The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (21 page)

“Oh,” he said, opening his hand to reveal a little dog he’d assembled from the pieces of wood. “One of these silly things. Cute, aren’t they? Japanese.” He and Sandra gazed at the little figure in his palm, perplexed and abstracted.

“What pretty glasses,” I said, picking up my juice.

“Yes,” Sandra said. She reeled her attention back from Norman’s hand. “Those. Yes, they are quite pretty, aren’t they? They’re local work. It’s a shame they don’t make them any longer.”

“Well, we’ve got ours,” Norman said with a jolly lift of an eyebrow. “We got them years ago, and we still have them.”

“Like everything else we got years ago,” Sandra said crossly. She took a sip of her juice and set the glass down, pushing it away from her on the table. “They used to do such lovely work in this area,” she said to me. “Norman and I used to bring carloads and carloads back home with us. Oh, those trips!” She looked at Norman for an instant. When she looked away again, she held out her hand, and he clasped it. I was decades away from them in the long silence.

“Would you like something instead of the juice, darling?” Norman said.

“Would I like something instead of the juice.” Sandra looked at him and withdrew her hand from his.

“No, I just—” he said, and stopped. He set the little wooden dog on the table and watched it as if it were going to perform a trick.

“Well,” Sandra said, seeming to remember me. “But I hope you’re having a lovely, lovely time.”

“She is,” Norman said.

“We always do, ourselves,” Sandra said. “Wonderful climate, wonderful friends—pool, sun, tennis…”

“And they’re a happy people,” Norman said.

My day, of course, was pretty well ruined. To salvage something of it I took an unfamiliar street into the square; although every street looked alike, and the walls, their colors softened by an aged, powdery bloom, hid most of what lay beyond them, each doorway and gate opened onto a little scene as precise and mystifying as a stage set, and today I walked slowly, to look. Here and there I could see part of a garden littered with fallen flowers, or the twisted trunk of a tree whose branches arched above the walls. I passed a shop where paper goods were displayed as proudly and elaborately as if they were precious rarities, and a tiny restaurant, consisting of several cheerfully painted tables and a stove, on which sat a stewpot. A jewel-colored parrot presided from his perch. Nearby in a roofed space, a woman leaned back against a polished sports car, resting, her eyes closed. She wore a little uniform with a starched pinafore, and she fanned herself slowly with a large stiff leaf. Stretching out behind her, on and on, I could see a slope covered with tiny shacks. Lines of washing crisscrossed it, and children played there. Several ponies—real ponies they were, of course—stood, flicking their tails. When the maid opened her long obsidian eyes I was unsettled, as if something potent were being released through them. But she didn’t seem to see me. Perhaps I was invisible in the strong light.

Later I wandered through an outdoor market I hadn’t come across before. I was attracted to an array of miniatures spread out on a blanket, and I picked one up to admire it. It was a tiny scene exactly like the one I stood in front of at that moment: a woman wearing a shawl around her head and shoulders and a long skirt sat behind a display of her wares just like the woman who looked up at me now. But the miniature woman sold tiny foodstuffs—the smallest imaginable carrots and scallions and tomatoes and bottles of milk. I was charmed by the little tableau; but when I tilted it to inspect the toy woman’s face, I saw that it was a skull, its mouth open in greedy bliss. Seeing my expression, the living woman in front of me broke into peals of laughter, and my hand seemed frozen to the nasty toy. I was shaking when I reached the news kiosk. Both boys looked at me with concern, and I was glad that it was not possible for us to communicate with one another.

Upstairs that night I took myself by surprise in the mirror. An American girl—no wonder Norman and Sandra insisted that I was young. I’d seen a small-featured face, unusually composed, and an almost aggressively fresh pink-and-white complexion that seemed to have been acted upon by neither internal nor external weather. I had always assumed that life would start for me at about the age I had reached now; it was the age at which my mother considered hers to have started, the age at which she had married for the first and only time, had conceived her first and only child. But soon after that late, small budding of her life she had been left with only a wedding ring, a settlement, a disease, and a daughter, of course—a daughter who was now thirty-four years old.

