Paul Silverman Stories

Alana’s book club friends have suggested that nocturnal pole-dancing – under the shield of a Dolly Parton wig – might be a faster way to fill the cookie jar. Meanwhile, waiting on tables at The Chadwick Grille is still Plan A for hanging onto the house, a 1786 saltbox with a historic plaque.

Working all those split shifts has flattened Alana’s feet. But it’s also stretched her peripheral vision. So when she emerges – on this her night off -  from the dark of the Fenway concession arcade, third base side just back of the visitor’s dugout, she finds she can look straight out at the players doing pre-game sprints and still size up the guy two seats in from the aisle. She observes he’s an overeater who’s in from the sticks and a Red Sox fan - like many of the thousands milling and mooching, curled all the way from the Monster in left around to the Dunkin’ Donuts sign high above the right field grandstand. The way he’s wolfing the sausage and pepper sub tells her it’s not going to be his last of the evening, and dustings of  pulverized  peanut shell already adorn his navy blue shorts.

Within moments she learns he’s from the hills of Worcester, because she hears him say “Wister” in between chomps.

These are no ordinary seats Alana has. They’re Yankee game seats, a pair of them, deep down in the field boxes. The kind Bruno used to get when he pitched for the Triple A PawSox and subbed now and then for injured Red Sox starters.

Unaffordable and unavailable, the seats come compliments of the handlers who are still betting on Alana’s only daughter as maybe, just maybe, becoming the Twenty First Century’s Twiggy: saintly skinny as opposed to cheeky skinny.

For a mother-daughter evening, more perfect you couldn’t buy. Sky of velvet. Zephyrs tickling the flag. But Justina has never, ever joined Alana before Inning Four. With the schedule she has, how could she? The green eyes and golden cheekbones are busy moving the needle. Ditto the hands, the ankles. And starting this morning they were shooting her for a Nine West direct mail drop.             

Alana’s bones hurt from running with trays, so why be cramped? She plunks herself down on the aisle, leaving a one-seat space.

And the overeater leans her way and says, in a surprisingly sweet voice, “I’m not that fat, am I?”

Alana looks at the hamhock elbow pressing on the arm of the empty green chair  and thinks, “yes you are.” But what she says is, “oh no, I’m just saving that seat for my daughter.”           

Actually, the fellow, who wears a flag-red Jason Varitek tee shirt with man-tits, isn’t obese fat so much as big-boy fat. One of those baby-skinned chunks who, even at two hundred forty with stubble and a mustache, still hasn’t outgrown the butterball he used to be in his kindergarten red jersey and navy blue shorts. Using her peripheral vision, Alana pegs this point in time as around 1977.  Nine years or so before Justina was born.

Out of the corner of her eye she sees other things too. The round golden glint on that meaty hand of his holding the beer. Back in the sticks of Wister, there’s a wife.

Right at Alana’s back are a pair of Red Sox haters. It’s not clear whether they’re Yankee fans, or even fans at all. They wear no pinstripes, no caps. They never cheer, only jeer lewdly. One is a shrill, wiry girl. The other is a massive pre-human, a neckless creature whose head rises straight out of a tank-body, cylindrical like a cement mixer.

The crowd roars. A droplet hits the back of Alana’s neck. It falls just as the second pitch of the game hits the mitt, far outside the strike zone. With the sky dry as a sapphire, Alana concludes it was beer spray. She hunches her shoulders and raises the collar of her crisp Italian polo, loot from a Justina shoot months ago. Just putting it on in front of the mirror stirred a reverie of all the years of Justina-building. The glossies, the cattle calls. Dragging Justina from this to that. Joining the long lines of pugnacious stage mommies and fearful, fidgeting children, crowded in some ragged field like chained prisoners, waiting forever to be called into the Winnebago. Before modeling days, the commercials. Some TV, mostly radio. Locked in the glass sound booth pushing the juiced-up cutesy voice, the sound of Disney on speed, the sprinkly sweet strains of child labor. Alana outside with the engineer at his console and the stacked bagels and moldering cantaloupe, schmoozing the clients.

After the session, Alana would don the home apron and bake cupcakes. For Justina. Just the two of them in the sun-striped buttercup kitchen, sheltered by the original 1786 beams. Justina licking the frosting bowl. Pressing her face to the apron and saying, “I love you, Mommie.” Saying it in her true, unamplified voice.

                                                            *******

Justina at work. She knows this cheeseball Nine West drop will run out of pages before they would deign grant space to her face. It’s ankles they’re after, the more per line of glossy stock the better. Yet the photographer, a hawk-faced huntress in a skull-print Japanese tunic and slouchy tie pants, makes head-on Leica assaults for a seeming eternity, chewing up film, grinding out the billable hours. Justina’s eyes sting from staring into the white heat, and all the time there’s this pathetic yelping from somewhere behind the backdrop. When they finally let her break for a swig of Fiji she heads straight towards it, trailed by this eel of a man, shiny as a black satin tie, who calls himself the photographer’s producer and lets it be known he’s the photographer’s brother as well.

As she’s done before, Justina yanks open the door of a storage room the size of an ample pantry. She bumps into the photographer’s pocket dog, a silky-eared King Charles Spaniel, clawing so madly it’s as though Justina’s legs are a tree that must be climbed. One wall of the room is exposed brick, whitewashed a soothing linen. Lining the others are shelves with enough herbals and tree barks and organics to stock a small natural foods store, including books on yogic systems and the wheel of bliss.

