A Stranger in This World (5 page)

I want to go! she said. I don’t want to stay here!

OK, he said, all right. He put it together as he led her toward the gate, she must have thought he meant to leave her here, or at least the fear. She stumbled, looking behind. The anger had passed from her face but the fear remained.

Ice cream, Paul said. You want some?

No! I want to go!

After we leave, he said. He had to calm her down somehow. Outside the gate she seemed less agitated, outside the bars, away from the cages. He led her past the duck pond, toward the derelict hot dog stand in faded red-and-white that stood across the pond from the entrance to the zoo. The morning sun was getting hot, Judy was tiring, so he had to drag her a little to get her to come along with him, but she brightened when she saw the boats, little paddleboats that seated two, which one pedaled like a bicycle.

Boats, Paulie! Judy shouted.

Don’t you want some ice cream?

I want to go in the boats.

He knew then what a bad idea this trip had been. He was getting hot himself, and the prospect of paddling around this duck-fouled acre of water, exposed to the hot sun and fully
visible to any passer-by, did not please him. But there was no way around it. He paid the candy-striped boy behind the iron grille and took command of boat 17, an aqua plastic double bathtub, settled her into the sun-hot seat and pushed away. Again he saw the maimed and crippled ducks, their senseless fights, their shit fermenting on the concrete shore, while Judy, in the purity of her delight, saw only the sparkling sun on the water, the happy trees, the smiling clouds and the happy little boat. The sun embroidered on her sweatshirt, it felt like he was carrying a suitcase full of someone else’s things. He began to feel a headache.

Three times around the little willow-draped island in the center of the pond, always in the same direction because Judy couldn’t get the drift of paddling, they always went left. This tired him out, and he stopped, though he didn’t want to. Judy looked to the left and to the right, and then she took his hand in her own hard little palm, led it to her bare forearm and sighed as she felt the soft pressure of his fingertips on her own sun-warm arm.

Oh, she said in drowsy delight.

For some reason this repelled him. We can’t, he said, not here.

Just touch me.

Not here.

I want to go home, she said.

OK, Paul said, relieved. Let me put the boat away.

No, I want to go home.

We have to put the boat away.

Mom! she cried. I want my mom!

Abruptly she stood up, nearly tipping the little tub over, and looked around the shore, expecting to see her mother.

Mom! she cried out. Mom! Mom!

A silence spread along the dirty shores of the pond, and every stranger’s face was turned toward them. He took her hand, tried to coax her down onto the seat again, but she shook free, and he could not move the boat with her standing up. Twice she nearly fell into the water, and then he gave up, closed his eyes and hoped for whatever there was to hope for, which was nothing, nothing he could think of. The sun was pleasant, though, and the sound of the water lapping against the fiberglass hull, little hollow drumming notes, like a marimba.

Mom! Judy yelled. Mom!

She was nearly crying, baffled, near the end of her rope. Heavy, flustered. He wondered what would happen next, wondered, if he never opened his eyes, if this could still be imaginary. Then heard the sound of an outboard motor start and stop and start again. He followed Judy’s gaze: a tin Sears boat with three uniforms in it, the candy-striped kid from the ticket stand riding the motor, a park policeman sitting nervously in the middle, gripping the rim of the boat, and in the prow, standing, a zoo guard in his red uniform, one foot propped on the seat, smoking, looking like an admiral in the Italian navy, gold braid and a peculiar hat, and he was leaning forward, elbows on his raised knee, and staring at Judy and at Paul, and only then, at that moment, as he watched the zoo policeman take one last drag from his cigarette, then hurl the butt into the rushing, tea-colored water, did Paul realize how badly this was all going to end.

TETHERED TO HER STATION BY A COIL OF BEIGE PLASTIC
,
A TINY
microphone in her mouth, voices in her ears, she feels her body
become part of the machine after the first few minutes of work, the type of work machines do better anyway: “Reservations this is Tina how can I help you?”

