The End (27 page)

“We’ll buy him peanuts that he likes.”

Mrs. Marini and the boy were connected temperamentally. She had a keen sense of justice, as did he. She had the snapping of a clothespin; he had the opening and closing of the icebox door, a waste of gas she would not have indulged for anyone else. The connection antedated his birth and had its source in events and confidences of the kind that her profession had taught her to inter in deep caverns, so far out of day-to-day reach that it required no effort to keep them there.

(The events that had led to Lina becoming pregnant with the boy were such a confidence; however, Lina’s specific reasons for refusing to dispose of him when he was still only a germ were not. It had seemed to both Enzo and Mrs. Marini the only unobjectionable course. If Lina had run away in shame at that time, no explanation would have been expected of her. Instead it was as though she had waited to disappear until no one could have imputed to her any motive other than supreme egoism.

“Aw, Coco,” said the glib ghost that pretended it was her husband, “takes one to know one.”

“How about you give me a whisper of fellow feeling for once?” she exclaimed. “Will you never understand me? Carmelina was my heir. She wrote
herself
out of
my
will. On a whim. How absurd.”)

“If you had the sort of car in which it’s appropriate for four people to ride at the same time,” Mrs. Marini said, “I admit I would have no quibble. But you have the truck.”

“I’m going to eat one of these bananas,” Ciccio yelled from the kitchen.

Patrizia lowered her voice further. “I want your best behavior,” she said.

“I have mortadella in the drawer on the right on the bottom,” Mrs. Marini yelled back.

“Save your rotten-egg throwing for at least a month. As a favor to me.”

“I don’t see the bread,” he said.

“A month?” said Mrs. Marini. “A month from now she’ll be hunting seals in Norway.”

The train waddled north out of the soot-smeared green dells above Pittsburgh into the familiar flatland, in the direction of Erie, Pennsylvania, where the woman would transfer to a two-and-a-half-hour westbound into Ohio.

She asked a cadaverous young man who was reading the Book of Mormon across the aisle if he had any cigarettes, but he said he didn’t. She tottered into the next car, scanning the seats for a prematurely wrinkled face. The other passengers glanced at her and looked aside. Finally, an army private gave her a Chesterfield but claimed to have no matches.

Her husband, from whom she was estranged, detested Chesterfields. He would indiscreetly leave a room in which Chesterfields were being smoked. In the dining car, she got a light from a girl behind the counter. The canteen was closed for business. They were only a few miles from Erie. Nobody was in the car but the two of them. The girl was perhaps twenty-five years old and wore a golden yellow turban tied in front with a knot that was like a French crescent pastry. She wheeled a bucket from behind the counter and then pressed with her foot on the lever of one of the castors and locked it in place.

“Missus, don’t you have a handkerchief ?” She sighed.

The woman was sitting at a table by the window. She shook her head no.

The girl yanked a handkerchief from her pocket—it was clear the embroidery on the edges had been done by hand—and waved it at her. “Now, that’s fresh from my iron this morning,” she said, “but I guess you’ll keep it.”

The woman said, “Thank you,” and wiped her eyes and nose, preparing to be softly but aggressively pitied and then to be evangelized.

The girl only commenced mopping the floor.

Later, in the station in Erie, the girl came up to her again and asked passingly if she had a while to wait. The woman said she had two hours, yes.

The girl sunk her fists into her coat pockets and blew a long breath through her teeth. The turban had gone a little crooked. They both stared up at the estimated times of arrival and departure, the platform numbers, the destinations. The girl, keeping her eyes on the timetable, cocked her head and asked under her breath, “Missus, don’t you know you got that dress on backwards?”

He opened the icebox. He closed the icebox. He was alone in the old lady’s house. He listened to the noises when he (a) pulled back the handle, releasing the latch; (b) broke the airtight seal that the weather stripping around the door formed; (c) pushed the handle forward again, lowering the latch; (d) tossed the whole apparatus away from him, the latch relatching and the seal resealing simultaneously.

