Still Life with Plums (14 page)

Last July Janine said she had a new job, service station attendant. She burned down the photo hut. “Film is highly flammable,” she said. We sat in the atrium and went over numbers. Last to first. As if by going backwards we could change the beginning. Keep Chrissy an
extra 5 minutes at work. A phone call would have done it. A trip to the bathroom. A dead battery.

But her car started right up. Japanese cars are notorious for that. She drove up Seawall Boulevard in that pouring rain. Right on Rosenberg. Left on Mechanic. Crossed the railroad tracks. I imagine she could already see me coming in the ambulance. Lights flashing. Siren screaming. Yet here came Chrissy. She probably wondered where the emergency was. What it was. Train wreck? Heart attack? Never knowing. Never sensing. Then I hydroplaned. Skidded across the median. Practically drove right through Chrissy’s windshield.

It is Sunday, pier day, but I’m walking the wrong way. I’m carrying my suitcase to Douglas’s house, to Simone. The trailer lot owners found me out. When I get there I say, “There are 9 dog houses on Bayou Shore Drive and 3 of them have no dog attached.” Simone says, “You can sleep on the couch. Put your things in Douglas’s room.” It feels right to live in this house where small triumphs mean so much.

Douglas finally caught that big fish for his R.T. and Simone cooked it up special. He tied an orange bow to the lid and brought it to the Thanksgiving party in the employee lounge. I got invited because I’m more regular than most of them. I brought a bag of red delicious apples that had fallen off a truck. The Vending Machine Refiller brought a shoe box full of expired Little Debbie’s.

The R.T. was impressed with the fish and kissed Douglas right on the mouth.

Dr. Castinoli was at this party. He said, “Ed, I’ve got somebody I want you to talk to. I’ll get you an appointment as soon as I can. No charge.” I said, “Doctor, there are only 29 shopping days till Christmas, and there’s 1 button missing from your left sleeve.”

Douglas couldn’t sleep that night.

I got 2 interesting pieces of mail today. The first was a threat from Sally. It seems she’s met someone. Robert. She doesn’t love him, but he’s good with our daughter and he’s an electrician. The second was an appointment card for Dr. Rebecca Warner, Psychiatrist, January 7 at 9:30 a.m.

Robert. Wonder why he doesn’t go by Bob.

Simone makes me help her in the kitchen. It is how I earn my couch. “Peel them potatoes, boy. Take out this trash.” We made boudin sausage last week. She let me add spices and stuff the casings. Boudin reminds me of nurses’ legs. Rubbery pink flesh squeezed into white nylons.

Today Simone is deveining shrimp for filé gumbo. “Chicken gizzards in the roux,” she says. “My secret.” She pats a chair beside her. “Sit down help me, boy.” Which I do. Simone is chewing on a sassafras root and thinking very hard. Finally she says it. “Some day you gonna run out of numbers, then where you gonna be?” Simone puts 32 medium shrimp and 2 pounds of kielbasa into her gumbo. But she doesn’t let it go. “Why you doin’ this? Not for that brain-dead girl.” I stand up. “This your penance or your hell?” I start walking to the living room. “All penance got to end sometime, Ed.”

Dwayne and I were at Tibbitt’s Drive-Inn Hot Dog Stand where his aunt cooked the Secret Special Sauce. Dwayne told his friends we supplied the meat—the secret that made the sauce so special. Business was slow because of that rain. I was flirting with a curb girl. She was impressed with our uniforms and kept looking over my shoulder at the ambulance. I said, “Wanna go for a ride?” Her eyes lit like sparklers. “Let me punch out and get my purse!” Dwayne was mad. His
curb girl said no. So off we went. The three of us in the ambulance in that pouring rain. I was driving.

Janine runs the 32 feet from the elevator and sort of trips into my arms. “My sentinel!” she says. “I can always count on you.” Janine is drunk. “I can’t wait to see your numbers, Ed. What’s Chrissy been missing this year?” We both look down the hall in Chrissy’s direction. Janine actually takes a lunging step forward. “Are… are you going to…” I try to say. “No. No-no-no,” Janine says before falling into a chair. She raises a finger to her lips, “Shhhhh. Nobody even knows I’m here. Do you know? Do you know what she did? My mother? She repapered Chrissy’s old room without even asking me! New carpet. New drapes. She calls it the
guest room
now. Can you believe it? So what will Chrissy do when she walks into her old room and it’s not there?” She pauses, droops slowly to the left, and throws up into the plastic rhododendron.

