Final Vinyl Days (6 page)

“I've got your knee-high hose right here,” my mother answered and held it out to her. “I got your Lee press-on nail. I got your sleezy old tank top.”

“I don't have a tank top,” the girl answered even though she was wearing one. “So there!” She stuck her tongue out at my mother, and they went to a local commercial for Stiles Chevrolet.

My mother had been lowered into the ground right beside the man who had made her so miserable. I kept trying to picture her again that day in front of her washer, to picture the man there moaning and arching and carrying on in front of her. Was it love or desperation or revenge or some strange combination of it all that she was feeling?

Though Twyla was traipsing to the cemetery nearly every single day with candles and rocks and roses, I kept my distance. Nearly a month passed before I got up my nerve to go out there and when I did, I was struck by how small and plain her headstone was, how the mound of red earth was already flattened by recent rain. It was a beautiful Saturday morning, the September air cool, invigorating. Doug had gone to play golf, and I caught myself thinking as I had been ever since my mother died:
he said
—he
said
he was going to play golf. I could not trust a word from his mouth, and I was about to tell my mother just this, tell her how she had ruined my life, and why couldn't she have just died in silence instead of using her last breath to put a hex on me, when I glanced out toward the old pecan tree near the junior high school and saw that there were dark clouds gathering, a storm coming. I thought of that old bull grazing in his field, and I thought of my father more or less grazing in
his
field, and I thought of Doug walking from tee to tee, the tallest thing on the green—a warm-blooded lightning rod, and I was up and running to the car, and then speeding through town. I thought of my mother in front of her washer, younger then than I was now; I saw her lineless face, the pale brows she darkened to enhance her wide blue eyes, the frizzy hair she pulled so hard over big, bristly rollers. She wanted straight hair. She wanted barefoot sandals.
She
wanted a man like Doug. I pressed the accelerator a little bit harder, anxious to see him gathering his belongings and fleeing the approaching storm, a man smart enough to come in out of the rain. I could not wait to see him, to touch him. I would gather his wet clothes and throw them in the dryer where they would tumble and tumble and tumble, warm and dry when the cycle reached its end.

When I quit smoking I dreamed of cigarettes. And when I was awake, cigarettes seemed omnipresent. They were everywhere: dangling from lips, burning in ashtrays. I felt the thin cylinder between my fingers, heard my words shrouded in fog, listened for the zip of a lighter, the scritch-scratch of a match. I could smell cigarettes from blocks away. Surrounded by hordes of people in the subway, I knew exactly who smoked and who didn't. I moved close to those who did, envying the habit, the rustle of cellophane in their purses and shirt pockets. I wanted to suck the stale tobacco from the fabric of their clothes.

I begged a cigarette from a complete stranger, a man
with dreadlocks who carried a brightly colored duffel (I didn't
look
pregnant after all), and ducked into a dirty public rest room, stood in a nasty stall that had no door, and read still nastier graffiti while inhaling and exhaling. And as I got down close to the brown filter (a much harsher brand than the one I'd abandoned), I kept hearing my doctor saying that he could tell which women smoked by the appearance of the placenta, and I could almost feel the poison I had just taken in settling like silt onto that little cluster of cells safely hidden from the world by skin, underwear, jeans, sweater, thick down coat.

The nurse who took my little cup of urine and poured it into a vial—another sample lined up with all the others waiting to go to the lab—didn't know how to arrange her face when giving results. A wedding ring is no guarantee. Age is no guarantee. It was easier for her to telephone, easier to deliver the news without a face, only monotone syllables:
Your test is positive
, confirming everybody's home stick tests, just like the one I had already tried twice. I found myself reassuring
her
. That's wonderful, I said, and I could hear her lengthy sigh at the other end. She faced a waiting room full of others: the young girl with mascara-stained cheeks, Clearasil and homework assignments in her synthetic leather purse, the one with
some boy's ring and promise strung around her neck, the one who had no earthly idea how it could have happened.