The clock starts running as soon as she picks up the call, a minute forty-five seconds to service them and on to the next, and the next, and so on. The machine kicks out her average at the end of every working day: she’s been running slow, one-forty-eight, one-fifty-one. Mr. Beveridge (the human face of the machine, friendly and round, Tina suspects he might be gay) has already apologized for noticing this. “What is it?” he asked her. “Is something wrong? You’ve always been our champion.”

Tina tries to think of what she might say, massaging her sore wrists.

An eagle, wings outstretched over his biceps, with a writhing snake caught in its talons. The tail of the snake winds around his arm and down to the soft veins inside his elbow. The colors are vivid, reds and greens, he’s had it only a few months. Tina knows (watching him play bass with his awful little band, sweating on the black stage in a black sleeveless T-shirt) that if he lives long enough Bobby’s tattoo will turn blue and fade and look as awful as the rest of them, all the old-man-blue tattoos slumped across the wattled skin of retired sailors and marines and cops.

But this prospect of age doesn’t seem, to Tina, worth worrying about. She can’t imagine him any way but young, as if on some future not-too-distant birthday his skin will split wide
open and some new species of Bobby will emerge, a different animal entirely.

Lacing her forearms into the canvas braces, he says, “These have to be tight for them to work.”

“You want me to wear these everywhere?”

“Everywhere.”

With a soft satisfied grunt, he ties her right arm snug into the brace, tan canvas reinforced with a hidden metal strap that runs along the inside of her arm from her elbow to her palm. They lace along the back, long tidy stitches like the laces of boxer’s boots. When he’s finished with both, Tina stands up, holding her arms before her. Her arms are rigid in their new jackets, stiff as weapons, too large for her body. The braces hold her palms open, tilt her wrists slightly back, so that she holds her hands toward the doctor like Jesus, vulnerable, welcoming (she thinks of the suffering bloody hands and the blank face of Jesus in her childhood church, the wounds that were so much more expressive than the mouth, the eyes).

“I wear these everywhere,” she says again. “Even to work.”

“I’m telling them at work to give you a break for a week or so. Come back on Tuesday, we’ll do some range-of-motion tests, then we’ll see.”

“See what?”

“If you ought to go back to work or not,” he says, and grins to himself; some wry private moment. “I know you love your job,” he says.

When she sees it accidentally, changing clothes or bathing, her body looks pale, soft, arbitrary. But more than anything else, it looks
white
—blank as paper, an empty space to fill in.

She’s scribbled on this emptiness herself: eleven earrings in her left ear, two in her right. She’s shaved her legs and dyed her hair (blond and now black), dressed in leather and poured herself full of junk and sugar and Bobby’s cheap vodka, trying to write a new version of herself—I am sexy, I am daring—but under the clothes is always this blank place, this absence, like the blank white bark of a paper birch into which boys carve their initials.

Black, boiling into gray froth as it pounds onto the beach, the ocean heaves and roars. An intermittent moon glitters between the slow-moving clouds. Somewhere out in the night, Tina knows, the darkness of the water must meet the darkness of the sky, and if she holds her head level enough she imagines she can see it: the thin, immaculate black line of the horizon. “Bobby,” she says. “Bobby, I want to go home.”

“What’s wrong, baby?”

“I’m not kidding.”

He seems to rouse himself, unfixes his eyes from the sea and grins at her. He says, “I didn’t think you were kidding.”

“It’s too cold to swim.”

“It’s October,” he says. “I could have told you. We didn’t have to drive all the way over here to find out.”

“I like driving with you.”

“Tina,” he says, “you’re fucking nuts.”

In their black overcoats they lean against a piling, soft sand under them. Bobby drinks from his pint, offers it to her, knowing she won’t take it, then leans against her, taking her bound left hand into his pocket. A captive. His face is outlined in the slanting light that falls from the boardwalk lights above them, a drawing of a face. Feral, Tina thinks; the eyes of a Doberman. Though she knows it’s an act.

The physical body, interesting in itself: immaculately lean, he eats only grains and fruits, neither meat nor milk nor eggs nor fish, and he pedals his bicycle all day for a messenger service. His skin is thin, elastic, and his muscles ripple plainly under it as he moves. All that cycling has given him big, powerful legs; his hips are as full as a woman’s but solid. His arms and his chest are less developed, not weak but thin. The way his pale torso rides on his heavy legs reminds her of a centaur, half-animal, half-warrior; she has seen these in museums, on the sides of ancient cups.

