The Night Singers (11 page)

Despite the virtues of this invigorating work-out, I find my glance wandering toward the fashion show. Toward the plump blonde in black lace exercise brassiere and stripped pedal pushers. The young Islamic woman performing jumping jacks in baggy sweatshirt and black scarf. Isn't she baking in there? Then there's the brave, solitary man in his veteran university shorts and threadbare t-shirt. Concentrate, I scold myself, zen into an alternative state. Attitude. You in your body. You are your body.

When I return from Circuit Class, a pouting Marta stands by the locker, dripping from her yellow stripes onto the floor.

My first thought is not about this little one, but about Mrs Hanson, whom I haven't seen yesterday or today. Is she OK? It's too early for her San Francisco trip, right?

Soon, Marta's sullenness fills the room.

“What's up?” I ask.

“Nothing,” Marta mutters, wringing the purple rubber swim cap in her strong little hands.

Marta's mother shrugs and returns to her heavy textbook.

“Didn't you have a good swim today?” I try again.

Silence.

Suddenly, I remember. “Did you make it? Did you swim from one end of the pool to the other without stopping?”

Head down, Marta glowers at her turquoise toe-nails.

“Answer the lady,” instructs Rosa gently.

“Stupid!” exclaims Marta. “What's the point of getting all the way across? You just have to swim back.”

Grinning, Rosa encourages, “It's the next stage in learning.”

“You can't talk,” Marta snaps, “you won't even stick your foot in the water!”

Often I am given free reminders like this that I would flunk motherhood. How will she answer?

Rosa is spared because a tall, red-haired woman has just appeared from the shower, a white towel around her waist. We are all surprised by the left side of her chest, by the long red scar, the missing breast. Marta moves forward for a better look. Rosa and I glance away, maturely pretending to busy ourselves with important thoughts. Marta continues to stare and when I turn back, the woman has noticed Marta. She bends down to the little girl and winks. Marta puts her hand over her heart and winks back. They both break into wide smiles.

It is the last day of August and I am leaning on the registration desk renewing my membership, when Mrs Hanson hobbles up behind me to sign in.

“Hello! I was worried,” I say hectically, then note the cane. “Oh! Are you OK? What happened?”

A little fall, she explains, as we walk gingerly together toward the locker-room. I hold the door open, wincing at her ragged gait. She'll never make it to San Francisco at this rate.

“Your grandson,” I ask. “Did you visit him?”

Deftly, she slips into her waterbird suit. “Well,” she sighs, “there's good news and bad news.”

I hate this expression, but have never heard it uttered with Mrs Hanson's charming fortitude.

“The bad news, of course, is the fall. I had to postpone my visit until December.”

I nod, waiting.

“The good news is that he's taking me down to Disneyland for Christmas!”

“How wonderful,” I say, that and a few other empty phrases, as she proceeds purposefully with her cane toward the pool.

My favourite class is step aerobics. Maybe because the teacher plays Aretha and Bonnie Raitt and La Belle. Never before have I felt graceful. Yet here I accomplish knee lifts, hamstring curls, side leg lifts, V-steps, diagonals, L-steps, repeater knees, side lunges, back lunges and turn steps. Before joining the gym, I lived in my head, which seemed roomy enough, with space for yesterday, today and tomorrow, but I couldn't go back to residing there full-time. Not now that I've located all these bones and muscles, some of which I know by nickname: abs, glutes, pecs, lats.

While my classmates' speed and strength can be amazing, the most impressive folks are the rubber people. I watch agog as they stand up straight, bend at the waist, and place their palms on the floor. Some women sit on the mat, hold their legs wide apart and put their arms flat on the ground between their knees. Then there are the neck stretchers. How do they get their ears to touch their erect shoulders? You'd think a librarian's head would be heavy enough to cooperate with gravity. I'll never be Ms Pretzel, but I am pretty good at the stand-on-one-foot-and-bend-the-other-back-to-your-bottom routine. My balance is improving and I enjoy the pull on my “quad” as I now fondly call it.