The dreams started early, odd little snippets. I was at a table with friends, in a lively colorful cafe with hot-pepper lights, and I felt so jolly, robust and jolly, and when the cute young waiter, his hair slicked back like a flamenco dancer, came whirling by, I asked for another fruit juice concoction like the one I'd just finished. Delicious stuff. I ate the cherries and sucked the pineapples. I discreetly picked my teeth with the frilly little parasol.
Fruit juice
? he asks.
Fruit juice
? and the music stops, all heads turn to my table, to me, my abdomen clearly visible under a skin-tight top like nothing I have ever owned in reality.
Lady, you just sucked down your fourth double tequila sunrise
. What?
Lady, you look discombobulated
, he says with a shocked face and that word,
discombobulated
, with all its loud, harsh syllables seems to ricochet around the room. I get stuck on the word, my head bobbling, reeling, about to fall off. The images came to me, woke me, the blackened placenta slipping onto a clean hospital floor, the wide-spaced, staring eyes of fetal alcohol syndrome. That one was a recurring dream, right up there with the one where the bathtub is steaming and bubbly and this beautifully shining naked baby shoots from your
hands like a bar of soap into the well of an empty tub or out an open window. There's the one where you leave the baby on the hood of the car and speed off down the highway, and the one where you accidentally pierce the fontanel, that soft spot, with something as innocent as the wrong end of a rattail comb.

There were times in those early weeks when I couldn't help but smoke. How bad could one cigarette really be? How bad could one little paper tube be, compared with nervous energy and honest-to-God craving? I walked blocks to a strange, distant neighborhood with a drugstore where no one would recognize me, to buy a carton, and then I hid them in the apartment, here a pack, there a pack, so it seemed like they weren't even really there at all. Early mornings, I stood in my nightgown and watched from our fifth-floor window until my husband disappeared around the corner. I climbed out on the fire escape with matches and an ashtray. The knowledge that I
was
going to smoke allowed me to slow down, take my time, angle myself so that I had a good view, red-brick buildings and sidewalks rising up Beacon Hill. Then I puffed furiously, the late November wind making me shiver as people down below scurried past in their down coats and scarves and hats. I watched our neighbor walking toward
Charles Street, his steps slow, as methodical as the metallic click of his prosthetic heart valve.

Our neighbor. As we were moving in, we had been told by the single woman below us—the one who wore faux-zebra spandex minis and catered to at least five Persians I could see lounging in her bay—to avoid
the old man
at all costs, to look the other way. He'll talk your head off, she whispered, and then rushed off to her job at a small gallery on Newbury Street. She never once asked what I did, somehow having gotten stuck in the groove of my husband's job (he's an actuary). Like many people who aren't sure what one
is
, she simply stopped talking and left.

I met our
old man
neighbor that same day while the mover was still bringing our things. It was only late August, but already it felt and looked like what I knew as the beginning of autumn in the South; there was a breeze off the Charles River and with it the sharp, water smell that I grew to appreciate, even to welcome, as home. The light seemed sharper, whiter, the shadows longer. It was a surprise to find that I
loved
this city, the street, the building. I thought about all of this sitting on those old concrete front steps, smoking one cigarette right after another—right out in public—and watching our belongings come off the truck.

It was while I was watching my Great-aunt Patricia's pie crust table angled and turned through the door that Joseph Sever stopped to introduce himself and then (as the other neighbor had predicted) proceeded to talk. He told me how he used to smoke, how he smoked Lucky Strikes, started during the war, liked them so much he kept right on. He said if he hadn't had such a good reason—his life—to quit, that he'd still be smoking three packs a day and enjoying every puff. But of course that was before his wife of forty years, Gwendolyn, died, before the heart valve, before his temples atrophied. He had been an accountant right there in the downtown area, and he described those April evenings when he worked so late, lighting cigarettes without even thinking, sometimes finding two lit and burning in the ashtray, as if he had an invisible partner.

He asked (it was clear he'd give consideration to any possible answer) how I spent my time. When he stopped speaking and there was a lull in the hoisting and heaving of the movers, I could hear his valve, a metallic click as it swung closed to prevent his blood from rushing back to its source. I told him that I worked as a copy editor for one of the publishers in town, and with that entry, he started in talking about books, his favorites from as long as he could remember:
Look Homeward Angel
as a young man new to the city, and then
Anna Karenina
and
For Whom the Bell
Tolls
, all of Hardy and Conrad, a little Jack London. “I'm a bit of a literary dabbler,” he said. “I have written some perfectly horrible poetry myself.” He liked T. S. Eliot and he liked Yeats. He liked to pause and quote a line or two with some drama, always stopping, it seemed, just as his breath gave out, at which point he tipped his latest L. L. Bean hat and bowed.