After Sandra’s arrival there was a great deal more activity downstairs. Sandra and Norman were often out sunbathing, or sitting on the terrace, where Dolores brought them elaborate little meals. In the evenings, they frequently had gatherings. The guests, often people who hardly would have spoken to one another in the United States, were bound together here by the conviction, based on the spending power of their dollars, of their own merit, and necessarily, therefore, the merit of their companions. They reinforced this conviction by continuous complaints about the town (and it was true that nothing ever happened on time, nothing was ever properly done, there were endless, inexplicable shortages of goods—it was a world of exasperating shrugs and smiles), and all conversations on these evenings were suspended in a medium of expatriate complicity, where no one had ever suffered any past indignity or disappointment, where no one, in fact, seemed to have any antecedents whatsoever. No one ever asked me anything about my own life. Any sharp-edged remnant of life “back at home” that might mar the smooth afternoons was washed away in the evenings’ floods of alcohol. The morning sun burned off the hangovers. There was only one beautiful day and then another, and life being squandered.

During these parties of Sandra and Norman’s I would go upstairs as soon as possible. But the loud voices and laughter seemed amplified in my little apartment, and after an hour or two I would feel weak with grief and rage, as one does when one is ill. When I managed to avoid an event of this sort altogether, Dolores would appear at my door with an invitation for me to join the company, and on those evenings that I sent her downstairs with excuses she would return with a tray of party food, decorated with flowers or paper constructions or carved miniatures. Usually I put the food into the refrigerator and saved it for several days before I threw it out, but once, as soon as I’d shut the door behind Dolores, even though I was terribly hungry I threw it wrathfully into the garbage. When there were no parties I sat inside with the lights dimmed, fearing the exhausting importunities that would surely ensue from downstairs if I were to be seen on my balcony.

One evening, to escape from Norman and Sandra I went to the square. And as I approached I was amazed to find myself in the company of the entire town. The street walls exhaled the retained heat of the day, and a sudden scent of honey was released into the air as people filed in from all directions, arm in arm, and perched on the embellished benches or the rims of the tiled fountains, or strolled along the little paths. The sky flowed pink to green, and across it birds convened in wide streaks, screaming, and settled, with the dark, down into the trees.

I found a spot for myself on a bench between two elderly women. Although the sheen of daylight hung over the sky high across from me, here under the canopy of trees and birds it was truly night. The steady, intricate play of the fountains wove up all the sounds, and small lamps spilled light onto the glossy leaves. All around the square the cafés filled with customers.

No one bothered me. No one spoke to me. I watched the children tumbling about, playing tag up and down the little paths or kicking large, bright, slow balls to one another. Two little girls in identical starched and ruffled dresses bought a balloon from a boy hardly older than themselves. Expertly he disengaged their choice from the massive cluster that bobbed above him. A group of little girls, with ribbons in their silky black hair, tottered, still rubbery with infancy, under a stream of translucent spheres that bloomed from the wand of a vendor of bubble liquid. Little boys ran up a flight of shallow stone steps and slid down its broad border over and over. Teenagers sat entwined, kissing or reading comics, and older couples meandered hand in hand. Some vendors had spread out cloths to display their goods, and others sold sweets from carts, or glowing drinks made of crushed fruit. Musicians played—some in groups, others singly—without reference to each other, and then a band appeared in the little bonbon of a band shell, the brass of their instruments flashing more brightly than the sound. The porous night absorbed noises rapidly here, and activity streamed silently around one, like the sort of dream that binds the body and absorbs the voice as one struggles to break into the waking world.

After that, I often fled to the square in the evenings. It was like being part of a little music box. Every night the figures assumed their positions—the birds, the boys and girls, the parents, the grandparents, the couples, the vendors, and the musicians all took their places at the same time, and the men who sold bubble-making liquid sent their streams of bubbles tirelessly into the air while the tiniest children twirled, enchanted, beneath them.