But the stench of the place makes Justina palm her nostrils with one hand and clutch her throat with the other. She looks and finds what she knew she’d find. Over in the corner by a smeared, crusted window is a spiral of fresh dogshit in a puddle of dogpiss. And the toy dog’s toenails scrape at her even faster, like a buzzsaw.

“Not your fault, Winnifred,” she says, “not your fault. It’s okay, Winny. Okay.”

As though she were the photographer’s maid and not the model, Justina pulls a fistful of Glad-baggies. Then she grabs a skull-print leash off a peg, hooks it on the dervish of fur and jogs for the elevator.

“A little late for that, wouldn’t you say?” The eel-man’s voice echoes over her shoulder, and eventually the voice stops her. She has to agree, the dog has messed  – what’s the point of going down to the alley now?

He folds his arms and watches, grinning, as she bends over the squish-pile with a roll of paper towels and the Glad-baggies, and sprays disinfectant until the chemical smell overpowers the shit smell.

They’re all criminals here, she thinks. It’s no different than if they crippled the animal. Broke its little legs.

“Since you’re an animal lover,” says the producer, “can I tell you a story?”

Without a doubt the story will be about animals but not about animals. Justina, back on her feet, reads this from the way the tanned and oiled head tilts lewdly at her and the facial jewelry gleams. She knows the dance, knows where it goes. But she takes Winny to her lap, strokes the silky ears and lets him get on with it, his ducks and drakes tale, as he puts it.

Right off the bat he informs her that among all the birds on earth, drakes are among the very few armed with penises. These they use like assault weapons on the ducks. “I’m talking aggressive,” he says. “You have no idea…”

Justina strokes Winny and wishes they would call her back from the break. She’ll take a Leica stuck in her face all day and all night. Anything but eel-man.

“The penises come in all shapes and sizes. They’re elaborate, just like guns. It’s like all the drakes are in an arms race with all the other drakes…”

At last they do call her and he has to stop. Or pause. But he starts again the instant he can, hitting on her with his story even after the shoot ends and she slips out of the building. Late in the cab and traffic, Justina plows through the Fenway turnstiles and heads for the seats and Alana. But the ringtone nails her and what can she do? – he’s a player in the Twiggy plan. From behind their cotton candy towers the concessionaires peer at her, this leggy wonder, at her red-carpet gait and second-skin jeans and butterfly camisole. The platoon of shuffling men waiting for access to the green-doored men’s room pivots en masse. They see the phone glued to Justina’s bangled ear and the heel-spikes flashing past them and they think E! and People Magazine and Hall-Of-Famer girlfriend.

“Ready for the duck part?” the eel-voice natters into her ear, and doesn’t wait for an answer. “For every ingeniously armed penis there’s an ingeniously defended vagina,” he says. “Some have corkscrew turns, some have blind endings. Those duck vaginas make it tough for the drake, baby. Just like you…”

                                                        *******

Absorbed as he is with the Sox’ ace Beckett notching his fifth strikeout, the fan from the sticks nearly drops his beer when he catches Justina wriggling past Alana and sanctifying the space right next to him. In the tight Fenway seats, the two of them are so close that a strand of her flaxen hair falls across his left forearm as she reaches down to adjust a heel strap. She sees the wedding ring on the hefty, hairy hand, then she sees him slip the hand out of sight. This he keeps doing – either sitting on it, tucking it under his right arm, or hiding it under the greasy paper he’s collected from the multiple hot dogs and subs he’s put away.

“Sorry for the mess,” he says, in a tone that has a wink in it, slightly flirtatious, and Justina catches it by the second syllable. But there’s a second tone weaving in there as well, groveling and serf-like, as though he were addressing a Princess of the Realm. All of this is wrapped into a body language of sheepish, playful head nods, gestures that make Justina think of huge plush-toy dogs, those Newfies and St. Bernards when they’ve reached full size but still have their puppy ways. After eel-man, she’s happier to be next to him, in his loutishness, than he could ever realize.

She watches him attempt to smile at her without leering – unsuccessfully. Then he reaches under his seat with the right hand, comes up with a red, white and blue bag and slyly asks, “Peanut?”

Justina does an instant fat-gram calculation and takes one. Just one. As she cracks it she sees his left hand return to full view, like a gopher emerging from a burrow. It comes to rest on his lap. Abracadabra – no ring.

Meanwhile, the game has become five innings old, and for the last two of those innings Alana has endured a cascade of ugliness spewing from the pair of Red Sox haters right behind her. They opened fire after their third or so Budweiser round and pumped up the venom and the decibels with each succeeding brew. Now that Justina has joined her mother right in the battle zone, the outbursts rage around the back of her neck too. And she feels it like the hot breath of stalkers.

Up to the plate comes Julio Lugo, the Red Sox leadoff man.

And from the neckless throat of the tank-sized man, a sneering war cry. He calls out JULIA, JULIA. He keeps shrieking this through a nine-pitch at bat.

When the hitter Manny Ramirez stands in, he screams, MANDY, MANDY.             

And when the catcher Jason Varitek draws a walk he roars at the umpire. HEY, BLUE, WHY DON’T YOU STICK YOUR HEAD UP YOUR ASS? AT LEAST YOU’LL BE ABLE TO SEE SOMETHING.

