“Is dinner soon?” he asks. He may or may not have been looking at her. She can’t remember which eye is the good one, left or right, as confusing for her as it is with Fancy and Dancy. And it seems like nothing is as clearly labeled as it ought to be. She shouldn’t feel so lost, so disoriented in her own house.
“Yes, soon.”
Wall-Eye says, “I need to eat or I’ll have no energy to perform.” He’s thin and bookish, the kind of weakened soul who gets pale if he doesn’t eat on time. He stares off in his cock-eyed directions, the shoulders of his suit jacket covered with bird shit from the parrot, who every once in a while joins in with Mr. Eddie’s chorus, screeching, “Redheaded woman! Squawk! Redheaded woman,” as if the parrot has more to say about the immediate goings-on in the parlor than Wail-Eye. “Do you think Sir Lee will come soon with a liquor run? We’ve run dry, you know.”
They are a troupe of drunkards. “He should come any day,” Alma says, deflated, tired now. What she felt in the carnival, displaced, an inching toward some sense of freedom, foreignness, is gone. She retains only a nervous register in her chest.
She walks to the kitchen. It billows with heat. Flies and steam. The insects seem to ride on the wet air, motors sputtering. She’s relieved to find Henry like this, asleep, head resting on his arm laid on the table. He looks small to her, like another one of her children. His lunch box yawns open with its crumbs and pathetic, bitten-down apple. A collection of flies circles the brown core. He has spent his day arranging train cars, the bursts of air from the brakes, the heavy locks, coupling metal to metal, load after load of coal. Her love for him can be simple, as simple as that work. She doesn’t want him to wake up.
She notices the boiling pots on the stove, the lids jiggling, a wincing of metals. Henry must have started dinner. He knows only to get the water going. Alma lifts the lids quietly. A burst of steam. There’s nothing inside but bubbling water. She walks to the icebox and pulls out two cabbages wrapped in thin towels. She is always pleased by the heft of the cabbages. This is true, she supposes, of anyone who knows real hunger. There are too many flies, a constant buzz. One, polished wings and eyes, lathers its arms, a quick rubbing, while balanced on his thread-thin legs with backward-cocked knees. She chooses not to slap it. There would be no point to it. She thinks of the expression “Kill a fly here and ten thousand come to its funeral.” She would say it aloud if there were someone to hear it. She has a momentary wish for company. She doesn’t like to be alone, and yet it seems she always is. Sometimes she feels lonely even when she’s in a filled room, even when she’s in bed with Henry, and she thought he’d cure her of lonesomeness. It seems to her a sickness. She feels infected, like she belongs in a sanatorium along with Fancy (or Dancy?) the lunger, to scrub this stain from her soul, something she imagines to be lodged in her electric chest.
It’s the bear that wakes Henry. He comes in quietly enough, sits across from Henry. He puts his paws on the table, waiting, like a gentleman, another boarder—but more polite, actually—for his food to be served. He’s wearing his bow tie, a bright red, and an oversize fedora with a matching band. He eyes the apple core, but he knows better than to reach for it. He’s a well-trained bear, delicate, refined. And old, too. He looks especially frail today, his chest sunken, and an extra huskiness to his normally labored breathing. His eyes are weak. He sniffs at Alma with his flared nostrils, a polite inquiry as to how she’s faring. But it’s his scent, most likely—fur, dung, hot breath—that shakes Henry from sleep.
Henry looks up, a momentary dullness, a small surprise to find himself here. He glances around, his face wet, red-cheeked. His bristled hair lifts off his forehead stiffly. He seems to choose not to address the bear, although he’s obviously disgusted. “Where have you been off to?”
Alma pats down the curls around her face, trying to loosen the steam-tightened coils. She keeps her back to him. “Mr. Bass wanted to show us girls a new machine they’re thinking of buying.” She says as little as possible, not because she wants to keep the lie simple, but because they have become grudging with words. Sometimes it seems each utterance is a gift, and neither wants to give more than the other is willing to offer. It’s a balance, each trying to be stingier than the other. “He thinks the machine might replace some of the ones they got and they might be able to turn out more hose this way.” She thinks again of the gears of her heart, not shiny, but oily and dark, racing. Actually, she doesn’t like to lie. This is before she understands that Henry is a capable liar, the kind who can hold onto one inch of the truth within a lie, just enough to believe it as long as it is coming out of his mouth, long enough to feel guiltless.
