along now, when a magic bluebird swooped down out of the sky and made him one hundred years older as well, and then boy did Sleeping Beauty have a good laugh.

Did they live happily ever after?

Gee, honey, you know it just doesn’t say. What do you think?

Yup, says Jeffrey, not smiling.

Knock, knock, says Mr. Fernandez.

Who’s there? I smile, on my way home with Jeffrey. I am double-parked on Spruce Street.

Amnesia.

Amnesia who?

The moon is full is serene, wanders indolent and pale as a cow, a moon cow through my window, taking me to its breast, swaddling me in its folds of light. I leave on this moon, float out into the night on it, wash out like a wave and encircle the earth, I move with a husbandless gait, an ease about the flanks, the luminous hugeness of milk at my eyes I shift, disappear by slow degrees, travel, looking. Where did you go?

I owe. I owe the store so much money I cannot believe it. I let Amahara go home early today and then go into the back office, get the books out again, and calculate how much it has been: so much I cannot say.

At least I have done it neatly. There is something soothing in arithmetic, in little piles, little stacks of numbers that obey you.

Tuesday I stop at Wanamaker’s and pick up ruby-colored satin slippers for my mother and walk out of the store without paying for them. I then head for Mr. Fernandez’s to pick up Jeffrey. Together, big blonde, little blonde, we walk the sixteen blocks to St. Veronica’s, no need to get home early; Tom’s still in Scranton.

Sister Mary Marian is ecstatic at seeing Jeffrey again. He gives her a big juicy kiss on the cheek and she giggles and reddens. It makes me uncomfortable.

In the elevator I touch my face, touch my eyes to see if they are behaving, if they are being, if they are having, or misbehaving, miss being had. The words conflate and dizzy me, smack of the errors of my life I misbe. I mishave. Jeffrey pulls on my arm as if he wants to tell me something. We are stalled on the third floor while two orderlies wheel in a giant cart of medical supplies, glasses, and linens. I bend down so Jeffrey can whisper
whatever it is he wants to say, and with both his hands he begins assiduously smoothing my hair back and out of the way. When he has the space around my ear sufficiently cleared, however, he doesn’t say anything, but just presses his face close against my head.

Jeffrey, hon, what is it? The doors now shut and we resume our ascent.

Nothing, he whispers loudly.

Nothing? I ask, thinking he might be scared of something. I am still bent over.

I just wanted to look at your ear, he explains.

We walk in dully, not knowing what to expect. We leave our raincoats on.

Mother seems to be having a good day, her spirits up gliding around the white metal room greeting the world like pleasant hosts. And we are the parasites that have just trudged sixteen blocks, the pair of sights, the parricides.

Riva, dear, and Jeffrey. I was hoping you would come today. How’s Tom?

But I think she’s said who’s Tom and I freeze, very tired, not wanting to get into that again.

Do you feel all better, Gramma? Jeffrey asks with a yawn, climbing on the metal footboard, looking as if purposefully at the meaningless clipboard there.

Gramma just has to speak to the doctor before she can leave here, she says.

I am shocked that my mother is talking about leaving. Does she no longer think of herself as mad? As Catholic? I look at her face and it is smiling, softened like ice cream.

Mother, do you mean that? Will you come home with us? I feel equivocal and liver-lipped.

We’ll see, she says, has forever said, as I sometimes do now to Jeffrey. And yet it seems more hopeful, more certain. I feel,
however, the slow creep of ambivalence in me: How will she behave, will she insist on refrying the pork chops, will she snore unforgivably from the den?

Ladies always say that, announces my clever son. He has now wandered over to the window and stands tiptoe, just barely able to peer out at the emergency entrance in the wing directly opposite this one. Wow, he shouts. Ampulnses. Neato.

Mother, I think it would be great for you to leave here, and as I’ve said before, we would love to have you. I sit at the bed squeezing her hand, having no idea what I really want her to do, astounded at my disingenuousness—would she just watch TV nice and quiet all day on the couch?

Jeffrey is still watching things out the window, saying: They take sick people for rides, right Gramma?

I haven’t been able to stop eating. Amahara remarks today when I put three Lifesavers in my mouth at once: Boy, don’t you know it’s Lent? You haven’t stopped eating for weeks. Silence. Have you?

I am reminded of a man’s coat I bought once at a used clothing store, a store of dead people’s clothes, and how I found an old Lifesaver in the pocket and popped it in my mouth, a dead man’s candy. You’ll eat anything, won’t you, said Tom.

I am suddenly angry at Amahara. I march out wordlessly, straightening my spine. I stand next to Mrs. Rosenbaum our best charge customer and recommend the Korean paisleys while every cell in my body grumbles and gossips. Later I do a small operation with the Ann Klein receipts in the back. I will buy a new dishwasher.

I steal back into dreams of you, your unmade bed a huge open-faced sandwich. I lie back against you, fit the crook of your arm around my neck and into the curve at the base of my skull, bring your hand around to meet my mouth, chewing on your
fingers, one by one, as a child might, listening to you tell stories
.

Once upon a time I was in a strange position regarding women, you begin. I saw myself, as someone once said of Mohammed Ali, as a sort of pelvic missionary
.

Ah, I murmur. The pelvic missionary position
.

And your calluses press against my lips and teeth and your fingers strum my smile like a harp I am yours, yours, despite your stories I am yours
.

I want to diet. I want to slink. I want to slink in a mink at the sink.

Batman is giving me dance lessons again before dinner. Glide, glide, goom-bah, he says, his lithe little body cutting S-weaves across the floor. Mom, he sighs, feigning exasperation at my swivel-hipped attempt to do what he is doing. He is imperious, in imitation of his teacher, a frustrated bursitic Frenchman named Oleg. Move just your feet. Everything else will follow. Goom-bah!

