She asked me if I was planning to stay for supper.
She told me Pop would be home in about an hour, so it would a good idea for me to go down to the employment office.
That way, she said, I would have something to talk about at the table besides jail.
I saw she wasn’t asking. I started to get mad.
I’d only just been released.
I didn’t exactly expect a hero’s welcome, but her to start in nagging?
But when I looked into her face I saw something else.
It was fear.
That hurt worse than anything.
The old woman don’t think she’s superstitious.
Careful is what she calls it.
I know what I know, she usually adds.
The winding vine around the left post of the front gate is five-leaf akebia, planted in summer ashes to ward off disease.
The wreath on the door entwined with sweetleaf and wolfbane, a combination she says pleases the house-spirits who guard against evil mists.
In the kitchen, she hangs strings of garlic woven together with wrenfetch and chalmsy, sprigs of rosemary and dried bishop’s hat.
Scoff if you like, but she has never been sick in all these years.
The old lady ain’t crying.
Maybe she’s worried about the sheriff standing there. Maybe she’s counting herself lucky that all she’s losing this time is the apartment.
“You don’t pay, you can’t stay,” the Greek landlord says to her like it’s some kind of philosophy.
Me, I don’t say nothing, but I try not to look at the drawings on the empty refrigerator, nor at the framed family photos on the TV, the ratty stuffed animals in the jam-packed kids’ rooms.
Joe and me work solid and quiet, getting it done while the old lady just stands there not crying.
Charlotte quickened her pace, for she knew the rumor was true.
A blockade runner had slipped through the phalanx of Union ships, run right up the Cape Fear and was even now at dock.
First come, first serve, the man had said.
She’d riven her secret hideaway pillow and disgorged its coin and bullion saved for just such a day, fastened her bonnet and set out, Old George walking apace with the handcart.
Sugar, she thought, now spying the masts over the rooftops, and perhaps even tea and coffee.
But disappointment set in as soon as she saw the crowds.
The curtains in his mind between remembered past and observed present grew thinner with each passing year, a diaphanous membrane of inconsistent transparency.
The world began to seem as a dream, the long-dead stopping by for conversation or advice, the not-yet-born asking to be named. Places too, for his mind held no fixed geography.
Passages between far-flung cities connected them like rooms in a house, so moment to moment he would be standing in his boyhood Glasgow and then in Greenwich Village.
To onlookers he was a smiling old man sitting on a bench, but his inward life was limitless.
Jesus your life is a disaster. I swear you are always walking a tightrope.
Not a tightrope, I say. A trapeze.
I get it, he says. One crisis to another, flying between them, back and forth. You twist and turn and never get anywhere.
Yeah yeah, I say. You should talk.
And you work without a net. And me, I’m one of those clowns in the ambulance who jumps out with a stretcher and trips over it while the crowd laughs.
You should bring a shovel instead, scrape me off the floor.
Naw. You never fall. That’s the amazing thing.
The dint of loneliness.
She rubs her palm against the stale grease on the window, further streaking it. Though blurred, she can make out the figures across the road.
The man, the woman, the children. He helps her onto the running board of the long black automobile, closes the door after. The children clamber into the back.
Trees shade the lawn so the grass does not grow well near the house. Just as well, since there is no one left to cut it.
Tired of the window, she moves back into the shadows of the house to wait for something.
He lay on the cot of the Ames Shelter House and closed his eyes.
That summer’s ramble had been the last. He’d known it then and the doc had confirmed it, told him he was lucky to have lasted as long as he had.
That afternoon he’d given his bindle to a young man who’d come in asking for a blanket, given him all he’d need for surviving the streets, tools that it had taken years to acquire.
The empty locker felt like a wound, but he could lie here warm with eyes closed and travel it all over again.
She gets up from the recliner. She’s wearing her old robe and pink sweatpants. I fix her a plate, pull out a chair for her. She sits down and starts to eat like she’s starving. I know better than to ask when she ate last.
The stove is a disaster. Beneath the towel, charred patties congeal in an inch of greasy water. The whole stove smells rancid, caked with ashy spatters. The calendar on the wall–December 1981, when Pop died–is singed at the corners.
I feel my anger rise. “You’re just lucky you didn’t burn down the fucking house.”
Graduated from RSDI, the got an MFA from Pratt. I wanted to be another Basquiat, take the New York Art scene by storm, selling out a show and buying some old farm in the Hudson Valley, convert the old barn into a studio aka Jackson Pollack.
But nobody was impressed. I couldn’t get a show at the crappiest gallery, couldn’t even get work selling illustrations to magazines. All I had to show for my education was a mountain of debt and three huge boxes of unsold paintings.
So, you want me to draw you on an elephant, or a lion?
