Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories (3 page)

“It’s too bright,” she said. “Pull down the shades.”

Martin pulled down the shades, and now the room smelled of the shades as well as the dozens of bottles of perfume atop Terra’s dresser.

“It could be a sin. I thought you wanted to be an altar boy someday and wear a lace surplice. Are you sure you want to see?” Terra asked in a whisper.

“I do,” Martin whispered back.

Terra threw herself down on her bed and lay seized by a fit of laughter. When she recovered, she brought the French doll down from its place on a bookshelf.

It wasn’t her favorite doll, Terra said. It was too old-fashioned and there was no wardrobe for it, so it wore the same dingy clothes day after day. The doll’s name was Terri. Terri from Paris. It rhymed if you pronounced
Paris
like the French. Terri from Paris was special because she’d been the favorite doll of Terra’s mother when she was a girl. And before that Terri had been the favorite of Terra’s grandmother. Terra had never met her grandmother.

Terri from Paris ran in the family, Terra said. Terra’s father had told her that someday Terra would pass the doll down to her own daughter.

“That’s why you took her from Mom, isn’t it?” her father had asked. “Because you wanted to pass her on to your own little girl.”

“Mom forgot she gave her to me,” Terra had answered.

Actually, her mother had never given her Terri. While her mother was alive the doll had lived in a hatbox on top of a shelf in her mother’s closet. Terra told Martin that she’d lied to her father, because she wasn’t about to agree to passing a doll on to a little girl of her own since she had no intention of having a little girl of her own.

Terra had never met her grandmother because, like Terra’s mother, her grandmother had died young, of breast cancer. When Terra’s mother was dying, she’d asked that the doll be buried with her. Terra sneaked Terri from Paris out of the coffin.

“So you want to see something I discovered?” Terra asked Martin.

This time Martin said nothing. He didn’t want to be laughed at again.

Terra showed him anyway. She lifted the doll’s frock and pulled down the yellowed muslin underpants.

“I don’t know if my mother ever took these underpants down, but maybe it’s why she kept Terri in a hatbox,” Terra said. The space between the doll’s legs had been cracked as if someone had tapped it with a hammer. In the middle of the crack a jagged hole opened on the hollow interior of the doll. The hole was surrounded with the same cotton candy frizz of gold hair as once seemed to grow from the doll’s head before it became unglued and now looked like a wig.

“I think my uncle Bella did that,” Terra said. “I think he did that when he was a boy. He always tickles me. I hate him.”

*   *   *

Martin kept the potato even more secret than he did the doll. Wearing the doll’s golden wig, the potato was hidden away behind the tubes in his makeshift dollhouse, an ancient TV set half gutted in the basement. The potato troubled Martin, but Martin couldn’t forget it or leave it alone. At night, while the family slept, he crept down into the basement, turned on the bare bulb above the workbench, and clamped the potato in the vise. Sometimes he put his own finger in the vise and tightened it to see how long he could take the pain. He selected screws and nails of various sizes from the mayonnaise jars in which his father had them organized. Then he screwed and hammered them into the potato. He daubed the wounds they made with Mercurochrome from the tiny clotted bottle that had been stored away on the top shelf of the medicine chest for as long as he could remember. Some of the Mercurochrome ran in streaks down the wrinkled potato skin and dripped like orange drops of blood to the dusty floor.

Finally, he stripped off its wig and buried the potato in a narrow corridor of sunless dirt between the house and the garage. He could bury it, but he couldn’t stop worrying about it. So he found himself digging it up just at dusk one Sunday after dinner. The screws were already rusting, the nails turning black, festering. Sickly white fingers sprouted from the eyes. He squirted it with lighter fluid and watched it char in a ball of blue flames, then he peed out the fire.

After that it was no good simply burying it again. He put it in a brown bag that he taped shut with tape from the roll of white adhesive tape that had been stored on the top shelf of the medicine chest for as long as he could remember. Whenever he swung the mirrored door of the medicine chest shut he would watch for his face to appear, trying to catch its expression before his reflection met his eyes. When the mirror swung he could feel his eyes roll like a doll’s, minus the clatter, but he couldn’t catch that eye roll happening to his reflection.