Do I grow slinky? I think of carrot sticks and ice and follow Jeffrey’s lead. I am snapping my fingers, wiggling, bumping, grinding. Mom, giggles Jeffrey. That’s too kinky.

And later, alone, the night outside grows inky, like my thoughts, my thoughts.

I am dying for a Twinkie.

Tom is home tonight from Scranton. We curl up on the couch together, under a blanket, whisper I love you, I missed you, confusing tenses I think. Jeffrey comes clunking in on a small broken three-wheeled fire engine.

Dad, Mom said to ask you if I could have a BB gun.

Jeffrey, I say, flabbergasted. I told you you could
not
have a BB gun.

Your mother’s right on that score, says Tom, sounding weird—on that score, what the hell is that, he sounds like some oily sportscaster.

Geeze, mutters Jeffrey, maneuvering the firetruck into a three-point turn and back down the hallway. Fuck it damn it all, he says. I am startled.

Watch the mouth, young man, shouts Tom.

During lunch hour today I stop by Mr. Fernandez’s school. There are about fifteen kids there and they all seem quiet and good and engrossed in making block forts or cleaning up finger paint. Jeffrey looks up from behind some blocks, yells hi Mom, then resumes work on some precarious architectural project, which is probably also supposed to be a fort. I find a seat nearby and watch. Jeffrey suddenly stands up and looks fidgety, holding his crotch with one hand. Yikes! I gotta go! he shouts and bolts out of the room. While he is in the bathroom, I ask Mr. Fernandez about Jeffrey’s language, whether he has noticed anything, any obscenities.

No, says Mr. Fernandez, looking puzzled.

Jeffrey emerges from the john, pulling up his pants.

Amahara chews an office property pen and says, aw, he’s probably just reading it on bathroom walls is all.

Fuck it damn it all? He’s only four-and-a-half.

Sure, she says, absently cracking plastic between her snaggle teeth. Like: Aint got no toilet paper, fuck it damn it all. Or no nukes, fuck it damn it all. Or no nukes hire the handicapped. Or nuke the handicapped. Or fuck the handicapped, damn it all.

I make a face. Amahara, I say. You’re just free-associating.

Best things in life are free, she sighs.

With Amahara, clichés can take on epiphanic dimensions.

Best things in
life are free
, she repeats with emphasis, getting up, casting me a dark glance, and walking out the door, leaves me to wonder what she is driving at.

Tonight by his bed I discover a chewed crayon and a letter Jeffrey has written. It says Dear Jesus and God Hi.

Sunday. This cool cloudless afternoon I feel a pulsing at my neck and head and hips to escape. I drop Jeffrey and Tom off at the cinema for a Disney cartoon fest they both said they wanted to see, and I drive thirty miles or so out into Bucks County toward a gorge and waterfall I read about last summer in an
Inquirer
article entitled, “Nooks for Cooks—Great Spots for the Gourmet Picknicker.”

All the way out I listen to the car AM radio, bad lyrics of trailer park love, gin and tonic love, strobe light love, lost and found love, lost and found and lost love, lost and lost and lost love—some people were having no luck at all. The DJ sounds quick and smooth and after-shaved, the rest of the world a mess by comparison.

I have to drive a mile on a narrow string of a dirt road, praying, as my father used to say, like a goddamned mantis that no one will come barreling toward me from the opposite direction. I then leave the car parked at the end of it—along with only one other car—and walk another quarter of a mile in. The trail is black and muddy with spring and as I slop along in old sneakers, I can hear the rush of the water already just a short distance away. Slop City, Batman would say if he were here. Slop, slop.

The trail down from the woods into the gorge is veined with large knobby roots and as I make my way down along them, strategically leaning from tree trunk to tree trunk, it occurs to me that I should be thinking I am too old for this, and yet I am not and instead am marveling, marveling. The smell of the soil is wet and silty and few of the branches of the softwoods even have buds on them yet. A raccoon, elegantly striped and masked as for a small mammalian ball, has come out of the bushes and approached the creek. I make little noises at it, noises I think might be appropriate raccoon noises: a trilling, clucking
sort of chatter. The raccoon cocks its head to one side, curious. I try human language—Hey, Mr. Raccoon—and it yammers at me angrily, scurries away in a furry blur.

In the middle of the creek there are long flat slabs of slate and I can jump from rock to rock and without much difficulty land myself in the middle of the largest and sunniest of them. A few yards down, an old stone bridge spans the gorge, crumbled but stubborn, its stones chipped and spilled, its mortar cracked; it is like the weighted arc of a wise mouth, a large, tight-lipped stitch across the jagged brown banks. I turn from this, turn toward the shimmer upstream, the bright white of the water, god, the light of it, as it skis down over the rocks and ragged beginnings of mosses, all around the zig-zag of flaking shale, layered as old pastries. The light, something the article never talked about, flashing from bud and wave and ripple, everything lined and measured by it, in this sunken rip, the blinding living ice of it knocks me out, flat like a lizard on a rock I just lie here and begin to feel the sun warm my skin even through my clothes, and then I am taking them off: my jacket, my sneakers, socks, sweater, pants, underwear. The sun heats the hairs of my goose-bumps, soaks into my shoulders, the vast incontinent continent of me; sun closes my eyes, this sun, my sun. The creek roars around me, waking from winter, strong and renewed. I have the urge, lying like that, like a fat snake, to squeal or shout. I stand up and dip my right foot into the creek. No one is around and I leap from flat rock to flat rock whooping like a cowgirl. God, you devil you, moments like these I do believe are you, are gods that hold you and love you happy that’s what a god should do, hold you and love you happy someone is stealing my wallet.

Behind me there is a barebacked man in denim fumbling with my jacket pocket three rocks away.