I keep her fairly quiet on the bus. It is a 17 minute ride to the house with 4 stops. Douglas wants Janine to sleep in his bed. Simone says no, she’ll share hers. Douglas is mad. He doesn’t even drink his nightly warm milk with vanilla and cinnamon. Simone makes Janine sip this beige Creole drink. “It’ll keep your stomach down,” she says. Janine likes the bowling pin nativity scene set up by the tree. One of the guys painted it. Nobody ever asked him where he got the pins. Janine starts whispering about Chrissy’s last Christmas. “She got everybody these fabulous lawyer gifts. Golf clubs and tiaras and stuff. Everybody ooooed and ahhhed.” I can barely hear what she’s saying. “She did it to show off. I hated her for that and told her so. Told her right to her face. That’s the last thing I ever said to my sister:
I hate your guts.”
The words come out in a tangible cloud that hangs in the air for several minutes.

My curb girl started flipping switches and turning knobs. I didn’t care. Dwayne didn’t care. “Aren’t you married, Ed?” she said. “Every other day,” I said. “This is my other day.” She laughed. She seemed to like that. Up ahead I could see the light at Tremont turn red. I flipped the siren and hit the gas. Those cars scrambled when they saw us. Everybody checked their rearviews. The curb girl sucked in her breath when we swerved into the oncoming lane to pass a truck. She didn’t breathe until we were through the light and back on our side of the road. Then she burst out laughing and squeezed my knee. Goose-bumps beaded on her arm. I chased red lights after that.

I like the Christmas tree at our house better than the hospital’s. Simone only allows handmade ornaments on her tree. There is an assortment of nearly successful origami birds and dragons, popsicle stick sleds, crocheted wreathes, paper snowflakes, and unidentifiable dried macaroni wads dipped in red glitter. I strung together a length of flip tops from soda cans. Not too creative, but they reflect the lights real pretty. When Simone comes back from putting Janine to bed she says, “She is a very troubled girl, Ed. She’s more troubled than you.”

I received a first-ever letter from my daughter. Inside is a crayon drawing of a smiling flower. There is a teepee in the sky and a dog labeled “Ed” trots along the bottom edge. Ed. A conspicuously well-scrawled message runs up the side. “Mommy is marrying Robert on Cristmas day.” Sally never could spell Christmas.

All the men at Simone’s house wait patiently in line outside the bathroom door. Janine, this strange woman, is showering in their tub. Washing her naked body with their soap. It is astounding. Douglas has dibs on the soap.

When I count backwards it is not to stall Chrissy. It is to stall me. And I could have, very easily. Sally was feeling amorous that day. She wanted me to call in sick. “You need a vacation, Eddie. We both need a vacation. I’ll take the baby over to Mom’s.” But I just wiped her off my arm and drove away. Marriage was not my solution, baby or not. God, why didn’t I just stay home and make love to my wife?

When I think about life before Chrissy I think of the sun beating down. I see white hot concrete. A sidewalk. A slab for a three-bedroom rancher. A subdivision driveway. It is a dry, dry feeling that reminds me of soap operas in the middle of the day with the drapes closed. Of school crossings without children. Of a sightless dead bird on the side of the road.

Since Chrissy, I have been sitting in the rain. That’s what I feel like. My clothes are always moist and clingy. The paper in my notebooks is damp. But I’m comfortable in this weather. I like pulling my clothes around me. Hiking up my collar. Shoving hands into pockets.

Janine is still at our house. 2 days and she hasn’t called her parents. She hasn’t had a cigarette either. House rules. Simone ground a bitter herb for Janine to rub into her gums. Janine swears it works. Now she sits in the kitchen all day long peeling my potatoes.

“She wants you back, your wife,” Simone says. My daughter’s crayon drawing is taped to the refrigerator. “You are a lucky man, Ed. Now let’s see how smart you are.”

The ambulance flew thirty feet and landed on all fours. The curb girl had a slight concussion. Dwayne had minor lacerations and a sprained wrist. Me, not a bump, not a drop of blood. Dwayne said, “Ed, you are a lucky, lucky man.” Then we saw Chrissy’s Impulse.
She ate the steering wheel pretty good but I couldn’t get at her. Every door buckled. Every window jammed. And she was turning that gray upholstery maroon. I was pounding-kicking-hitting, but she couldn’t hear a thing. Dwayne called Jaws of Life but that was too slow. I grabbed a bumper trying to crack that windshield like a piñata. Nothing. It was five minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen damn minutes before they got there and another five to pop the door. They figured dead-at-the-scene, but I ventilated and compressed like a maniac. Dwayne tried to pull me off her, “It’s too late, man.” But I didn’t listen. “She’s gone, Ed. Let it go!” I pushed him off, “Like hell she is!”