To Justina, this isn’t heckling. The voice and the person are too big and too close, and the sound is too angry. She wants to be in a fetal position, trembling, huddled in a corner somewhere until the storm blows over. What she hears isn’t a drunken bloke at a ballpark, but her father Bruno when she was seven, just before a court order sent him far away. She hears the sound of the deepest male rage erupting, breaking through the trap door of the brain. She sees Bruno shattering everything he can get his hands on, trashing the house. And she and Alana scampering out of any door they can reach. Grabbing barrettes and bobby pins. Fleeing to motels, bus stations, airports, anywhere to get away.

Alana knows what’s happening to Justina. The fiery ball in the stomach, the panic attack. She would know it with her eyes closed. What surprises her, though, is that the fan from the sticks seems to know it too. Alana catches the new look in his sidelong glances: alarm, concern. No trace any more of the ogling, the clumsy banter.

The inning is a long one, with the Red Sox doing so well they bat all the way around, and Julio Lugo steps up to the plate again.

From behind Justina, the bull voice reaches its most ear-splitting level yet. To her, it comes out of the earth, or the loudspeaker. It drowns out the entire crowd:

JULIA, JULIA. YOU PUSSY. YOU CUNT.

She hears it with reverb. Thunder bouncing off the mountains. CU-U-UNT.

And she cringes, shrinks into the green seat. If she were a turtle the green seat-back would be her shell, and her whole being would disappear into it.

At the very moment Justina slides down in her seat the fan from the sticks half-rises in his. He twists his girth around and locks eyes with the shouter.

“Hey, clean it up, will you.”

The response is a snarl, then the loudest roar yet:

JULIA, JULIA. YOU PUSSY. YOU CUNT. CU-U-UNT.

“Watch your mouth, you watch it.”

YOU WATCH YOURS, PUSSY-MAN.

And on the last word he launches a fist like a piledriver, straight and short – a direct hit on the mouth. Justina hears the gruesome mashing sound, the sound of skin ripping and teeth cracking. She smells something that cuts through the beery atmosphere. The rancid stench of two brutes in a death-lock. Relative to her, they could be bears, rhinos. They don’t just hit, they collide. She sees the blood spray and gush as the bigger man seizes the head of the merely big man, pins it on the seat-back and hammers it without letup, hammers it long after it ceases to squirm out of the way. He keeps at it while the crowd retreats. He keeps hammering until the last, even when there’s a security force of a half dozen swarming over him from the back.

They wrestle him away, the massive Red Sox hater, and somebody yells something about making room for paramedics. Justina is alone, the only remaining onlooker in the circle of cleared seats. Even Alana joined the stampede and cries to her from the sidelines, where the victim’s comrades have retreated too. Splayed next to Justina, for all intents and purposes, is a butchered carcass in human clothing. A being that no longer moves and no longer has a face, only bloody, bubbly face-meat. With smashed shapes on it that once had been distinguishing features: nose, lips, eyes, cheekbones. Her butterfly cami is splattered red. She cradles the head and dabs at it with the hem, soaking up the gore. Alana stares at the scene, numb with too much feeling. She sees a small girl, the toddler of yesteryear, hovering over a pet that’s been crushed by a speeding train.

                                                     *******

The paramedics and their beefy cargo, strapped and swaddled like an enormous papoose, slowly disappear into the cave-mouth ramping down to the concession mall. Justina bolts to her feet and tries to trail along, but she bumps into a cop belly, blue as an umpire’s chest protector. The policeman sits her down, produces paraphernalia and attempts an interview. But only Alana can speak. She acts as interpreter, translating her daughter’s simpers and whimpers into police-log English. Tonight there will be no going their separate ways, no staying for the rest of the game and then Justina breezily taxiing off to her Back Bay one-bedroom with what has become her little signature, a self-mocking Twiggy air-kiss launched just before the yellow door shuts. The two of them stagger, arm in arm, to the parking lot, and, for the whole ride back to Chadwick, Alana sits like a sentry at the wheel while Justina keeps the passenger seat in full recline. The sound of her daughter’s fitful breathing fiddles with Alana’s time sense. At least twice on the highway she gets lost in a warp, really believing it’s one of those nights when she’s driving, just driving, to let the rocking road lull her stricken newborn asleep.

Once inside the salt-box she draws Justina a tub, peels off the blood-splotched cami and finds her fleeciest robe. She excuses herself as soon as she can to get the stove going. In double-time she re-climbs the steps, scrubs Justina’s back and lanky limbs, then towels her head to toe and wraps the robe around her. Justina maintains a dazed look, stone-silent, even when Alana stands on tiptoes to peer at some dot of linty fuzz on her scalp. Arm in arm, they descend to the buttercup kitchen, where the warm cakey smell rising from the oven registers a flash in Justina’s eyes, restoring the emerald shimmer, if only for an instant. Alana feels as though a train, stopped dead on a broken track, has started up again. She warps out for the third time tonight, confusing this moment, this sense of a train back on track, with the very moment Bruno finally took a suitcase and stormed out for good.

Justina’s hands are folded in her lap as Alana sets a cupcake in front of her, the chocolate glistening from the heat within.

Another flash of green in the eyes and then another.

“They’re shooting again tomorrow,” Justina says, radiant at last. “I can only have half. But I love you, Mommie.”

When Justina wakes up the next day and turns again to her cell phone, she finds four messages blinking. Three are from eel-man and one is a voice she knows yet doesn’t know, but the rumble of it makes her skin explode in violent blotches that even the stylist can’t hide. The voice claims to be Bruno. He says he saw her in some mailer from Nordstroms. Page fourteen, tank tops.

