Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman (2 page)

Now, the director—a big, cheerful woman with a loud voice—was organizing attempts to open the closet. The key went in, but the cylinder flipped over and over without resistance, without catching. So many people were sure they'd know just how to turn the key that Pekko couldn't get near the door. The soup kitchen is staffed partly by volunteers, partly by people doing community service who are sent by the courts, and partly by kids from some kind of reform school. One of those—nobody was asking how he'd acquired his experience—moved forward now, and we joined the group watching him.

“I
never
put my things in that closet!” said a woman in a coat, with self-satisfaction. She could have left but didn't. The rest, a coatless group of four or five, stood around my mother, who looked out from under white curls like a wise woman, good-naturedly razzing the young man at the door. I joined the crowd. Pekko watched quietly while the young man worked a length of wire coat hanger into the disabled lock. He bent it so it surrounded the bolt inside and came out the bottom, but it didn't dislodge the bolt. “This is a good lock,” he said respectfully. The sexton arrived. He explained loudly that the door was specially braced and wouldn't come off even if the hinges were removed.

“Pekko!” said one of the coatless women—a thin white woman, maybe in her forties.

“Hey.” Pekko shook her hand solemnly. “How are you, Daphne?”

My mother got interested. “You two know each other?”

“Do you know Gabby?” said Daphne. For some reason they call my mother Gabby at the soup kitchen.

Pekko introduced me, and Daphne said to him, “I heard you got married.” Then to me, “I worked for Pekko when he had the restaurant.” That would have been twelve or fifteen years ago. When we met, he owned a frozen yogurt store.

Daphne said she was working at the soup kitchen because of a traffic violation, and I wondered if that was true. I didn't think you had to do community service for a speeding ticket.

“What are you doing these days?” Pekko said. Daphne's face was jumpy, lined by too much smoking. Light brown hair fell close to her eyes, and a skittish teenage face was visible beneath her present one.

“Waitressing, still. Whatever I can get my hands on, but that pays the best. I'm working lunches now, so I can come here in the evening.”

Finally the sexton shooed us all out. The director's car keys were in her pants pocket. Coatless, she led two people with neither coats nor keys to her car. Pekko offered Daphne a ride, and she followed us, hugging herself in the cold, while my mother came along, diminutive in my extra coat. I'm tall. Pekko hadn't had a turn at the lock.

Daphne lived in Hamden, so I took Roz home first. Pekko and I sat silently in the front seat while Roz and Daphne chattered in the back like our children. Daphne talked about her kids, and Roz volunteered facts about my two older brothers and me, as if we were Daphne's kids' counterparts, and as if I wasn't there. “Oh, Daisy had excellent teeth.”

Roz lives in a small brick house on Prospect Street. “It's too much work for me,” she told Daphne as we approached it. “It's supposedly low maintenance, but it's not low enough.” She had a contract for snow removal, but keeping up the yard was difficult. “No help from my daughter,” Roz said. “
She's
no gardener.”

“I like to garden,” Daphne said, after a pause. We had reached Roz's as yet unplowed driveway, and I drove up it. I didn't get out to help her. My mother, firm on her legs, was wearing state-of-the-art boots. “I could do your yard work,” Daphne continued, as Roz opened her door.

“You could?” she said, climbing out. She took my key to her house, and said, “I'll keep this coat for a while. I like it.” She made her way through the snow, and as she let herself in, I backed carefully down the driveway. Then I took Daphne, who became quiet, to Hamden.

On the drive home, I asked Pekko, “What's Daphne's trouble?”

“She's had plenty of troubles,” he said. He reflected for a while. “No fractures that I know of.”

“Healthy.”

“Well, I think she once had cancer.”

“That's why you shook her hand that way?”

“No, no. It was a long time ago.”

“What else?”

“Nothing else.”

“Is it all right if she does yard work for my mother?”

“I suppose. She's a nice woman.”

At home, there was a message for me on the answering machine. The last time I'd had the urge to put together a talking event, I'd gone on the radio instead of assembling a group. I'd become interested in a small, homey radio station not far from New Haven, run mostly by volunteers. I worked in their office for a while, then persuaded someone to let me substitute on her low-key, casual show when she went on vacation. So I'd done a few shows, playing music and reading poems aloud, and apparently people liked them. The message, that February evening, asked if I'd be interested in doing five programs on “a topic of public interest.”

“I could talk about hunger and homelessness,” I said to Pekko. “Or prostitution. Do they let you talk about whores on the radio?”

“Like daytime television?” He was stamping snow off his shoes. “What makes you think of that?”

“More like oral history. Sociology. Are some of your tenants prostitutes?” I asked.

He didn't answer. I wrote down the name and phone number of the woman who'd called. Then I started washing the dishes. As I stood at the sink, still cold from being outdoors, Pekko came and stood behind me, putting his hands on my waist, then drawing them down the sides of my hips. Then he pressed his body into my back and moved his hands to my chest. I left the broiler pan to soak and turned toward him, my breasts throbbing. I didn't reach under his clothes with my wet hands. Arthur squeezed his head between us, so Pekko put him in the yard. We went to bed at last, hurrying under the comforter once we were undressed. Pekko's solid body was confident and warm as it moved above me. We came at the same time, and lay quietly afterward. I reached to stroke the side of his body, and he took my hand, held it, then let it go.

It was early for bedtime, and I'd left the dishes in the sink, but I thought I'd get up only to brush my teeth, then read in bed before sleep. Pekko now snored lightly beside me, but when I sat up, he roused himself, slapped his bare thighs as he swung out of bed, and said, “I'll take Arthur for a walk.”

