The Broom of the System (14 page)

A chest of drawers from Mooradian’s .in which were clothes and on top of which, leaning on a triangular cardboard support that folded out of its back, was a photo of Lenore, her sister, her two brothers, her great-grandmother, Lenore Beadsman, and her great-grandfather, Stonecipher Beadsman, grouped around a deep wooden globe of the earth in a pretend den in a photographer’s concrete studio. Taken in 1977, when Lenore was eleven and temporarily minus front teeth. There was also, leaning back against that picture, an unframed picture of Lenore’s mother, in her frilly white wedding dress, linen, next to a large window filled with filmy spring light, looking down and arranging some wedding-related items in her hands. The picture resting on a spread-out cotton handkerchief with “Midwestern Contract Bridge Championships, Des Moines, Iowa,. 1971” embroidered onto one comer.

Three drawers of socks and panties and so on, and one drawer of soap. A bed, unfortunately at the moment unmade, with a shiny old heavy maple frame and a pillow with a pillowcase with a lion on it that Lenore had had for a very long time. A shelf in the refrigerator in the kitchen downstairs on which were crowded bottles of seltzer water and ginger ale, some dark old carrots with limp tops, some limes. An area of the freezer crammed full of plastic bags of frozen vegetables, frozen mixed vegetables, on which Lenore largely lived.

A soft easy chair, old, covered in thick brown pretend velvet, that could recline so far back one’s head almost touched the floor. A footstool with a woven straw top. A small black table that served poorly as a desk and was at the moment bare anyway. A black wooden chair that went with the table and was irritating because one of its legs was shorter than the others. An even more irritating, blindingly white-bright overhead light fixture. Two ceramic low-wattage soft-light lamps with painted nut-and-flower scenes on the bases, purchased as alternatives to the overhead light, lamps that threw huge praying-mantis-ish shadows of Lenore and Candy Mandible on the room’s cream walls after sunset.

Eleven boxes of books from college, most of them Stonecipheco boxes, with red-ink drawings of laughing babies on the cardboard sides. All the boxes unopened, the athletic tape wheedled from the college trainer on the pretext of a mysterious pre-graduation sore ankle not even cut off, yet, and turning yellow. The boxes piled on either side of the west windows and supporting a tape player and a case of tapes and a fuchsia depressed and budless from lack of water in the August heat. A popcorn popper that popped popcorn with hot air. A box of Kleenex. A pretend tortoise-shell hairbrush. An old walker in the east comer, with two aluminum parabolas joined by twin mahogany support bars with soft cloth handgrips and the name YINGST carved in the wood of a bar above a hanging Scotch-taped publicity photo of Gary, the especially smiley Lawrence Welk dancer. Half-access to a bathroom down the hall, meaning half-access to a sink, a commode, a medicine cabinet, a tub with a shower fixture, and a soap-crusted shower curtain covered. with profiles of yellow parrots.

A bird cage on an iron post in the northern comer of the room. A mat of spread newspapers, beaded with fallen seed, on the floor below it. A huge bag of birdseed to the right of the newspaper, leaning against the wall. A bird, in the cage, a cockatiel, the color of a pale fluorescent lemon, with a mohawk crown of spiked pink feathers of adjustable ‘height, two enormous hooked and scaly feet, and eyes so black they shone. A bird named Vlad the Impaler, who spent the bulk of his life hissing and looking at himself in a little mirror hanging by a string of Frequent and Vigorous paperclips in the iron cage, a mirror so dull and cloudy with Vlad the Impaler’s own bird-spit that Vlad the Impaler could not possibly have seen anything more than a vague yellowish blob behind a pane of mist. Nevertheless. A bird that very occasionally and for a disproportionate ration of seed could be induced to stop hissing and emit a weird, extraterrestrial “Pretty boy.” A bird that not infrequently literally bit the hand that fed it, before returning to dance in front of its own shapeless reflection, straining and contorting always for a better view of, itself. Lenore refused to clean the mirror anymore, because as soon as she did so it was, in about half an hour, covered with dried spit again. A Black and Decker hand vacuum to vacuum seeds and the odd fallen feather or guano bit lay on the floor to the right of the bag of seed, having fallen out of its wall mount a few nights before.