Then I got it. A pulse. A breath.

It was still raining when Mr. and Mrs. Salir arrived at the hospital. They were soaking. Mr. Salir wore fake control. “Nobody could find us we were at the ballet we just got the message on our machine.” Dwayne introduced himself and pointed to me. Mr. Salir came over and shook my hand. He didn’t know any better. He thought I just saved his daughter’s life. Dr. Castinoli walked in. He’d put a lab coat over his scrubs but the blood still seeped through. He pulled the Salirs into a corner, sat them down. They talked for awhile. Dr. Castinoli shook his head and Mrs. Salir cried and cried and cried.

“How’s the service station job going?” I finally ask Janine. “Gasoline is highly flammable, too,” she says.

I talked to Mr. Salir today. Sort of. It was lunchtime and I waited for the elevator in front of a hungry crowd of housekeeping staff. When the doors slid open there he was. This wasn’t his regular day and I froze. So did he. But the crowd pushed me inside, right into Chrissy’s father, and I knocked him to the ground. I bent to help him,
but he swatted my hands away. “Don’t!” he said, and kept swatting even after I’d stepped back outside. Housekeeping stood and stared at this man sitting in the middle of the elevator. He looked up into my eyes, “Don’t you dare help me.” He held me with a hard stare, but before the doors hissed shut I said, “I’m sorry.” The elevator jolted and hummed down toward the lobby. I yelled after it, “I’m sorry!”

I don’t have many belongings, but I had a few things scattered around Douglas’s room. My Producto box. Rainbow vase. My daughter’s teething ring—I keep meaning to send that. This morning I noticed all of my possessions had migrated to the coffee table. “Just dusting,” Simone said and went in the kitchen to make beignets with Janine.

When Sally made it to the hospital she had streaks of mascara running down her cheeks. Dwayne told her everything—including the curb girl. But Sally just hugged my neck and kissed my face hard. A cement sun beating down on my rain.

It was my third visit to see Chrissy since the wreck. Red and purple swelled out around gauze and tape. I was leaning over the bed rail when Mrs. Salir walked in. She stopped short when she saw me, then stepped forward very slowly, very deliberately and slapped my face as hard as she could. Then she slapped it again, turned around, and walked out.

At 7:30 p.m. Simone sits us all down for Christmas Eve dinner. Deep fried turkey injected with peanut oil. Douglas gets to carve and he gives Janine the first slice. All the men like having Janine in the house. A woman who is not Simone. They all have last minute gifts for her under the tree. A Quality Inn shower cap. Baggie full of
M&Ms. A glass doorknob. Douglas bought her a black pair of panties.

Simone gives me a straw hat with a red bandanna. “I hear the sun beat down hard in Albuquerque.” She clasps my face in her burning Creole hands. “Tomorrow wedding bells gonna ring, dear boy, unless you are smart as I think.” Then she goes to the bedroom and softly shuts the door.

Janine and I look at each other from opposite ends of the couch. Still my couch. “Have you called your parents yet? I mean, you’re flying back to Seattle tomorrow, right?”

She crosses and recrosses her legs. “Well, see, I was going to fly back but, I was thinking, that is, and Simone agrees, maybe it would be better if I stayed here for awhile. It’s not like I have a job or anything to go back to.”

“Oh, and Simone agrees.”

“Well, not directly, but I can tell that it would be all right if I just sort of—stayed.”

There is this enormous pause for a minute and the air becomes too thick to breathe.

I stand up too abruptly and clap my hands on my thighs. “I guess you’ve pretty much got dibs on the couch.” She stands up fast, too, and shoves her plane ticket into my shirt pocket. I was used to her whisper, but I still had to stoop.

“… that maybe you were going to go back to your wife. At least that’s what she’s hoping you’ll do. I thought you could trade in my ticket to Seattle for a flight to Albuquerque.”

Her eyes were so hopeful for me that I could not possibly have refused.

I scoop my 17 notebooks from the coffee table. This stack represents 496 days’ worth of adding and multiplying and estimating. It also represents 496 days of my life. I count them as well-spent days. Janine’s eyebrows arch when I hand them over, then she holds them
to her chest and nods. I’m about to turn away, but I stop and reach into my back pocket for the appointment card. Dr. Rebecca Warner, Psychiatrist, January 7, 9:30 a.m. “Here,” I say. “You better take this, too.” I think maybe Janine needs this house of small triumphs more than I do. “And watch out for Douglas.”