He allowed the mind to unravel. He allowed it to think whatever it wanted. Then he pierced it with the sound of the icebox door. He tried to synchronize the noises with the ticks of the clock. He watched as the mind organized itself around these sounds,
click
by
whomp
by
click
by
whomp,
until all other thoughts became inaudible.

It wasn’t really working. Usually it was a surefire strategy for quieting the interior clamor, but not today. Now Ciccio had blown so much time working on his head that he had just two hours left.

He picked up Mrs. Marini’s phone and called Ricky.

Shortly thereafter, the two of them were coasting down Chagrin, Ricky steering, Ciccio on the rack behind the seat with his feet out to the sides for balance. It started snowing again—great clumps of snow flopped onto the street.

“You were at the farm this whole time?” Ricky said.

“I told you, ass.”

They dropped the bike in Ciccio’s driveway and went in through the back door.

“Off with the shoes,” Ciccio said.

They took off their shoes.

“Now,” Ciccio said, “you’re going to keep your mouth shut about this, got me?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“I’m serious here,” he said, although Ricky was to be trusted.

“I said okay, fine.”

“The train’s supposed to get in at five forty-seven. Give them till quarter after six to make it back. We have ninety-two minutes to clean this dump up.”

When the conductor called out “Erie Station Tower,” the woman got off the train. She could see them out of the corner of her eye, two old ladies in black scampering toward her like ants, from two o’clock, about fifty feet distant. She looked away to the left. She pretended to search the faces where she knew they weren’t, pretended, for about five seconds, not to hear that one of them was calling her name, and held tight to these last moments of strangerhood.

The fear of being called by name in a crowded place.

She stood fast until it was no longer plausible that she couldn’t hear them, and then for one second longer. The dread of the faces that knew her face. Then the faces themselves, taking her in.

There she is. The hair is different, it’s faded. You expected that. Mercy is to be resisted at all costs. Make the face. Just like that. Freeze your jaw in exactly that position. Do not lift the eyebrows, your wrinkles will show. Giddyup. Don’t let Patrizia get ahead of you. It’s not faded, of course, her hair (she’s coming into focus); it’s part black and part white.

Hold the face.

There she is.

Here she is.

She’s skinny. Outside it’s New Year’s Eve, with the snow squalls aswirl and the bone-chilling temperatures, and yet she has no coat or hat or earmuffs. Her dress, which she isn’t wearing so much as it’s hanging off her, is yellow with blue stripes and is hideous and unironed. Her shoelaces, however, are double knotted the way you showed her. The skin of the face is the color of an undershirt that needs bleaching. The skin of the neck has begun to pucker like a sock that’s fallen below the calf. You fail to detect remorse in the eyes, in the mouth, or in the posture.

But now here she is, face-to-face. You take her hands. You feel the presence of sex in yourself as an infected organ, and you want to open up your flesh and cut it out.

You struggle to steel your resolve. You struggle to keep at the forefront of your mind the senses in which she is at fault, but here she is, face-to-face, and you are forgetting all of them but one, that you are a
me.
And I have a face, too, see it? And I was left behind.

One thing.

One enormous thing that had included her but didn’t now. It broke apart and came together again in a smash and broke apart continually. Each time it came together again, a small part of it wrenched itself away.

What became of the part? It traveled through empty space. It was not aware of any trajectory.

What had become of her poor father? No one had even heard a word.

What had become of her?

The woman had redepicted in her mind certain moments from the past so many times that it was impossible to distinguish the moments as they had happened from her remembering of them: Imagine a house repainted with a hundred thousand coats, under which the original wood has rotted away; and yet the house still stands, composed now entirely of paint. The moment itself may not have mattered anymore. It may have been trivial to begin with, but the act of redepicting the scene for herself, changing it each time over decades, had trained her thoughts around a central mystery in it.