In her Greek English, Melina told the psychiatrists the attacks were like vertigo, but not the kind you feel standing on the edge of a roof. The first one came on the plane from Venizelos to Logan, where she sat on her hands because she felt the hands would assault her. She was traveling from the wharves of Athens to the wharves of Boston, flying to her aunt and uncle who had arranged transport and would give her work in the uncle’s fish restaurant. In her fourteenth night in the kitchen on the pier she refused to walk out of the walk-in refrigerator, and shrieked so loudly the tables began to empty. Melina went straight to Applewood, in an ambulance. It was her first trip inland, anywhere, ever, and when morning came she was afraid to take long looks at the open fields between the cottages, they seemed so vast.

The day Taylor saw her sitting in the brief patch of sun was a milestone, her first venture outdoors in weeks. The cottage they put her in, North Brannock, had two floors and thirty four patients. On her floor, the first, was a Canadian nurse, Janet, who was a good twice her size, and this huge human being was the one she came to trust above all others. “You’ll keep me from falling,” Melina said. “Falling from what?” Janet asked, looking down at her, “you’re already sitting on the floor.” From her cross-legged position on the tile the girl threw her arms around Janet’s thick calves and replied, “falling out of my self.”

On break with the other nurses and attendants one day, Janet nicknamed the girl Helen of Troy, and it stuck. “Helen of Troy wants a Rice Krispies bar.” “Well, of course she does. It’s rice, and she’s Greek.” “Bring her some tea with it. Helen of Troy demands tea. It’s for her hair, it’s her beauty secret.”

Taylor would sit in some mangy vehicle from the Applewood fleet, half-camouflaged by the ragged trees. He would think so ravenously about Melina’s hair he would smoke three cigarettes and barely realize he had lit a single one.

Before the anti-psychotic drugs began to settle Melina down, her learning there were locked doors at every turn was actually a source of relief. It meant there was less unbounded space into which she could “fall.” It also meant ever-present staff, men and women who would emerge out of nowhere with their heavy, glinting keyrings and somehow find the right key for every keyhole. And if she balked at the newly opened space they would take her by the arm and escort her across the threshold, walking with her until she felt safe. After several days, Janet found the most effective therapy wasn’t to engage her patient in probing chatter about the past and her feelings, but to simply let her sit in silence on the floor of her room encircled by large, solid masses – her dresser, her bed, and, most imposing of all, Janet herself. From that fortified position Melina would endlessly knot and re-knot her hair, her fingers dancing and twisting this way and that. As a palliative, this worked even better than sitting on her hands, she said, because it gave the hands gainful employment and kept them from wreaking destruction on herself and others. On sunny days, Janet brought in dandelions and daisies plucked from the forgotten orchards and weed-ridden fields. Melina said she could feel the ghost of her mother, who on festive occasions had adorned certain rooms with leafy vines, making the house smell like magic. With her own hands, so meaty and crude compared to the thin, regal fingers of “Helen of Troy,” Janet used the torn-up flowers to fashion rough garlands for the braided mane. “A crown for Helen,” she announced at the nurse’s station. “Can Paris be far behind?”

                                                *******

Taylor yearned for his own set of keys as deeply as Melina wanted none of it, wanted no access whatsoever to any part of the cottage. On her first night she’d begged for a straitjacket, but Janet crushed her with the news that they were no longer used. Melina described her entire angle on life, how she saw things since plunging through the cracked floor of her mind, as a long telescope turned completely around. No matter where she pointed her gaze, everything she longed for was smaller and more confining. Life in miniature. If it were possible she would sleep in a dresser drawer, and even more secure than that – in a boxed compartment within the drawer.

Taylor, on the other hand, envied Hank, because he had the precious power of access, and he bought Hank beers at the Winfield Barn – did everything he could to pry the keyring loose from his neck. The situation was a familiar one: even in grade school it was always Taylor, stuck on a lower rung of the ladder, whining for some privilege or possession of Hank’s, and Hank reaching down and swatting him away. “Don’t go too far,” Hank warned him at the Winfield. “Next step is the shelter, the human dumpster. Even your mother won’t take you – you  need this job.” What he meant was that Taylor had already bounced around the valley, far more than was wise. He’d been let go from the only places where employment existed at all - state and county institutions – prisons, reform schools, homes for the orphaned and disabled, and mental hospitals like Applewood. The valley was filled with such official receptacles, all of them occupying great tracts of the cheapest land in the state, all of them founded and built ages ago to catch the rain of falling bodies, the deluge of people driven mad or maimed by the mills.

Not being allowed keys was Taylor’s cross to bear – not just once, but several times a day. He would stand outside the front door with his empty hand-truck, pressing his nose against the rectangle of shatterproof glass, banging for a nurse or an aide to notice him and open up. Then he would repeat the process when the cart was cargo-laden. He would stand inside the door like a mule in a stall, shifting his feet, itching for the stable keeper to let him out. Keys were for psychiatric personnel only: They wouldn’t ease the rule, not ever. Not even on the day of the big change in North Brannock, the day Taylor executed the Facilities Director’s rearrangement of the rec room.

That move was slated for the lunch hour. Precisely. Until that time Taylor was allowed to do nothing but occupy himself with the daily mandatories. First and foremost, this meant locating every basket or barrel on site and emptying all refuse, which included medical waste. Naturally, the job could never be as simple as in most businesses, where all that was required was extracting a garbage-stuffed plastic liner from the trash container, cinching it, stacking it on the hand-truck and hauling it away. At Applewood the very words “plastic bag” raised alarm. Plastic bags of any style or size were banned, and banned with such fervor you’d think they were as much of a suicide threat as handguns and loose pills.  Nurses and aides confiscated them on sight, plucking them from the hands of visiting relatives innocently bringing in candy or magazines.