She sees something animal, too, something obscene in the way his neck supports his skull. He keeps his head nearly shaved, a black beard-stubble marking the outlines of where his hair might be, and through this shadow she can plainly see the muscles of his neck, the points where his tendons attach, his sinuous beating veins. She’s rarely seen a naked head;
there’s something still shocking about her first daily glance of him, even after these months together.

But what she remembers when he’s gone isn’t how he is but how he seems: solid, full of intention. He seems to fill his body completely, while Tina’s managed to colonize only a tiny corner of her own. And when he’s touching her, even just accidentally or casually (as the hand in the pocket tonight, his fingers wrapped around the taut canvas of the brace), she feels his intention spill out of him to fill the blank, amorphous mass of herself.

(Some nights she has to blur her eyes a little for this trick to work.)

Though the sidewalks are dark, deserted, and the shops all shut behind their metal grates, the blocks by the boardwalk keep their look of bright corruption. The cold salt breath of the ocean blows the signs back and forth: clowns, ice-cream cones, balloons. An audience of oversized stuffed animals perches behind the targets of the shooting gallery, imprisoned until spring, staring out through the metal bars at Tina and Bobby, who pass without noticing them.

A dark blue Monte Carlo sits awkwardly in a pool of street light, crumpled into the rear quarter of Bobby’s beater Volvo.

(Two cars on the whole street, it’s like a joke, something you’d find in a bubble-gum wrapper.) Bobby starts to run as soon as he sees it, but the Monte isn’t going anywhere; the driver watches from behind the wheel as Bobby examines the damage. The driver waits for Tina to catch up before he gets out of his car. How long has he been sitting there?

“I’m fucking drunk,” the driver says. “I’ll tell you that right now. I’m sorry as shit about your car.”

Bobby doesn’t say a word, testing the bent metal of his car with little short kicks. Tina wonders what he’s up to. The car is nothing to him, a two-hundred-dollar souvenir of his father’s second marriage.

“Is this your car?” the drunk asks Bobby.

Bobby’s still thinking, but she can’t tell what. The night around them is loud with wind, an onshore breeze, as if the ocean didn’t want any part of them, didn’t even want to think about them. The drunk is wearing knife-pleated synthetic pants and a black cloth jacket with a lot of snaps and attachments, like the ones that pit crews wear at stock-car races, although to Tina he just registers as one word: asshole.

“I tell you,” the drunk says. “That woke me right up. I was about falling asleep. Look, I can pay you for your car—let’s just do this private, OK?”

“What do you mean?”

“I give you a couple of hundred bucks, you drive away, we don’t tell anybody about it. I mean, if I’ve got to breathe into the tube, I’m going way downtown.”

“What kind of money?”

“Like I say, a couple hundred bucks.” He glances at the Volvo, missing hubcaps, torn seats (and in the moment of his glance Tina sees his contempt for the two of them, how it
pains him to even talk). “I mean, I’m sorry, but we’re not talking about a damn Mercedes or something.”

“It’s a foreign car,” Bobby says.

“I could maybe go three hundred, three fifty. You’d best make up your mind, though—the cops show up, this deal won’t make any difference to anybody.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Bobby says. “I didn’t run into your car.”

A mistake, Tina thinks: she sees the anger kindling in the eyes of the drunk, bright for a moment, then folding into their heavy lids, pretending to be sleepy. He folds his arms and leans heavily against the front fender of his car, which bows under his weight.

“All right then,” the drunk says. “I guess we’ll all just sit here and wait for the cops.”

Pictures from her childhood: a tan stuffed horse; a picnic when she was small, when the grass in the park grew long and lush and green and her aunt teased her about how pretty she was becoming and the wind blew through the leaves of the tall eucalyptus trees, the air smelled like wet earth; a new white dress; a new tiny watch with a pink watchband.

“Three-fifty?” Bobby asks. “Is that what we’re talking about?”