Black Tickets (19 page)

The curtains are soaked, she said, I didn’t hear it raining.

She stood by the window in the watery air, smelling the warm asphalt cool. When she was a child she had seen rain. She remembered it fell in a slanted color. Pearls and ash falling. Rain came from far off to contain everything. You could see it coming. It rained those weeks in the hospital when they operated on her head. They said it was the tail end of a hurricane, named for her because she was the littlest girl on the ward (I’m not little I’m eight and I can read
Ivanhoe
. No one said anything. She knew she couldn’t read
it anymore). Later they asked her to remember. Remember all about it; her mother, the man, the car. Nothing there. For six years, Laura sat in her aunt’s house. A sequence of paid widows read aloud to her. Her aunt read the Old Testament.

Your mother, she said, was my sister born in innocence and consumed by her own soul. You are the innocent fruit of her repetitious sin. As we sow, so shall we reap.

Laura sewed; rapidly, constantly, perfectly: long afternoons by a window open even in winter. Unconscious of her finger’s penance on a raised design in linen, she heard and smelled the street. When Laura was fourteen, her aunt became afraid of her. She ordered that Laura’s hair be cut; she sent her to the school. In two years, Randal came.

Randal heard Laura’s fingers stroke the polished windowsill. Rain continued, round. Those years ago her belly was globed and tight with a hollow floating. He remembered the long night of first labor … long, long. How she held her breath and spent it, blowing air like an animal adapted to ocean. Then it was over; he heard her fingers on the baby’s face. Raining on the sheathed head, first memorizing, then just looking again and again. And he touched her forehead, which always had a peculiar heat to it when she was happy.

When Callie’s nose bled, the rocking chairs got blurry. Their shiny arms rippled and ran over themselves. He was five. They bought him glasses and Molly went to school. Molly went to school, putting her face in front of him where she knew he could see, saying Callie, Callie, don’t untie the string. She had told him about the string no one could see. She said it kept his feet on the ground. She rubbed his back with her hand and took her book away.

You can’t read, she said. It’s not good for you.

And the door opened. All the cool rained air came in. He heard her feet on the sidewalk; he heard her brown shoes with their neat ties on the crisscrossed brick that was washed now. Fat dark worms writhed on the cool grit. His father said they were trying to find dirt when they rolled like that. He said they were drowning in the air.

Callie heard the cat scratching at the window and dimly saw it beyond the glass. It opened its mouth soundlessly wide and to Callie it looked like a pink hole opening in a steam. Things seemed closer than they were; things were there before he touched them. He pushed his hands through the veil that surrounded them. Then there was a hardness.

They took him to the special doctor’s and he read the pictures. There was a boat, and then two boats, and then two cowboys and a boat in the shape of a triangle. He couldn’t see the cowboys’ faces anymore, but he remembered what they looked like from before. He told how they looked. They were the same one two times, with their big eyes rolled to the side and their smiles and their hats. They looked like they were turning and something pressed them flat. He thought they were afraid of the boat coming. When he squinted he could make the boat roll over them. Then he pulled it back and they were still turning.

He could read the chart with the letters on it. But Molly said not to tell, and now she wouldn’t let him read her books. With his glasses on he could see the big letters again. He never took the glasses off. He tried to sleep with them on. Each night his father’s big hand came down and took them in the dark. The hand was big and dark and his father sang to him when he took the glasses.

I wish I was an apple. A hangin in a tree.

His father sang it very slowly, trembling his voice. The apple was in the tree. It was round and red and it had a heart.
It was made of sugar. When he got to the part about the girl, his father’s voice went up and around and in; still slower, like a heavy animal moving in a snow. Callie had heard about snow.

And every time my Sweetheart passed she’d. Take a bite of me.

Now it was snowing and he and his father walked with the girl to get along home. Callie led them all home because he could see. The girl was his mother but she was not his mother. She was Cindy; Callie knew that, but the song smelled of his mother.

Get along home. Get along. Home.

His father’s voice was slower, slow and high. There was cold honey in the snow.

Get along. Home Cindy Cindy. I’ll marry you suh uhm. Time.

Apples were fallen in the snow and the honey. They went along home until they were gone.