Some personal items in the bathroom. A closet full of white dresses. A shoe stand bulging like a raspberry with black canvas. A bookshelf over the desk table half full of books in Spanish. Also on the shelf an annoying clock that clicked and buzzed every minute on the minute, and a little clay Spanish horse with a removable head in which was Lenore’s spare key. Above the west windows, broken venetian blinds that fell on the head of whoever tried to let them down. A tiny frosting of cracks in the glass of the tops of the windows, from airplane noise.

A manual called
Care for Your Exotic Bird.
A patch of chewed wall behind Vlad the Impaler’s cage from where Vlad the Impaler had gnawed on the wall in the dark when the mirror-show had closed, a patch from which plaster protruded, and about which Mrs. Tissaw was not pleased, and in regard to which a bill was promised.

Rick dropped Lenore off and she ran upstairs and came into her room and took off her dress. There was music and clove smell from under Candy’s door. Lenore’s room was filled with sad hot orange sunset. Vlad the Impaler had his feet hooked into the bars at the top of his cage and was hanging upside down, trying to find some reflective purchase at the very bottom of his smeared mirror.

“Hi, Vlad the Impaler,” said Lenore in her bra and panties and shoes.

“Hello,” said Vlad the Impaler.

Lenore looked at the bird. “Pardon me?”

“I have to do what’s right for me as a person,” Vlad the Impaler said, righting himself and looking at Lenore.

“Holy cow.”

“Women need space, too.”

“Candy!” Lenore went and opened Candy Mandible’s door. Candy was stretching, on the floor, doing near-splits, in a silver leotard, with a clove cigarette in her mouth.

“Christ, sweetie, I’ve been waiting, how are you?” Candy got up and moved to turn off her stereo.

“Come here quick, listen to Vlad the Impaler,” Lenore said, pulling Candy by the hand.

“Nice outfit,” said Candy. “What about the unclear emergency? How’s Lenore and Concamadine?”

“You’re sweet, but that kind of talk can lead exactly nowhere,” said Vlad the Impaler, staring dumbly at himself in his cloudy mirror. “My feelings for you are deep. I’ve never claimed they’re not.”

“What the hell is going on with him?” Lenore asked Candy.

“Hey, that’s what I was just saying,” Candy said, looking at Vlad the Impaler.

“Pardon me?” said Vlad the Impaler.

“I was rehearsing what to say to Clint tonight, tonight I’m going to break up with him, I decided. I was in here practicing while I waited for you.”

“Hi, Vlad the Impaler,” said Vlad the Impaler. “Here’s some extra special-wecial food.”

“How can he talk like that all of a sudden?” asked Lenore. “He only used to say ‘Pretty boy,’ and I had to like pour tons of seed down him every time, to get him to.”

“There are lots of pretty girls in the world, Clinty, you’re just so incredibly
serious,
” Vlad the Impaler said.

“Clinty?” said Lenore.

“Clint Roxbee-Cox, the V.P. at Allied who drives the Mercedes? With the glasses and the sort of English accent?”

“Clint, Clint, Clint,” twittered Vlad the Impaler.

“Shut up,” said Candy Mandible.

“Anger is natural,” said Vlad the Impaler. “Anger is a natural release, let it out.”

“He could never talk like this before,” Lenore said.

The orange light on the shiny wood floor began to have slender black columns in it as the sun started to dip behind downtown Cleveland.

“Weird as hell. I was in here at like six-thirty, and he just hissed and writhed. And I went for a run, and I came back, and I rehearsed what to say to Clint, and then I went to stretch out, and then you came,” Candy said, tapping her cigarette ashes into Vlad the Impaler’s cage.

“Of course you satisfy me, Clinty. Don’t think you don‘t,” said Vlad the Impaler.

“Did you feed him?” Lenore asked Candy.

“No way. I’ve still got that scar on my thumb,” Candy said. “You said you’d do it all the time.”

“Then how come his dish is full, here?”

“Women need space, too.”

“He must not have eaten from it this morning,” said Candy. “Is that a new bra?”

Vlad the Impaler began to peck at his seed; his pink mohawk rose spikily and fell.

“This is just like the bizarrest day of all time,” Lenore said, untying her shoes. “Rick and I had dinner with Mr. Bombardini? Of Bombardini Company and skeleton eye-socket fame?”

“You met Norman Bombardini?” Candy said.

“I just don’t know what you mean by love. Tell me what you mean by that word,” Vlad the Impaler said.

“You’re going to have to buy a very small gag,” said Candy.