Arthur likes an evening walk, but he'd been outside for forty minutes, barking now and then at the other Goatville dogs. “It's snowing,” I said.

“I think it stopped.”

I wanted to stay near him. “Shall I come?”

“No.” He got dressed, and after a while I heard the jingle of the choke collar, and then Pekko let himself out, locking the door behind him. In the old days, a man I'd brought home would sometimes leave after sex when I expected him to spend the night. I'd be disappointed, then relieved. Now Pekko and Arthur took a long walk. I brushed my teeth and was asleep before they returned.

 

I
like serious clutter. I'm not stimulated by messy closets but by rooms piled to the ceiling. And I do
like
it, though it makes me slightly ill with anxiety. I like dismantling it, but I am sad, which might be why hoarders trust me. I can find what's worth keeping: love letters from the First World War, usable furniture for the homeless shelter. I don't like garbage—smelly clutter—and sometimes the distinction is subtle. If everything is wet or otherwise disgusting, I call in a firm that empties and fumigates, but if possible I work myself, salvaging what I can—most often ceramics and glassware, which doesn't crumble, rust, or become permanently stained or greasy. Of course the usual problem is dust. A mask offends some gatherers. I carry a small battery-powered vacuum cleaner. I don't mind bugs, but I'm afraid of snakes.

The recalcitrant hoarders I like best are the divided souls, like me, not the single-minded accumulators who've been prodded to call me by a horrified acquaintance. My favorite clients have had a partial conversion: a vision of a bare room, a vision they're resisting. One man hired me when the immense accumulation of trash in his apartment was what he called “complete.”

“Now,” he said, “it's time to go the other way.”

“How do you know?”

“It's what I imagine.” I join a client's inner life. I view and handle its embodiment. What could be better? Secrets please me—learning them, telling them—especially when revelation confirms separation. When I'm alone with my oldest friend, a social worker named Charlotte LoPresti, I don't tell secrets easily. “What are you afraid of?” Charlotte would say, if she read what I just wrote. I don't know what I'm afraid of, but I know I like the edge of secrecy, the nearly public edge.

When I began volunteering at that local station, radio wasn't entirely new to me. Years ago, at the time of the conference on women, I was interviewed at a small radio station full of unwieldy equipment with the mechanical look of the thirties or forties: metal poles swung in our faces; nothing flickered electronically or kept discreetly to itself. As far as I remember, nobody was present except the interviewer and me, and between the contraptions holding microphones aloft, I could hardly see her. I thought nobody was listening. First we talked about standard women's issues. Soon we began telling personal stories, and I forgot the possible radio audience. It was a call-in show, but the phone didn't ring. When it did, and a listener asked me to repeat the conference schedule, I looked at the interviewer, startled. She laughed lightly, and I complied. Then we returned to our conversation. See, she seemed to say, listeners make it
more
private.

Those more recent evenings—playing Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith, reading poems—felt similar. It was late at night, and I seemed to be alone. The last time I did a show, I read parts of Wallace Stevens's long, difficult poem “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”—because I always thought it should be heard on some ordinary New Haven evening. Like others in this town, I imagine, I'd come upon it first in a table of contents, and read a little because it seemed to promise to describe my life. It didn't. I had no idea what it was describing. It has thirty-one sections, each almost a page long. Somebody's in a hotel room, and then he's walking around among the Yale colleges and New Haven's churches. He imagines New Haven, and he tries to work out the relation between the city he sees—“the eye's plain version” and the city he imagines, “an impalpable town, full of impalpable bells.” Out loud, I read,

 

The point of vision and desire are the same.

It is to the hero of midnight that we pray

On a hill of stones to make beau mont thereof.

If it is misery that infuriates our love,

If the black of night stands glistening on beau mont,

Then, ancientest saint ablaze with ancientest truth,

Say next to holiness is the will thereto,

And next to love is the desire for love,

The desire for its celestial ease in the heart.

“Next to love is the desire for love,” I repeated firmly—talking, perhaps, to nobody. I think Pekko and I had just gotten married then, or maybe we were planning our casual little wedding. I wasn't certain I loved Pekko, but I knew I desired to love him, and I was glad when this poem I didn't understand—but liked—seemed to tell me that was almost as good.

Then someone called the station, as someone had called that first station, all those years ago—breaking into solitude, proving I wasn't alone. A man who identified himself as Isaac said, “The poem was written in 1949, so the hotel at the beginning is the Taft. The hill of stones could be East Rock. East Rock is certainly visible from the high windows of the Taft.”

 

M
aybe I finally married Pekko because he'd become a slumlord—because in his screwy way he was demonstrating his love for the city of his birth, which is a city I've become quite fond of myself. New Haven is turbulent, multiethnic, industrial—formerly specializing in the manufacture of guns—and somewhat but not quite dominated by Yale. If you lingered in some literate nook here—say the Foundry Bookstore—and talked to the people you saw, many would report that they, or their parents or grandparents, moved here to study or teach at Yale. Not Pekko; he's a townie. His sexy name comes from an immigrant great-grandfather, but most of his people have lived in New England for generations. His grandparents moved to New Haven from Rutland, Vermont, so his grandfather could work as a police officer.

“Yale!” Pekko says impatiently. In New Haven, Yale employs, Yale owns, Yale operates, Yale pronounces—and because of Yale, crimes here are national news, so we who live here find ourselves defending the place, even defending homelessness, poverty, and criminals. Pekko says, “Those professors think New Haven is Yale plus blight. They've never looked around.” My mother would tell me to point out that New Haven has many thriving neighborhoods with well-kept old houses, including some big, fancy ones still inhabited by single families. Our mansions are not funeral homes.