I came to learn that he purchased a new hat each season: the panama in the summer, the wool huntsman cap in the winter. I imagined a closet filled with hats, stacks and stacks like in that book
Caps for Sale
, a favorite book read in my memory in the voice of Captain Kangaroo. It turned out that at the end of each season, he continued to do what his wife had called
purging
. He gathered up everything he could live without and took it the Salvation Army bin down on Cambridge Street. “Everything except books,” he qualified, “and of course the cats.” He and Gwendolyn had always had cats, sometimes one, usually two. During his fifty years in the building, he had had fifteen different cats and could name them in one fluid motion, their names rhyming and rolling as each received an epithet: the friskiest of them all, the one with a terrible urinary problem, the one Gwendolyn never got over, the one who ate a rubber ball. He said that I should come visit his apartment and see what fifty years of books will look like.
“This will be your future,” he said as he slowly mounted the stairs. “There are rows behind rows of books, in closets and in one very special kitchen cabinet. Gwenny always used
Heart of Darkness
to balance the lamp that wobbles by our bed.” He paused on the landing before taking his flight to the second floor, the big brass-plated door propped open by the movers. “I keep it there. The lamp is a hellish thing, old and shorted out, but I keep it there.”

I kept dreaming I was having a kitten. I looked at the faceless doctor and said, “Oh, thank God she didn't have her claws out.” I told him that yes she was really cute, but that I was kind of disappointed. I really wanted a baby. At which point he laughed, just slapped his knee and laughed in a way that marked the absurdity of it all.
Imagine wanting a child
. Then I dreamed that I
couldn't
have a child, there was no child, and I went to a special clinic seeking help. I rode the T, changing trains twice; I took a boat and a bus and a taxi. The building was no bigger than the little drugstore around the corner and women of all ages and sizes and shapes were pressing up to the counter, behind which stood a woman in white guarding the shelves of test tubes. “Ah, yes, Mrs. Porter,” she said and nodded when it was my turn. “We have your child.” Suddenly all the other women were gone and I was being carefully
handed a small glass tube. I held it up to the light and inside it I saw a beautiful little girl no bigger than Thumbelina, whom I remembered from my childhood fairy-tale book. She had dark brown hair that waved onto her shoulders and big blue eyes that I was absolutely certain I saw wink and blink in affection.

“Freeze-dried,” the woman said. “Same process as coffee. Just go home and add a little water, you'll see.” The woman looked like someone I knew, a former teacher, the mother of a classmate, I couldn't quite place the face. “Be very careful with her, now,” she added and handed me a special cardboard tube, much like what you'd use to mail a stool speciman or a radon test. Carefully, I kissed the precious glass tube and slipped her into the sturdy container and then into the special zippered section of my purse. I put that into a brightly colored duffel and looped the strap over my head for extra security. In the dream I had dreadlocks and a joint hidden in my bra.

“Oh, by the way.” I was almost out the door when I remembered the important questions I had planned to ask, all of the things that my husband and I had discussed before my long journey to this place. “Her medical history.” The room was buzzing with grappling, grabbing women again, and I was being shoved out of the way. “Please. I really have to know all that you know about her.” The
woman seized my arm and pulled me behind the counter and back behind the heavily rowed shelves. She leaned close and whispered. Now I knew that I had never seen her before in my life. I would have remembered, the shiny broad forehead, the missing teeth. “You must never reveal what I'm about to say. If you do, people will want your baby. They will never let her alone.” She leaned closer, her mouth covering and warming my ear as I strained to hear. “Her mama was Marilyn Monroe” she said. “And her daddy,” she paused, looked around nervously. “JFK.” I felt stunned, disheartened. Why couldn't my baby just be the product of Flo Taylor and Ed Smith from Podunk, Wisconsin? I didn't think to ask why they were giving
me
such a burden.
Is it all random, or have I been singled out, especially chosen
? My worries turned to mental health issues, sustance abuse genes, square jawlines, and prominent teeth. But then, because I was wondering about the rich and famous, I found myself thinking about good looks and talent and Southern roots. I dreamt I said, “Do you have one from Elvis?”