It was Sunday night. Martin stood before the mirror on the medicine chest. He’d taken his clothes off and was daubing himself with Mercurochrome around his wounds—his nipples, his navel, the tip of his wiener. With the tiny scissors his father used to clip hairs from his nostrils, Martin snipped strips off the roll of adhesive tape and taped them over his Mercurochromed scars. Orange streaks ran from the tape. It reminded him of Christ on the cross and he stretched his arms out pretending the nails were in his palms. Then he taped his mouth. He wanted to imagine what the doll would feel in the time to come when, staked to the workbench, she would give birth to the potato.

Confession

Father Boguslaw was the priest I always waited for, the one whose breath through the thin partition of the confessional reminded me of the ventilator behind Vic’s Tap. He huffed and smacked as if in response to my dull litany of sins, and I pictured him slouched in his cubicle, draped in vestments, the way he sat slumped in the back entrance to the sacristy on cold mornings before saying morning mass—hungover, sucking an unlit Pall Mall, exhaling smoke.

Once, his head thudded against the wooden box.

“Father,” I whispered, “Father,” but he was out, snoring. I knelt wondering what to do, until he finally groaned and hacked himself awake.

As usual, I’d saved the deadly sins for last: the lies and copied homework, snitching drinks, ditching school, hitchhiking, which I’d been convinced was an offense against the Fifth Commandment, which prohibited suicide. Before I reached the dirty snapshots of Korean girls, stolen from the dresser of my war-hero uncle, Uncle Al, and still unrepentantly cached behind the oil shed, Father B knocked and said I was forgiven.

As for Penance: “Go in peace, my son, I’m suffering enough today for both of us.”

The Kiss

She lies bluish in a puddle that looks like it has seeped through her skin. The Lifeguard with bleached hair and white zinc cream nearly washed off his nose, wearing a soaked red tank top with a white cross on the front and his name—well, his nickname—
Mars
, on the back, is giving her the kiss of life. He holds her nose pinched, comes up for air himself, and then fits his mouth over hers. It sounds as if he’s blowing up a rubber raft.

She just kept swimming when he blew his whistle. He rose in his tower chair and blew repeated blasts as he watched her stroking out past the buoys. By the time he’d raced across the sand to his boat, scattering shorebirds as he went, and was rowing out after her with the gulls screaming and swirling overhead as if he was chumming, she was going under.

A sunburned guy in cutoffs, a backward baseball cap, and mirror-lensed sunglasses pushes through the crowd repeating, “I’m a doctor, excuse me, I’m a doctor.” The doctor kneels beside her, feeling for a pulse, and the Lifeguard, between breaths, asks him, “Who the fuck are you really?”

“A med student, just keep doing what you’re doing.”

The Lifeguard leans back toward her lips but at that moment a cough jolts her body, she spits up water and snot, and opens her eyes.

Now that she is no longer a corpse, the boys in the crowd press in to memorize the shriveled nipple of the breast popped over her hot-pink bikini. An ambulance, its siren dropped to a pitch that resonates more in molars than ears, churns toward them across the sand.

“Why’d you do it?” the Lifeguard asks softly.

The med student scowls at him, shakes his head in disapproval, then removes his sunglasses as if it is important to his bedside manner that the girl sees his eyes, and asks, “Feel dizzy? Nauseous? Do you want to throw up?”

“You’re so pretty … so young … why?” the Lifeguard repeats, nudging the med student aside, although, even as he asks, he knows the question is wrong. But the invisible imprint of the kiss on his lips is shaping his words. There’s a sudden, compelling bond between him and this girl just back from the dead, an intimacy of a kind he’s never felt before, an urgency to keep saving her that is ruining his judgment. He has to resist the desire to take her in his arms, hold her close, and resume kissing her. For the moment whispering is as close as he can get.

“Why’d you do it?” he whispers, as if to reassure her that her secret will be safe with him.

“Do what?” the girl asks, and looks at him dazed, lost, her trembling fingers tugging at her tangled, waterlogged hair.

It’s clear from her confused blue eyes that she’s brought back nothing she can share, no forbidden secrets to confide to the living. She doesn’t remember where she’s just been; her few moments of death are harder for her to recall than a fleeting dream. She doesn’t remember the mouth on hers that brought her back, or his breath searching for her through the darkened corridors of her body, trying dead end after dead end until he found a pathway to her will. She doesn’t remember the kiss. It has remained a part of her total absence from herself. Soon, no one will remember it but the Lifeguard, and he’s right to suspect that it’s the one kiss he’ll recall for the rest of his life. The connection between them is slipping away and the Lifeguard lets it go as if releasing her body back to the water.