But making trash rounds gave Taylor much to sniff for and look forward to. Trash rounds were his passport into each and every patient room, and in the mornings the occupants were typically elsewhere – a third of them off receiving ECT in the clinic, the rest at group therapy sessions in the common rooms of North Brannock. He made a beeline for Melina’s room and knelt to pick up the wastebasket. As he moved past the whitewashed iron headboard, the scent of her erupted from the bed clothes and possessed him. He fell on the bed and sank his face into the sheets. He opened an eye, saw a wisp of dark hair on the pillow and wildly imagined the full braided pelt grazing the skin of his chest, then unknotting and falling like a bower around his face, eclipsing everything else.

                                      ******

Exactly at noon, Janet and the subordinate on-duty nurse, Christine, led the first-floor patients of North Brannock into the dining area, a cavernous space adorned with homey touches here and there – someone’s futile attempts to suggest an eat-in kitchen. As soon as the chairs at the long table were occupied and all the names checked off, Janet locked the dining area door for a solid hour, twice as long as usual. This was in accordance with her instructions from the Nursing Director, to whom the Facilities Director had gone for final approval of the new rec room plan. Although the plan had many elements, such as new shelving and wall cabinetry, what the Nursing Director honed in on were the big space-takers. “The elephants in the room,” was how she put it when she briefed Janet, who in turn briefed Christine.

By far, the largest object in North Brannock was the piano that was never played.

Janet referred to it that way because, in the dozen years she had worked in the cottage, she hadn’t heard the keyboard give up a single sound. In her view, the patients were so sunk in depression that notes couldn’t be heard, or else could be heard so faintly they weren’t worth playing. Christine had a very different theory – that depressed patients dreaded the piano being played because their disease exaggerated all stimuli. To them, the sweetest music would sound as shattering as the loudest thunder.

Taylor had no such hypotheses. He only knew he was supposed to move the piano to where the blue couch stood, and the blue couch to where the piano stood. In effect, he was altering the rec room so that east and west exchanged places.

“Big guy, can you give me a lift with this?” Taylor put a pleading glare in his eye but he already knew Hank’s answer. Hank had struggled up the ladder and bypassed Taylor to become a psychiatric aide; he would do nothing in front of the nurses that smacked of janitorial, and no exceptions. To make matters worse, the head maintenance man had refused to assign Taylor a helper, not even for fifteen minutes, citing the endless budget cuts that had thinned the ranks to a skeleton crew. “Even the exterminator is hardly around here anymore,” he said, and issued Taylor some paltry extra equipment – two flat dollies with wobbling casters – as the very best he could do.

What they called the blue couch was, in reality, two pieces – a long blue sofa and matching love seat, pushed against each other to provide a single wall of seating for six or seven patients. Moving it entailed moving countless satellite objects as well – side tables and floor lamps, Scrabble and Monopoly sets, stacks of ancient, unread magazines dotted with rodent droppings, jigsaw puzzles, Chinese checkers and dominoes. The couch was a heavy, cumbersome piece, but once the two flat dollies were in play, Taylor made decent progress.

The piano, on the other hand, might have been a mountain for the way it resisted him. The Nursing Director was right – the job took up the whole hour. When Taylor finally finished, he wiped as much sweat off his face as he could and rapped the dining area door for Janet, but she was occupied with one of the older patients, taking vitals. Through the thick glass rectangle, Taylor watched Melina at the long table, sipping her tea. Suddenly Melina put down the cup and stared up at him. The look told him she knew he had been doing something more momentous than collecting trash. A message was written on both their faces. The same words - he could feel them in his skin.  

           

                                                      *******

“Maybe it’s Feng Shui,” said Janet, the morning they heard it. “Maybe we finally got it right.” The chords rising from the piano were stiff and hoarse, as though the sharps and flats were wheezing dust from their undersides every time they were struck. But they formed a melody nonetheless, a song that wasn’t American and wasn’t classical either. “It sounds Mediterranean,” Christine said, and the two nurses dubbed it “The Ballad of Helen of Troy.” There was Melina on the piano stool, nothing around her body but space and high ceilings, her posture confident and her fingers traipsing over the keyboard as nimbly as when she fixed her hair in the tight shelter of her room. She had gone and sat there abruptly, without announcing her intention or asking permission, three days after the instrument had been moved. As for other patients, the impact of the rearrangement on them was alarming, even devastating, and some of them never adjusted. When they had filed out from lunch, several of them stepped into the rec room and became openly hostile or frozen with gloom. “How could they do this?” an older, professorial man said, addressing the piano itself. His moan was cosmic and hapless, the cry of a philosopher whose world had been seized by a totalitarian state and turned upside down.           

At the afternoon staff meeting, Janet, Christine and the psychiatrist in charge of North Brannock reviewed Melina’s sudden behavior change. The psychiatrist, a Pakistani whose M.O was endlessly tinkering with patients’ meds, believed it was nothing out of the ordinary. “We’ve just hit the right receptors,” he said, “a matter of chemistry, plain and simple. Two days ago I changed her cocktail. Please don’t tell me this all occurred because a maintenance man moved a couch.”