“Candy, the guy is trying to eat himself to death because his wife left him. He already weighs about a thousand pounds. He was eating eclairs off the floor.” Lenore took her bathrobe from the bedpost and undid her bra in the sun and headed for the bathroom. Candy followed her down the hall.

“You can’t hold me to promises I didn’t make!” Vlad the Impaler called after them.

Lenore took her shower while Candy Mandible leaned against the sink and smoked a clove cigarette in the steam.

“I don’t get it,” Candy said. “How can they just let twenty patients walk out and not see them or stop them?”

“Hobble out, is more like it,” Lenore said from the shower.

“Right.”

“I’m just going to assume, I guess, that if my father knows about it, Lenore’s OK. I’m going to assume that he took her to Corfu with him for this summit meeting with the president of this other baby food company. Except Gramma’s always had about zero interest in the Company. Except Dad and Gramma more or less hate each other. Except Gramma really has to have things ninety-eight point six or she gets blue. Except there’s like twenty-five other people gone too. Corfu would have to be pretty crowded. But I’m going to assume Dad took them somewhere. Except God I didn’t even think he knew where the Home was, anymore. Even though he owns it. He always handles it through Rummage and Naw.” The shower hissed on the curtain for a moment. “I don’t know if I should wait till Dad comes back or not. I can’t just fly to Corfu. I don’t have any money. And plus who knows where they are in Corfu.”

“Rick could lend you money. God knows Rick’s got money.”

“I haven’t even told Rick about it yet. He’s hurt.” Lenore turned off the shower and stepped out.

“I think Rick sort of flipped out, a little bit, up there, today.” Candy threw her cigarette in the toilet. It hissed for a second. She began to brush her teeth.

“He seemed OK at dinner. He just wants to know where I am all the time. The one who’s flipped and landed heavily is that Norman Bombardini. He was talking about infinity, and living butter?”

“What?”

“My robe smells like the bottom of a rug,” Lenore said, sniffing at her brown robe. “It’s all mildewy.”

“You could see if Lenore’s maybe staying with anybody else in your family,” said Candy.

“And what the hell is with Vlad the Impaler?”

“You could see if Lenore’s with anybody else in your family.”

“What? Yes. That’s a good idea. Except no way she’s with John, he can’t even be reached, and neither can LaVache, because Dad told me he doesn’t even have a phone. And why would Gramma go all the way to Amherst? Maybe Clarice, I guess. Except if Gramma was still around here, which Clarice obviously is, she’d have called to at least let me know she was OK.”

“Maybe she tried and could only get Steve’s Sub.”

“God, that’s another thing, what a rotten day at work. That Peter guy who looks like a negative never came back, and we sure didn’t hear from any tunnel guy.” Lenore tried to get steam off the mirror. Candy dried Lenore’s back with a towel and took off her silver leotard and stepped into the shower. Lenore stuck her arm in behind the plastic curtain and Candy handed her the soap and Lenore gently soaped Candy’s back, the way Candy liked. “And we get call after call at the board, almost all wrong, and Prietht was laughing.”

“I’m really going to kill her. I’m going to murder her, soon. A negative?”

“And Walinda was just unbelievably mad that I was late. She was really going to fire me. She kept saying, ‘Don’t play.’ ”

“When she says ‘Don’t play,’ you know she’s really mad,” Candy said, stepping out of the shower. The steam in the bathroom was now so thick Lenore could hardly see to open the door. She opened the door. A rush of cool hall air came in and cut the steam. Lenore began to brush her teeth.

“I should shave my legs,” she said. “My legs are making that sound when I rub them.”

“So shave.”

“And then Candy what’s with Vlad the Impaler? I think he must be sick. Rick said the lady in the store said cockatiels didn’t really even talk that much, as a rule. Maybe he’s dying, and this is like the huge burst of fireworks at the end, right before the fireworks are over.”

“Clinty, the sex is great, you know the sex is great, I’ve told you how you fill me up, but sex is only like a few hours a day, you can’t let it totally rule your life,” said a raspy bird voice from down the hall.

“Little fucker sounds pretty healthy to me,” Candy Mandible said, walking naked down the hall, Lenore in the bathrobe behind her. “If Mrs. Tissaw hears this stuff, we’re really up the old fecal creek. We better start teaching him some Psalms or something.”

Candy went into her room and Lenore into hers. In Lenore’s room it was very pretty now. The floor and lower walls were liquid black, and dark tree shadows moved in the orange bath of sunset on the upper walls and ceiling.