“That so?” Henry answers.
“That’s so,” she says, quartering the cabbages with chops of a heavy knife, dropping them in the pots. She was afraid of him when they were first married. He hit her once for looking a certain way at a friend of his who’d come to drink, a hard slap that left a red mark on her cheek. But then she killed his dog, accidentally. It got into rat poison that she’d set out. It holed up under the porch, and she found Henry cradling it, a yellow lab, heavy and limp in his arms. When he looked up at her, he was scared, like she’d done it on purpose. He realized that she could kill him as easily, a carelessness with poison, a meditated oversight. He never hit her again, but still he likes to yell a bit, sometimes, to stomp and carry on the way he thinks a man should, and she allows him this, because, in truth, she would have killed the dog on purpose if she’d known it would have given her this power. Perhaps someone is born murderous. Or perhaps they learn it. Or perhaps life draws them to it. She isn’t sure.
Henry is shaking his head. He hasn’t believed her story about the shiny machine—and he’s right; Mr. Bass is too cheap for new machines and would never ask the workers for their opinions. Henry stands up. He’s about to say something like “Well, Judas priest, Alma, why not a little more attention here at home?” He puffs his chest. But then the bear, who assumes in Henry’s standing that he’s no longer interested in the apple core, paws it and pops it into his mouth. Its teeth look yellowed and a bit worn down but still huge. Henry turns his attention to the bear. He starts in. “Why, when a man comes home from a long day, does he have to have a bear looking at him? I ask you that. And then stealing his food? Goddamn it! Where is Bucci, that little bastard?” He calls for Mr. Bucci, the bear’s trainer, an Italian acrobat, but there’s no answer, not even a shuffling of feet from upstairs. “I want this bear out of my kitchen!”
The bear gives out a weak moan, stands, and lurches. He looks like he might roar, but instead he waddles and then drops to all fours and walks out of the kitchen. Henry and Alma stand there, listening to it struggle upstairs, limping on its arthritic hip. She turns back to her pots. The cabbages are now softening, shining, becoming translucent. And the kitchen is quiet a moment, except for the constant hum of wings. There’s a small feeling of victory, like Henry has won his kitchen back, and everything hushes while he waves his imaginary flag. She doesn’t look at him. She’s stopped giving in to these domestic flares of pride. It’s just a kitchen, she wants to say. It’s just a show bear. This isn’t the Merican Wars, and you’re not your heroic brother giving up his life in some battle. She knows that he feels like he should have had a more exciting life. He’s told her a million times about his brother’s letters from Veracruz, how he pulled bananas right off the trees to eat.
Lettie appears, walking in on her hands—the Italian gave her lessons. Her feet swagger in the air. Her hands slap the floor.
“Stop it,” Alma snaps, no patience, Henry having worn hers thin. “You’ll turn into a show person.” She can hear her tone, too harsh, too quick. It isn’t the way a good mother would chide a child.
Lettie flips to her feet. She’s a nervous girl, a tomboy, yes, but still sensitive, so easily stung by almost anything Alma says, it seems. Her pinched eyes tear up easily, as they are doing now. She’s breathless from tromping around on her hands. She sings out,
“Sir Lee’s here! He’s got boxes! And Irving is running the runners! And Mr. Bucci’s bear is sick. He told me it’s been moaning.” And she runs out of the room, which is still steamy, buzzing, sweltering.
“Well, she’s given us the news, I suppose,” Alma says. She thinks of Irving. He’s too wild. Sir Lee is liable to jerk on the brakes just to make him fall off. He is a snake that way. She hears the bear padding around overhead—above the low buzz of flies, its heavy moan. She looks up at the ceiling. Henry does, too, but then they ignore it. They can’t do anything about a sick bear anyway and aren’t in a habit of taking time to talk about things they can’t fix.
“Well, thank the Lord Sir Lee has showed up!” He turns to Alma. “Where is your money for the week?”