After all that fancy stepping, I deserve a long shower. Melting under the hot water, silently humming a new Queen Latifa song, I am blissfully alone, but surrounded by other women washing and shaving, by mothers cleaning children's ears, teenagers shouting gossip to each other over the noise of the pipes. Showering is the simple, perfect pleasure.
Paradiso
… Ah, divine heat massages new, old muscles; cleansing water sprays away the dregs of menstruation, the sweat of anxiety and exercise. I shampoo my grey-blond hair and feel face, shoulders, body growing relaxed and alert. A sudden image of Mom in middle-age—emphysema, arthritis, migraine headaches, complete set of ill-fitting dentures. Did such a memory provoke my brother's birthday gift?

“Hi!”

A small voice interrupts the drying of my ten exceedingly clean toes.

“Hi, yourself,” I say, “how's it going?”

Marta waits expectantly. Finally I look up, notice Rosa standing beside her in a glossy red swim suit.

“You?” I ask.

Marta answers for her mother. “She promised.”

Rosa renders her characteristic shrug.

“She promised once I made it across the pool, she would come swimming.”

“I said,” Rosa corrects her nervously, “I would stick my foot in the water …”

I begin to congratulate her, to say something motivating, and then realise I can't say anything at all because I am on the verge of tears.

Rosa saves me, “Eh, I figure, at my age, it's about time.”

Japanese Vase

“You look good,” he says, “Slim. Well.”

The first words to his daughter in four years. As he collapses in the overstuffed chair, she notices that he is not well. Not slim. Two-hundred-fifty pounds on five foot ten. All these years his weight has trailed her like Claudius. She is sad, repulsed, confused that she could ever have been so fearful of this man, her father.

He plops a packet of snapshots on the coffee table and surveys her apartment. He takes in the Indian wall hangings, small Guatemalan rug, purple gladiolas in the plum Japanese vase.

Does he remember the vase? Does he remember when he brought it back for her in high school? Or was it college? She does not remember.

He regards the vase, puzzling. When he notices her noticing him, he shifts his glance.

“An electric typewriter,” he says, considering her neat desk from a distance. He will not go closer. He has never intruded. “But I guess you need it for your work.”

Can he imagine the months it took to convince herself that she needed an electric typewriter to be a good union organiser? For surely she could organise on the falling-apart model from college with the semi-colon missing. Easy enough to insert that extra dot over the comma. How many semicolons does a good organiser need in one day?

“Yes,” she says, “it's useful.” She sweeps her blondness back in the plastic clasp. Strawberry blond, like his hair before baldness invaded. “Would you like an omelette or scrambled?” she asks knowing already that an omelette will be too effete and trying to recall how much milk to put in scrambled.

He follows her into the kitchen, with a cup of black coffee in his hands. He tells her how he is canning tomatoes. And cactus pickles.

She cannot believe that the soldier has retired to a farm. Now he lives in the desert alone with his dogs. Labrador retrievers.

Glad he is talking because she could never cook and talk at the same time—how had Mama done it with six kids underfoot and always hot food on the stove—she listens hopefully in between his words.

As she butters the muffins, he watches, fascinated, like a native of a foreign planet. Finally, he says, “You use real butter.”

She wants to explain that she bought it at the Coop where it's almost as cheap as margarine. But a suspicious smell invades from behind and she makes a mad rescue of the scrambled eggs. Not enough milk after all.

“Good grub,” he flatters from between loosely fitting false teeth that make her think, oddly, of a clucking hen. “Just like Mama's.”

He is lying. For eggs like Mama's he should visit Carolyn or Anne Marie or Ellen or Sarah. Even George cooks better eggs. But visiting George would expose him to more than electric typewriters and he could never admit his own son was a Buddhist. Why was she the one he always chose to visit?

“English muffins,” he says brightly.

She is touched by how hard he is trying to be pleasant, attempting conversation. “Remember when we used to get raisin muffins at the day-old bakery?”

She nods, thinking about the brioches and croissants to which Kent has introduced her. She made a special trip to Safeway for these standard English muffins and she doesn't want to feel guilty that they are not day-old. She sips her coffee and tries not to cry.