Callie and his mother went to the movies. Molly went to school. She saw the movies on Saturdays, but not on Wednesdays. When he and his mother went. They walked down the hill on the skinny sidewalk. He held her hand and her stick tapped out in front. It tapped very lightly like the thin finger of a clock. Sometimes he heard it tapping when his mother was asleep, tapping from the dark corner of the room. He heard all the clocks tapping in the velvet house. He knew the stick told them when to tap.

As they walked, his mother asked him to look up in the sky and tell her what creatures were there. A creature was like an animal but it could be people, or half girl and half horse. Creatures grew in the sky, sliding over each other. Once a cloud came down and covered the town. His mother said it was a creature of a sort, a fog; only he couldn’t see its
shape because he was inside it. She said she had seen many creatures when she was a girl. The best one was a man with a big pocket in his vest. More creatures kept coming out of the pocket until the man himself came out and then there was nothing left.

There were two movie theaters in town. The finer one was actually closer. But his mother liked the smaller one that was on down Main Street close to the tracks. It was nearly empty in the afternoons except for them and the sweeping man, who moved his big flat broom around and around. The lobby floor was laid with yellow linoleum in diamond shapes. It was coming up in patches where the planked boards showed through black with fuzz. Trains went by and the big mirrors rattled on the walls. In the shadowy closeness their seats shook; he gripped the worn plush delirious with joy.

The screen was a floating square of light. Curtains swung back on rods. His mother cupped his face in the dark. Pouring out of a tiny hole the big lion opened and roared, shuddering its gold weight. With his glasses Callie could almost see the tiny eyes and the fragile underlip quivering its teeth.

On the screen a man danced with a hat rack, holding it like some tender thing and twirling it over his back. He danced his feet around while it circled like a saucer on its side. Tippling its fluted legs, tippling it turned a long brown liquid in his arms in his thin arms. His shiny heels clicked and spun, his mouth a perfect kiss. He was supple and dapper and his smooth face rippled in the shaking of the trains. Callie was not afraid in the dark because the man was dancing. He danced over the rumble of the blunt-nosed engine and the clack of the boxcar wheels. He danced the tiled cement in front of the old theater and the steamy sidewalk
grate. He danced the long cracked Spenser streets under the droop-haired trees, up the hill to the house where Callie’s father sat with clinched hands, listening to Chopin in the dark. Callie dreamed them together in the dark house; his mother in the thin hallway, her white dress, her legs clear through the cloth. His father sitting with his music by the rainy window and they were all safe with the dancing man.

It went black and the lights came up. Callie waited for his mother to know, and they walked up the slanted floor to the lobby. It looked smaller to him now, gauzy as a cataract. Night, said the sweeping man. His broom went round and round. They pushed open the double doors and the soft fatal whish of his moving followed them away.

Laura put Callie down to sleep when they got home. She wondered why sleep is down. She thought it was like a sinking. Callie was afraid to sleep. She sat by him until he slept and put his glasses where he could reach them.

She pressed herself against the straight back of the wooden chair and touched her face with her hands. She felt the round covered balls of her eyes, the boned sockets, the hard line of her jaw. Her face felt old to her when she touched it; when she was alone and touched it. She hadn’t seen her face since she was a child. She remembered seeing it that night in the mirror; the hall light a sudden blindness, her mother laughing, the sweet sick smell as she leaned close to tie a red ribbon too loose in Laura’s hair. It fell lopsided in her light hair, in the mirror. She saw her own eyes, then her mother looking at her. And the man laughed, holding them both, and the car was warm, moving. She crawled into the back and rolled against the seat. They laughed, her mother dangling the discarded ribbon from the rearview mirror,
the wrinkled raveled satin, and the car lurched and they laughed.