“Not the couch,” said Janet, “ the piano…” She could have continued the debate, but chose not to. More important was getting the psychiatrist’s approval of advancing Melina to Level 4, meaning she could be let out to walk the grounds without staff accompaniment. Just helping her with her hair, Janet could tell the girl was ready – and eager too. Instead of huddling on the floor Melina now sat at the window, gazing out at the valley, impatient with Janet if her hands made a clumsy move and blocked the view.

Christine was playing politics too. She got the psychiatrist to okay Melina’s participation, as a performer, at the annual Applewood Picnic. This event was strictly for certain patients, the ones staff felt might benefit from social interaction on a grander scale than daily life in the cottages. All the North Brannock residents qualified. It was held each summer under the trees that fronted the old psychopharmacological research facility, a building that once held high hopes for inventing breakthroughs but now held undisturbed spiders and mouse-chewed texts.

On this same afternoon, Taylor completed his trash rounds with another visit to Melina’s unoccupied room. He had saved it for last, and it paid off. On top of the wadded Kleenex, used teabags and other bits and pieces of flotsam was a perfectly folded sheet of paper. It had one word scrawled on it – Talyor.

He stared at the letters for several moments, blood pounding. Then he unfolded the paper and found a childish pencil sketch of leafy vines.

                                                *******

Then came the bright, searing day they would talk about for years, the source of endless memos and recriminations about standards; as well as the loss of accreditation and precious state funding.

Among the professional staff, blame fell hardest on Christine, for leaving her keys in a place where Taylor could steal them. And worse, for not reporting it immediately. When the Nursing Director ordered Christine’s dismissal, Janet not only accepted the verdict but heartily approved. She had always considered Christine a lightweight, literally and figuratively. Too many years in amateur ballet, too given to flighty theories, too susceptible to distractions like the Applewood Picnic, a therapeutic non-essential if ever there was one. “Event-planning isn’t in her job description,” Janet said. “She’s a clinician – can’t she get it? That picnic was all she thought about for days, and the Greek girl playing the piano…”

                                                            *******

“She was doing so well as a Level 4,” Janet told Hank. “Long walks in the fields, all by herself. I watched her march right to the edge of Greeley Pasture that day, the day of the picnic, again and again…”

“You weren’t the only one watching. Didn’t you ever see the black truck? Well, you couldn’t. Not from your angle.”

Exactly how many trips Melina made with the raincoat might never be pinned down, but it was clear she made several. Each with a wave of permission from Christine, Melina’s reward for dazzling the picnic guests with her music. Each time she started out with the raincoat folded and flat. Each time she went to the same place at the edge of Greeley’s Pasture, where it meets the scrubby woods. Each time she was seen kneeling down for a time, then standing up with the raincoat swollen like a sack, clutching it with both arms. Then she reversed course and returned as swiftly as she could to North Brannock, sometimes breaking into a run.

And only Taylor knew why. Only he knew the feeling from the inside out, from the heart of the one true witness, because that witness was himself. He never revealed this to a soul, not as the officials were banishing him, not as Hank was drumming his face to a pulp. The story was his alone – to tell when he saw fit, or to never tell at all. The fervor of Melina’s fantasy, how she planned every detail, even the time to enter her room on the day of the Applewood picnic. How eagerly she begged him to steal the nurse’s keys. The glint in her eyes as she spoke of the bower she would create - the wondrous colors of the vines she had found and how she would drape them everywhere. Iridescent vines, bursting with glossy green and deep burgundy. In her Greek English it all became something mythical, a time beyond time. And for days she drew and re-drew those things, the child’s sketches of leaves. She pressed them to her lips and planted the snips of paper under the collar of Taylor’s shirts and in the openings between the shirtfront buttons, so they touched his chest.

On the day of the picnic he made his entrance as unobtrusive as possible, parking the black truck a good distance from North Brannock, in the lot behind the administration building. It took several tries with Christine’s ring of keys until his shaking hands found the right one. As he pushed his way through the doorway he expected to hear an alarm go off, or hear a nurse or an aide bellowing his name. But, miraculously, there was only silence and emptiness, except for the jangling of his keys, and it stayed that way as he passed the unoccupied nurses’ station and turned down the hallway that led to Melina’s room.

In the short time Taylor spent standing at the threshold, he glimpsed the meticulous hanging garden she had created. It ran from floor to ceiling, shiny leaves strung over lamps, cabinets, sills and the window tops. But at that point the vines struck him mainly as a background scheme – tangles of decoration. His eyes skimmed them in a blur and narrowed on Melina. She sat on the bed in a white gown, ghostly quiet, her back to him. The perfect braid between her shoulders seemed longer than ever, tumbling so far it rested on the sheets, the last strands of it pointing right at him.

As he rushed to touch it, she turned her head. And in place of the wondrous hair she gave him lips, eyes and cheeks - a swollen, screaming mass of features that only a monster would call a face. He jumped back, and only then, recoiling from the slitted eyes and blistered skin, did he look all around the room and see that the gleaming leaves she had strung everywhere, the Grecian arbor she had promised him - it was all poison ivy.            

                                                    *******

Next morning, a kangaroo court of accusers from every level of the hierarchy descended on Taylor. He held his hand over an imaginary stack of bibles and swore he never harmed a hair on Melina’s head – a claim that was technically true, since all he’d done the entire time he’d spent in her room was caress and kiss her mane, the only part of her that wasn’t raging with toxin.