Sensing her silence as boredom, he picks up the snapshots. Two black retrievers on the front lawn of his desert home. Frisky and Miranda. Both females, but one slightly more androgynous. The back garden overflows with peppers and melons and—ah, yes—the cactus.

How can he live in the desert?

He is eating another muffin. His fifth. “Better to serve too much,” Mama would say.

He carefully wipes jam off his thumb before passing a beautiful picture of the desert in winter.

She digs out photos of recent Christmases with her sisters and their husbands and children. Brother George is off on the sidelines, a bow around his neck, clowning under the tree. Or pouring himself a drink in the corner. She notices that George is always alone. And she, being the family photographer, isn't in any of the pictures.

The family—so much family talk—perhaps this makes him miss Mama.

“My work,” she offers, “is going well. We've organised three companies of office clerks this year.”

He tells her how the union is screwing him out of a pension.

“I've more or less settled down,” she says, glancing inadvertently at the Japanese vase. “After all those years of organising around the country I got tired of motel rooms.”

“Yeah, you can get dysentery from the water in those places,” he says. “You know I had another bladder operation?”

Why does she want to smash that damn vase against the wall? Who cares why? She'll do it when he leaves. No, perhaps she won't. For she doesn't own anything in which flowers fit so well.

He pulls out another snapshot. Frisky and Miranda by the flagpole. “19.95,” he says with satisfaction, “on sale at Sears.”

Sears. One of her earliest memories is set at Sears, searching for her father lost among the long male legs at Sears in Hackensack.

He looks at his watch. “Gotta go,” he declares abruptly.

Does her face betray disappointment?

“You remember Bo Bo,” he hesitates, “stationed in Nam with me? Lives in Baldwin now. Old soldiers having a drink together this afternoon.”

She nods to knock back the tears.

“Nice neighbourhood,” he notes on the way downstairs. He is much more talkative going down than coming up. “You get many coloured around here?”

At this moment, Juana emerges from the ground floor flat.

He blushes and looks at his shoes.

His daughter notices these shoes are the same old kind with perforations on the top. Very forties. He has always worn such shoes—from Sears.

“Will you take our picture, Juana?” she asks, handing her neighbour the camera. “Will you shoot us together?”

Impermanence

Enthroned on four pillows atop a motel dinette chair, Sophie stared into the bathroom mirror, imagining an exclusive beauty parlour. The bright cosmetic lights revealed a pleasant face, until she was provoked to smile; then the braces betrayed her. Nice skin, her mother always said, “Nice skin is a blessing. Perhaps you're too young to understand.” Such comments drove Sophie wild. An honour roll student in seventh grade, she already had a year more schooling than her mother.

Recently, she discovered the perfect riposte, “You're too old to understand.” At this, her good-humoured mother would roll those brown eyes. Sophie had large blue eyes. Her nicest feature. She didn't care for the long nose; these lips were OK. But her hair—that was the most maddening, neither curly nor straight. It was almost 1960; the times called for style. “Cute wavy hair,” her mother said. “You'll be grateful one day.” Another condescending adult phrase. She shifted impatiently on the unsteady pillows—what was taking her mother so long?

Today was Tonette Day. While her father took Dan and Jimmy fishing up the coast, Sophie was going to receive a long-awaited Tonette, “The home permanent gentle enough for a girl's hair, yet magical enough to make her feel like a woman.” Frankly, Sophie thought she was ready for a Toni, but her mother seemed nervous enough about this juvenile version.

Sophie noticed grey clouds reflected in the bathroom window. This overcast day in the middle of their week's vacation on the Oregon coast seemed perfect for “the ritual”, as her sarcastic brother Dan called it. Dan was leaving for the University of Washington next year and liked saying unusual words in snide ways. She didn't know what he had to smirk about since he spent hours hogging the bathroom, oiling and combing curls that draped his forehead in a bad Elvis imitation. Probably he was making the most of his hair while he had it, worrying about inheriting Dad's bald spot. Sophie used to kiss her father good-night on that tiny, soft dot of skin at the back of his head, but lately the spot had expanded and Dad cringed at her gesture. Now she opted for a more conventional cheek-kissing, right next to his eye, above the painful fence of stubble.