Later the town would pitch and boil as I slept. Faces I’d hardly noticed in the square rose up around me and spoke urgently, but I could not understand the words. The flowery walls that lined the streets split open in the pale brilliance of my dreams, revealing broad veins of cardboard shacks where bodies tossed and groaned in their own sleep. Women sat wrapped in their shawls; they reached out, but when I put change into their open palms they threw it on the ground, shrieking. I was ill; I lay in bed, dreaming, with my hands on the covers, unable to move or call out. My mother stood with her back to me, moonlight sluicing down on her. She poured transparent juice from a pitcher into a glass, but it made no sound. She turned and walked toward me, grinning in pain, making a balloon dance on a string. Inside the balloon was a baby. Its face swam toward the surface, hugely distorted. My mother jerked on the string, grinning, making the balloon dance. I saw it was falling, I saw it was plummeting down toward the slate ground, suddenly a great distance away; but a roaring silence masked its impact.

I always awoke into the quiet before dawn with my heart pounding. I would pour myself a glass of water and swallow it slowly to regulate my breathing as I walked back and forth in my room. The moonlight that streamed into my dreams had given way to a softer dark, but how bright the stars were still—like tiny holes in a skin that hid a pure light beyond. Often I hardly knew where I was, as I drank my water and walked, so altered had the world been by my sleep. And all around me dream images of my mother—forgotten images from all the ages at which I’d known her—slipped into shadows. I myself was no age in my dreams, the age one is to oneself. Exhaustion would topple me back into the life of my sleep, which seemed to be flowing on independently of me, just like the life my body entered in the mornings. And after several more hours I could feel myself working free again, but just as I sped up toward a sunlit surface the picture would spin and I would wake plunging downward into a daytime world as protean as my dreams.

In the afternoons, when the sun had baked the town into opaque, reliable shapes, I sat in the square and refreshed myself by reading about the history of the peoples who had occupied the area. Throughout the history of the military struggles, the vanquished had absorbed, to some degree, the victor, and had ultimately asserted at least some subtle ascendancy. And although the stately cities thought to be buried beneath me in layers were as invisible as the mountain where the remains of the pyramid still stood, pockets of ancient languages and customs had survived intact among the people who pursued their quiet activities around me in the square. It seemed remarkable to me that these people were adrift at the margins of a history now generated elsewhere, and yet were the living descendants not only of the ultimate, fierce Spanish conquerors but also of the glamorous nations that had ruled here when this had been the center of civilization. I read about them all—the succession of vivid, vanished empires that ended during the reign of a bellicose, death-obsessed people, who had been technologically and martially accomplished but otherwise less refined than their predecessors. These final Indian rulers used the pyramid as an altar for human sacrifice, and I could not bring myself to visit the ruins. I wondered if Norman or Annette ever imagined the blood that had flowed down stone steps over his picnic spot, her marketplace.

One night when I came up the hill from the square I found Norman and Sandra on the patio with a young couple utterly unlike the reddened, tuberous creatures who were usually to be found there. “Come here,” Sandra called. “I want you to meet Marcus and Eileen.” The woman’s skirt flounced out from her tiny waist, and her toylike high-heeled shoes were dazzlingly white and free of dust. “They’re our neighbors.”

“Yes, I am Marcos,” the man said, standing. “And my wife, Elena.”

“Now, where did I get ‘Eileen’ from?” Sandra said. “For whom can I get something to drink?” Norman said, clapping his hands together.

“It’s Dolores’s night off,” Sandra said. “God knows what she does.”

“What is it you are drinking, Norman?” Elena asked, reaching out a slender arm.

“Water.” Norman smiled sheepishly.

“Yes, certainly, but let me taste,” Elena said. Her long red nails gleamed against the glass.

“A little water,” Norman said as Elena took a delicate sip.

“A little water with a big gin,” Marcos said.

“Yes, give me one of those, please, Norman,” Elena said.

“And for me, too, please,” Marcos said.

“Nothing for me, thank you,” I said.

“Oh, come on,” Sandra said.

“No, really,” I said. “Thank you.”

“These two live right next door,” Sandra said, indicating the hedge through which Mister and the rabbit made their frequent appearances. “And
this
one”—she tucked my arm under hers—“lives upstairs. She came all the way from—from—America”—Sandra landed with relief on the word—“and now she’s right here in this garden. She
hates
us, isn’t that right?” Sandra winked at Elena. “We’re bad neighbors and she hates us.”