Laura’s head was aching. She would not think of it. She would go and lay in the snow. Behind her mother’s house the snow was deep. Laura move your arms up and down like this And your legs, there, like this … Laura would close her eyes under the pines in her warm clothes, feel snow falling on her face … all sounds went away. And her mother lifted her laughing Silly don’t fall asleep in the snow …

Laura got up and walked through the quiet house to the bedroom. Clocks ticked. She took off her clothes and folded them neatly across a chair. A car went by. She thought it must be dark by now. She was very tired. She got between the covers, feeling the wide empty bed with her legs. It seemed to open, the sheets opening and covering. In the snow they lay down to make women in gowns whose arms had exploded. No Laura, those are angels with wings like the angel in the tree … Snow fell from the trees in clumps, filled the angels up. Laura stamped the exploded arms. Again, in her dreams, she saw the shadow with the open mouth, falling all in fire. It had the sweet sick smell of her mother’s words; it crooned, falling the crackling black. Good black and the words said hush. Laura slept. She was sinking and the sounds went away.

On Wednesdays Randal took Molly to the diner. It was a long aluminum room with yellow stools and a red counter. Ralph was a man near fifty whose rubbery face ran with sweat. He shook Molly’s hand and called her a lady. Randal and Molly sat up front near the grill. Behind the counter Ralph’s flaccid daughter Sylvie smiled her sideways smile and nodded her head again and again.

Ralph made a bowl of batter for their pancakes. Sylvie shambled blond and big, reaching under the counter for the silverware. How you, she nodded, placing each utensil carefully beside the other. When he heard her turn to get the water glasses, Randal turned the silverware right side up. Molly watched Sylvie put three ice cubes in each glass, one at a time, with her big silver dipper. She put the glasses in front of them and smiled, her mouth twitching. Her father liked the blind man and told her to wait on him good. Her eyes rolled to the door, swept the wall and the square clock, swept it all to the far end of the red counter. Her hand moved on her thigh as if she held the rag that wiped the Formica clean. Her hands smelled like the rag. Its wilted pungence mixed with an oily peanut smell when she lifted her arms.

Her baby, Howard, was on the floor like always, playing with straws or spoons. He was a fat towheaded baby who never cried. Sylvie picked him up and held him on her lap while Randal and Molly ate pancakes. Uh huh, huh, Sylvie laughed slow, the baby rocking. Randal thought: she is like a cow burning. He asked her how the week had been, feeling Molly watch her.

Ralph scraped the grill with his iron spatula. Welfare people been to see my girl again, he said, but she can count to twenty now. She ain’t the first one been taken advantage of—Look here, Mr. Collier, I got new berries and cream for them pancakes.

The syrup was warm in Randal’s mouth. Molly’s fingers curled on his wrist were sticky, her small nails sharp. Her stolid hands weren’t Laura’s. Laura’s hands (the school that first month, his quarters a room in the tower; savage thumps of pigeons on the ledge. The psychiatrist crossed and recrossed his legs. Laura is a special case Her blindness, he said, Is to
some extent hysterical … thrown free, the car … her mother crawled out burning, he said. We think Laura was, he said, Conscious. Gloves at night for years, he said, To keep from hurting … herself in her sleep. I’m not qualified, he said, To deal with her).

Later, Laura gave Randal the gloves. They were white cotton gloves like young girls wear to church, but they knotted around the wrists with string. Her hands, thought Randal. Sylvie went on with her sounds.

Laura came to his rooms on the grounds. He hadn’t been near her for several weeks. I’m seventeen, she’d said, today I’m seventeen. She came near him, pulling at his hands his chest his hair. He was afraid her aunt would find out and take her away (She’s a slut like her mother. You’re not the first or last. I did what I could now she’s your affair). He lived in fear she would be gone or pregnant too soon; still he wanted her so badly he shook. By the time her pregnancy showed, she was eighteen and they were married. Randal was thirty-eight, moving in her arms in their empty house. On the blond wood floors she taught him to waltz. They turned, turning until he was dizzy and he pressed her to him and they lay down on the floor she—

Take your time, said Ralph. Just sweeping up. Randal reached in his pocket for the money.

Outside, the diner’s purple lights made the wet street pink. The door clicked behind them and did its slow sigh shut. Molly listened. Sylvie pushed her ragged mop and chanted. Nine, ten, eleven.

Callie heard them come in. His father scuffed his feet and then they were in the room. They all went out to the kitchen.
His mother had soup for them and the steam came up. His father’s face above him was wide and lost in the steam. Callie reached through and touched him and left his hand there.