As for Melina, the moment he left her bed she turned from the window to the wall and became mute as stone. Nothing they did could spark a response, not even when they told her Taylor faced prison for the way he’d violated her. With a heavy black marker they changed her status on the chart at the nurses’ station, sending her all the way back to Level 1. Locked down and supervised. For months she didn’t venture a glance at anything outside the windows of North Brannock, not even a patch of sky or a blade of grass. But Janet was her sun and moon.  On the worst day of the rash, Janet stayed overtime and tended to every last inch of tortured skin, squeezing stripes of jellied anesthetic over the sores and rubbing gentle circles with her thick, latex-smooth fingers. She smiled beatifically and told the others she was anointing Helen of Troy. 

 

Charlie is a skittish, skinny man, so full of the wind that drives him coast to coast his pants bag out. This ticks off Stella, who says it clashes with the green of his steeply climbing paychecks. “No more hip-hop look,” she announces, and they drive in for a clothing adjustment. “You don’t have enough hair,” she adds.

The salesman at Ari – the only men’s store in the Hub – goes beyond ebullient. The Milano wool Stella picks for Charlie is luscious. Its fine-combed pattern is set in either dark bluish gray or dark grayish blue, depending on whether you hail from above or below the Mason-Dixon line.

To Charlie, who calls on the Coca Cola folks in Atlanta, this is no trifling matter. You don’t walk in to see a cracker at Coke wearing navy, as though you were William Tecumseh Sherman. Not even if all you’re there for is to peddle eyeballs in the blogosphere.

“Nino will be right up,” the salesman chirps. “All you do is stand on the little stool, and he’ll make this fit like your skin.” He palpates a piece of subtle lapel cloth as though it were a sex organ. “Beautiful hand to it, wouldn’t you say?”

“Now something I don’t like is pressure,” Charlie declares, beholding his long tallness in the mirror. “There are two places. One is…”

Nino sweeps in, a small man with a Naples face and a tape measure.

“…there. Where you’ve got your hand.”

Nino has Charlie by the crotch-fabric, which droops off his bony haunches like the sail of a boat at anchor.

Stella speaks right up. This is what they had driven in for.

“Come on, Nino. Do your thing.”

Nino reaches between Charlie’s cheeks and yanks the material higher. 

“That’s a wedgie you’ve got going there,” Charlie whines. “I feel like a popsicle on a stick.”

“Pin it,” declares Stella. “No more clown pants.”

*******

A week later the suit is ready, and Stella proposes making a day of it. She tells Bronwyn to mind the shop. Coke wants Charlie down first thing Monday, and he’s wild. Wild in a way Stella’s never seen. His eyes don’t just bulge, they burn.

“We’ll go to Ari,” she says, “then we’ll do lunch at Yudofu. You can even wear the suit to lunch, how’s that?”

Charlie raves about Coke’s biggest buy yet. Monday will cinch the deal. He wants to wear the suit. She tells him there’s spittle on his chin.

They get a good spot at a meter near Ari’s, but it’s one of those high Boston curbs. Even with his beanpole legs, Charlie has a near plumber’s-butt moment stepping onto the sidewalk.

Inside the store, Stella watches Charlie do his cock-of-the-walk thing, parading up and down the carpet. 

“He’s like that Zegna boy,” Nino says, “only longer.”

“Adrian Brody? If you say so.”

She whips out her purse and plunges into the last signing at the cash register. Charlie, meanwhile, continues aping a male runway model - but on crack, legs pumping triple-time, sashaying haywire towards the front door. 

The very instant she snaps her purse shut, Stella sees something happen to the trouser bottoms of the new suit. Implosion. They sag and bunch at the heels of Charlie’s shoes. Same as they did in the old suits.

“Stop,” she cries, just as his fingers curl around the door handle. 

Charlie bounces back like a yo-yo on jet fuel. She directs him to a couch on one side of the room, and pulls Nino over to the other.

“Unacceptable,” Stella declares. “They’re swimming on him. They’re always swimming on him.”

Nino stares beyond Stella’s shoulder at Charlie on the couch, not uttering a word, his face a timeless study in failure – the eyes so pained Stella fears he’ll garrot himself with the tape measure. 

But there’s a limit to what she can endure too – on this day of all days, when the purse that holds the just-paid suit invoice also contains other documents – a small blizzard of them, bad news in every line - all of which popped into Stella’s mailbox over the last forty eight hours.

One comes from the state institution where her former husband resides, informing her of his imminent release. Just watching Nino’s twisted face revives the night her own was spouse-slammed into the refrigerator door. Stella remembers thrusting her forehead out like a bumper to try and save her nose. She feels a wrecking ball in her chest, swinging like a pendulum, crashing left and right.

But Charlie’s revving himself up for the Coke pitch, his voice keening and careening like a bird’s screech as they peel out from Ari’s. That voice of his bounces off the walls in the cavernous parking garage, where they find the express elevator that soars to the penthouse, and Stella swallows her thoughts, bites her tongue and carves a smile on her face. They emerge and see their reflections in a black pool of serenity, then a hand slips out of a curtain, and they follow it into the smooth-rocked realm of Yudofu, hippest of the hip in this city.

In Japan, Yudofu is an entire cuisine based on tofu. Appetizers, soup, salad, entrée, dessert. Tofu fried, boiled, broiled, braised, steamed. Tofu spiced, soured, sauced, sweetened.  All of it the rarest and most pristine tofu imaginable, sometimes so fanatically procured only the curd that’s been caressed by water spilling across a certain reef in the Sea of Japan is acceptable. 