In one such scene she was a girl standing under the laundry line on the packed dirt of their yard, a clothespin between her teeth and her father’s wet undershirts hanging from her arm, when suddenly the projectionist of the film of which she was the subject changed the reels. There were two projectors, the second standing at the ready for the proper moment, and the change was seamless, but she had noticed it. She had entered an infinitely precise model of her own backyard, but she knew all the same that she was not in the same
place.
Whatever underlay seeing, hearing, smelling, whatever people meant when they said the laundry basket was “over there,” whatever they meant by
there,
had changed.

And then again, behind the wood shop at a missionary school where she had worked until two years ago—it had looked like Wyoming and smelled like Wyoming, but she knew she wasn’t in Wyoming, she was in a place not far from where she was standing right now on the platform, in this city.

The way people didn’t mean the same thing when they said “location” as when they said “place.” They said “place” meaning the self of the location.

The present scene risked someday becoming one of those scenes. It was moving too fast, she wanted to slow it down. She had exactly one chance to witness it as it was taking place. Not even one. Her painting of it would become all it was.

The women approached, and Lina turned and looked at them. Her mother’s eyes were so hidden behind the bloated lids that it was doubtful whether she could see anything. Mrs. Marini’s eyes were enormous behind new, thicker glasses, her cheeks and lips and eyelids and eyebrows made up in a way that made her look like a grim clown, her mouth quivering. Lina was astounded at how old they were. She was astounded that she even knew who they were, because they looked so different now.

The way people said, “she,” “you,” “I,” and they didn’t mean only bodies or faces, they meant
her self, your self, my self.

And she could tell they were doing the same thing she was doing. They were looking for the self behind her changed face, as she was looking for the selves behind their changed faces.

“You look like disaster,” her mother said.

Mrs. Marini took Lina’s hands in her hands and then took Lina’s head in her hands. The old woman’s little nostrils opened wider; her lips flared, disclosing the gray teeth. Lina watched the eyes go opener, everything open, the face unmasked and savage. The old woman pulled Lina’s face to her face still closer. Maybe Lina was about to be bitten on the face. The wet breath of this woman on her skin. Lina’s own eyes going crossed. Then trying to pull away and the old woman yanking her face back closer still, to the face that belonged to the self of this person she had gone away from.

14

T
hey walked out of the station. A crowd of smartly dressed Negroes was milling in Public Square under the candy-cane Christmas lights and the plastic holly boughs that were stapled to the trees. Snow was falling. In the center of the square stood a greenish black monument in which life-sized soldiers were carved wearing the garb of the last century. Some held rifles and some torches; others appeared to be tearing up a railroad. Perched atop the monument’s pedestal, a woman in stone, dwarfing the soldiers and the people in the square, gripped a sword in one hand, while in the other, the palm upturned and limp, a clump of snow had amassed; one of her breasts was exposed. At a corner of the square was a dais and banner that Lina couldn’t read through the darkness and the snowfall. They turned onto Coshocton Street, which led to the lake several blocks below, and the wind crashed into them, and the snow fell harder and laterally.

She was clothed for springtime and it was snowing, but she did not feel cold. The cloud cover was complete and low and orange with city light. Her mother was wearing a translucent plastic babushka. Mrs. Marini wore nothing on her head but a huge nimbus of a wig, which was snow speckled. Lina felt the snow melting on her shoulders. It stuck in her eyelashes. Her nose began to run. They walked in the street, using parked cars to steady themselves. The wind fell off momentarily. The snow continued to come down. She was going to have to see the boy soon.

Her mother drove them east, out of downtown, pulled into the parking lot of a VFW post, put the truck in neutral, and stomped down the parking brake, waiting for a snowplow to tail home. She asked some desultory questions concerning Had the trip been very long, Was it warmer in Pittsburgh than here, How about a little lip gloss on that kisser.

Mrs. Marini sat dumbly between them, crouching, sucking her teeth. The inquisition was coming, the target was within range. Lina perceived this as you perceive an invisible pursuer hunting you through woods in a dream. She was to be peeled and butchered; her parts would be arrayed, trimmed of fat, spitted, roasted, and consumed.