“Any of you her friends?” he asks, looking into the crowd that’s reflected on the med student’s sunglasses.

She accepts a half-smoked cigarette from a hand in the crowd, and the Lifeguard, still able to feel the terrible press of coldness against his lips, rises from his knees in the sand. He stands watching, no longer necessary, as they bundle her in a faded beach towel, and she leaves without so much as a thank-you, or a wave goodbye.

Córdoba

While we were kissing, the leather-bound
Obras completas
opened to a photo of Federico García Lorca with a mole prominent beside a sideburn of his slicked-back hair, slid from her lap to the jade silk couch, and hit the Chinese carpet with a muffled thud.

While we were kissing, the winter wind known locally as the Hawk soared off the lake on vast wings of snow.

While we were kissing, verbs went uncommitted to memory.

Her tongue rolled
r
’s against mine, but couldn’t save me from failing Spanish. We were kissing, but her beloved Federico, to whom she’d introduced me on the night we’d first met, was not forgotten.
Verde que te quiero verde. Green I want you green
.
Verde viento, verdes ramas. Green wind, green branches.
Hissing radiator heat. Our breaths elemental, beyond translation like the shrill of the Hawk outside her sweated, third-story windows.
Córdoba. Lejana y sola
, she translated between kisses,
Córdoba. Far away and alone.
With our heads full of poetry, the drunken, murderous Guardias Civiles were all but knocking at the door.

Aunque sepa los caminos

yo nunca llegaré a Córdoba.

Though I know the roads

I will never reach Córdoba.

Shaking off cold, her stepfather, Ray Ramirez, came home from his late shift as manager of the Hotel Lincoln. He didn’t disturb us other than to announce from the front hall: “Hana, tell David, it’s a blizzard out there! He better go while there’s still buses!”

“It’s a blizzard out there,” Hana told me.

It was then we noticed the white roses in a green vase that her mother, who resembled Lana Turner, and who didn’t much like me, must have set there while we were kissing. We hadn’t been aware of her bringing them in. Hana and I looked at each other: she was still flushed, our clothes were disheveled. We hadn’t merely been kissing. She shrugged and buttoned her blouse.
Verte desnuda es comprender el ansia de la lluvia. To see you naked is to comprehend the desire of rain.
I picked her volume of Lorca from the floor and set it beside the vase of flowers, and slipped back into the loafers I’d removed to curl up on the jade couch.

“I better go.”

“It’s really snowing. God! Listen to that wind! Do you have a hat? Gloves? All you have is that jacket.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Please, at least take this scarf. For me. So I won’t worry.”

“It smells like you.”

“It smells like Anias.”

At the door we kissed goodbye as if I were leaving on a journey.

“Are you sure you’re going to be all right?”

Hana followed me into the hallway. We stopped on each stair down to the second-floor landing to kiss goodbye. She snuggled into my leather jacket. The light on the second-floor landing was out.

“Good luck on your Spanish test. Phone me, so I know you got home safe, I’ll be awake thinking of you,” she called down to me.

“
Though I know the roads I will never reach Córdoba
.”

“Just so you reach Rogers Park.”

*   *   *

I stepped from her doorway onto Buena. It pleased me—amazed me, actually—that Hana should live on the only street in Chicago, at least the only street I knew of, with a Spanish name. Her apartment building was three doors from Marine Drive. That fall, when we first began seeing each other, I would take the time to walk up Marine Drive on my way home. I’d discovered a viaduct tunnel unmarked by graffiti that led to a flagstone grotto surrounding a concrete drinking fountain with four spouts. Its icy water tasted faintly metallic, of rust or moonlight, and at night the burble of the fountain transformed the place into a Zen garden. Beyond the grotto and a park, the headlights on Lake Shore Drive festooned the autumn trees. For a moment, I thought of going to hear the fountain purling under the snow, but the Hawk raked my face and the frosted trees quavered.
Green branches, green wind.
I raised the collar of my jacket and wrapped her green chenille scarf around my throat. Even in the numbing wind I could smell perfume.