She wipes the sweat from her face. Her hands are red and puffed, her wedding band a thin choker. She’s tired. Her bones ache deep within them. She opens her apron pocket and begins to rummage. Don’t take my money, that’s what’s in her head, a chant. She hands Henry five bills and the change, keeping a hidden dollar for herself. But she feels defeated, not so much because they have to pay for liquor—she understands profit—but because she has to hand it over this way, to Henry. He asks with his hand out, and she must fill it.
Mr. Eddie keeps at the piano, but there’s more bounce to it now. He’s playing a rousing fanfare, in fact, with all the flourishes, celebrating the prospect of getting drunk.
Nettie waltzes into the kitchen. “Well, you heard? I’ve got to get me some liquor to clear my pipes!”
Alma wants to tell Nettie not to drink too much, that she’ll be too swimmy-headed to go on, but she knows Henry would chide her for it.
As if she knows what Alma’s thinking, Nettie says, “It’s medicinal! You know that!” She saunters out the back door, Henry following close behind.
Alma adds the pink meat to the pots, lids them, and opens the cupboard. She lifts a shiny flour sifter hiding a canister of sugar. She unscrews the canister lid and pulls out a liver-pill bottle, a small pinky-size cardboard tube, filled with her tightly rolled bills. This is where she hides her money. She takes the extra dollar from her pocket and rolls it between her moist palms, then stuffs it into the liver-pill bottle, capping it. It feels so good, this little ritual of roll, stuff, cap. It’s a secret indulgence, a comfort, her money hidden away, its quiet existence. She works fast, not wanting anyone to come bustling through. She’s learned to hide money in the kitchen, in with the sugar and flour, the things that men are too proud to pester with. It makes sense to hide money in food. She can sometimes taste hunger, the empty bloat and lightening head.
She pushes the liver-pill bottle so it sinks among the white grains, then tilts the sugar to count the bottles—16, which is not bad, not bad at all. A woman needs her own money, she says to herself. She thinks of her mother, briefly, alone in her country house, her father in the dark hat that shaded his eyes. She thinks, too, of the black man, the Prophet—had her mother named him that? Had he been born with a name like that?—because she can’t ever just think of her mother or her father without thinking of him, his strong back, his beautiful hands, the way he smiled so kindly. She would have loved him if her mother hadn’t. He was easy to love. He died of a head wound, after her father had already disappeared, despairing, humiliated, an epileptic with a missing tongue tip, a bruised skull, his wife in love with a black man. One day they were all there in the house. The black man never came back, nor her father. She misses both of them. Sometimes she wonders if the Prophet isn’t gazing down on her from heaven, if her father, closer, isn’t watching, hidden out in the trees, circling the house, his hat dipping from a window that has just held his full face. Can she remember his cheeks, the exact huffing deep red shade of flush, his front teeth, one overlapping the other? Memories slip. Yesterday, perhaps, she could still recall a certain mole, but today it’s been rinsed away, wiped clean from his hand, by what? Simply the erasure of time? The bear moans again from above. It’s a deep, soulful moan. And all of the sudden she wants to cry. She’s not sure why. She isn’t the tearful type. She often wishes she were softer, more like other women she’s heard of, prone to crying fits. She pauses there with her hands on the sugar can. She wonders if she is forgetting something this very moment, something small, precious, inscrutable, unimportant except to herself, one of the mind’s trinkets, and she is mourning the loss of it, unwittingly. She doesn’t know if she’s thinking of the black man or her daddy—is he dead now, too, having finally splintered his skull till it could no longer mend itself, an irreversible rupture?—or her heartbroken mother, now all alone, or that feeling again that her heart is a clacking machine, that it’s stirring the air around her and that things are going to change, or that they may never, that her husband will become unreachable, wordless, that her children will swallow her whole. She feels for the bear and for all of us here bolted to this earth. She doesn’t cry, though. She holds herself for a moment, squeezing the meat of her arms until the skin is pinched and there’s an ache. She stiffens. Tells herself to put the sugar can into its spot under the sifter, close the cupboard, walk out the back door. And then that’s what she does.