In Boston, Yudofu is the foodie temple, the restaurant beyond restaurants, and the menu’s holy of holies is the purest of slabs bathed before you – while you sit in a lotus position – in a boiling cauldron just inches from your unshod feet.

But jumpy Charlie is too Coked up on his spiel, too wild grooving on the pitch he will make to ever sit still and cross-legged, and he jerks to his feet. As he does the pants of his new suit desert him, and he trips on the cuffs, twisting like a top. All over the restaurant eyes turn coldly, and Charlie turns too, turns so fast and gyroscopic he stops only when centrifugal force and gravity bring him crashing to the ground, one cheek of his ass wedged in the scalding pot. 

The place rocks with laughter, the help runs over, the half-trousered victim is escorted behind the curtain. Lengthy backroom ministrations ensue. At last Charlie returns to the lotus mat, swathed in a kimono. He raises his chopsticks and even manages a smirk.

He takes one bite of the ethereal spongy whiteness, gives Stella a smirking stare, points the chopsticks at her face and says,” you’ve got a bat in your cave.”

She’s genuinely puzzled. “A what in a what?”

“There’s a booger in your nose. Want me to pull it out with these?”

Something in his face, something in the way he says it takes her by surprise. In that instant - and an instant is all it lasts - the carved smile softens and becomes real. For the first time in all her life, Stella feels overcome by Zen. She realizes why she’s sitting where she’s sitting, and why all is as right as a being could ever ask it to be. She sees she can enter tomorrow in just twenty four hours. But yesterday? Not in twenty four million years.

 

The bus pushed off under whipping Boston rain, so much of it the windows smelled like wet fish until they hit the cornfields, where everything dried and smoothed out. Denver was the longest stopover, and from there to the state line the only sound around them was passenger snoring and engine hum, so Corinne could stroke Johnny’s dome and talk softly about the future.

 

There were things she had to say about the past too, things she was still ticked or ripped about. Even now, she considered Johnny a beer-bellied fuck who couldn’t see his toenails, much less the end of the Mass Pike. “Until me, me the Steam City girl, you were like that big old sign in South Station,” she said, “the one right before the tracks that had just four words on it, Albany and the West, like Albany was the end of the known world. Without me you wouldn’t have even got to Albany, would you? Albany! You would have sat there in Eastie, two feet from Runway Three at Logan Airport, and you never would have even stepped on a plane. You would have stayed up in the catwalk with your stinking olive barrels, up there at the top of the goombah line with the forklifts, cracking the staves and pouring the olives down the chute, coming home to me stinking like an antipasto. Jesus, Johnny, you could have had a doctor’s degree in olives. Who else east of the tunnel could tell a Cannon Ball from a Colossal? But until me you didn’t know Arizona from Alabama, for shit’s sake. A gorilla like you, a weekend bouncer at the Marco Vittori Post, nearly wetting his pants over that bullshit cactus story. It’s a myth, that’s all, there’s no such thing as a jumping cactus, a cactus that shoots its spines at you if you come within six feet of it. They were slinging it to you, those cowboys, and you fell for it, cause you were such a Boston-ass dude, such a greenhorn, you and your faht and pahk the cah mouth, Charlie and the MTA… ”

 

Corinne didn’t bring up the other incident – it was so dumbass and shameful, but she remembered how Johnny’s baggy eyes had bulged, like an elephant having a shit fit over a mouse. The guy in skinny-assed Wranglers who showed them around the mesa in a jeep - the memory was so sharp she caught whiffs of that very guy in the bus fumes…how he’d screeched to a halt at this big rock and scooted off just as she and Johnny climbed out onto the red dust road. Like a freaking mountain goat the guy was – scrambling right up the side of the rock. “Know why I’m up here?” he yelled down at them. And then, after a great, fat silence: “Cause the spot you’re standing on has the greatest concentration of rattlesnakes in the world.”

 

But in the end, after all the times she dragged him, kicking and screaming, away from the three-deckers and out to the West, it was Johnny who forked over the wad for the trailer, every EE bond they had in the East Boston Five, and the trailer was waiting for them now, just two trailers back from a dead-on view of the craggy Presidio Range. These were the sunset shapes Johnny had slowly come to love more than anything he’d ever known. More, even, than the old giant Madonna statue looking down on the Chelsea oil docks, the hopped-up nags of Suffolk Downs and the garbage barges toting the seagulls up and down the great artery of mercury called the Mystic River.

 

The bus made its final stop at Steam City, and what was left of the night and the conversation took place at a super-economy motel, the kind Johnny was fond of calling A Nap n’ a Crap. Next day, Corinne hit the local Auto Mile and acquired a Chevrolet Suburban. As the salesman had said, it was a style of Suburban you don’t find any more, the battleship style, built back when they were making the bodies out of steel not plastic. They reached the trailer at nightfall, and there was more talk about the past and the future, a night and a whole day of it, a day of the foghorn-free air Corinne was born in. And then, in a swoop of light and color, it was the future: sunset pulling its blanket of blue and rust over the chilled crags of the Presidios.

 

Corinne walked until she found nothing in sight with pitted chrome or worn treads, just a straight-on view of the peaks. Then she waited for a breeze, lifted the dome and let Johnny go wherever the air wanted to take him. She was still amazed that a three-hundred-pound barrelhead, a greaser who could eat nails and spit nickels, who inhaled two-pound T-bones like they were communion wafers, could fit so easily in a brass jar.