Now outside without the steam and the electric fidget of flies, Alma feels lighter, too light almost, air-filled, lacking an anchor. It’s Sir Lee. He makes her uneasy. Henry, Nettie, the boys, and Lettie shift in the yard. Sir Lee lifts himself from his car parked in the yard. He walks toward everyone like a drunken ship, broadest at his belt, shiny and black as a stretched eel. There’s enough light to see the sweaty gleam of his face, the buckle of his nose, a moustache, its thin curved line above his narrow upper lip. She once saw him throw a heavy rock at a stray cat picking through her garbage. He hit the cat square in the head. It went slack, blood trickling from the knock and from its tiny nostrils. He took it with him when he left, hefting it into the backseat, saying it would make a good toy for his dogs to tear up.
She turns her attention away from him to the yard, uneven, grass worn to dirt, upturned rocks. The wash line is naked but for two wide, thick-strapped slips that belong to the oversize, aging chorus girls. One has a faded brown bloodstain on its skirt. She doesn’t like having other people’s wash strung in the yard. She will remind the girls to hang their clothes in their rooms with a towel underneath to catch the drops. For now, the white slips sway brightly in the near dark.
“Hey there, Mr. Henry Holfer. Miss Alma.” Sir Lee tips his hat where his whole body seems to come to its dented point. “I have some good stuff for you today. Angel teat, I tell you. No hospital alcohol in this batch!”
“Good to hear,” Henry says. “We don’t intend to scrub down the floors with it.”
Irving circles Sir Lee’s polished car parked in the side yard. Irving’s hair is cropped so close his white head glows beneath the fuzz. Willard’s hair is darker, thicker, like a slick leather aviator’s cap. Willard follows his brother around the car, doing what he does, running a hand over the tires, the glossy handles. He pauses to look at himself caught in the chrome. His face, odd enough naturally—exaggerated by fat and reddened by heat—is further distorted in the rounded mirror. He looks up and glances around the yard until his eyes fall on Alma’s face. “Look at me here!” he shouts, and she smiles, nods. She wonders what he thinks of his reflection, if he sees himself as different. She doesn’t think so. They’ve never told him that he is.
“Still a working man, Henry? Still slaving away? For the railroad? Is that it?” Sir Lee asks the same thing each week, and Henry is always forced to admit that he’s still holding a job, as if he’s weak because of it.
“Yes, yes, the railroad.”
Nettie sidles over to Delphine, Sir Lee’s girlfriend, who sits in the passenger seat. Sir Lee swats Nettie on the rump as he passes by, and she lets out a weak squeal. He hoots and grins, pitching back and forth, back and forth even as he’s standing in one spot. Delphine is young, with a sweet face cupped by her bobbed hair and pretty painted lips. She’s spent ti
me in New York City; Sir Lee told Alma that. And Delphine talks in a different way, clipped, almost rude, as if she’s got little time for you, but Alma likes it. It’s exotic. There’s a sadness about her, too, something worldly and jilted.
Nettie’s leaning against the car, dipping into Delphine’s window. Delphine nudges Nettie out of the way to keep an eye on Sir Lee, takes a sip off a flask, and then lights a cigarette, agitated, while Nettie prattles on.
Lettie’s pinched eyes fix on one face and then another, standing close to her father. Alma wonders if she’s the one who taught Lettie this nervousness. Alma was an anxious child, too, and she feels childish now, in fact, like she shouldn’t be here, as if she’s too young to be buying liquor, running this house, wife-and-mothering.
Henry says, “What you got for us?”
Sir Lee whistles and a boy about Irving’s age pops up from the backseat, out Sir Lee’s door, hurrying to the rumble, where he pulls a tinkling crate box up and out, his shoulders shrugged and back swayed to keep it up.
“Put it under the sink in there, boy,” Sir Lee says.
“Yes, sir,” the boy responds. He’s skinny and freckled, with a tight, tensing jaw. His hair is blond and cowlicked, his lashes full but pale, and he has an underbite that makes him look like a mean little dog. Sir Lee always has somebody to help him. He never carries in the boxes himself, and wouldn’t have Delphine haul them in unless it suited him to, but has it always been this boy? He seems plain after all, like he’s just appeared and will disappear when he’s no longer needed. Alma almost asks about him, but doesn’t. As he scrabbles past, she sees a rash, swollen red marks on his arm. The marks sicken her, make her own arms ache where she was pinching them in the kitchen.