30 Pieces of a Novel (13 page)

HE
'
S LET INTO
his in-laws' apartment (always the same way: one of them looks through the peephole, then unlocks three or four locks and unfastens the bolt and chain), says, “So, how'd it go?” and his father-in-law says, “We had a terrific time together, didn't we? … Fanny? Where is she? She was just behind me, wanted to greet you at the door. Fanny, come, please, your father's here.… Well, this is a mystery,” and Gould looks around and down the narrow side hall to the kitchen and sees the window's half open and says, “Excuse me, but are all the windows opened high like that? I thought I asked you only to open them on top and out of her reach and close them at the bottom to a few inches,” and his father-in-law says, “Oh, well,” and looks sheepish about it, “from now on we will; I can understand your concern,” and Gould runs around the apartment; his mother-in-law's office window is open a foot, bedroom window's closed, but the dining room windows are open at the bottom a foot and a half. “Fanny, no jokes on me now, will you please come out?” and his father-in-law says, “Don't worry, she didn't fall out; she's a smart girl, I'm sure she's only hiding,” and Gould runs to the living room, only room left in the apartment—except for the two bathrooms and there the windows are small, tough to raise, and pretty high, though she could step on the toilet seats to reach them—and sees her behind the sheer floor-length curtain climbing up to a window opened about two feet, one knee on the sill, other foot tangled in the end of the curtain but leaving the floor, and he thinks, I'll never reach her in time, and doesn't know if this'll stop her or scare her where she'll fall forward instead of back but shouts, “Fanny, come down!” and she stops in mid-position and turns her head to him and smiles, and he says, walking to her, “The window's open, my darling, don't you see that? You know what Daddy's said about that. To stay away from open windows, never climb up to them, and if you see one in an apartment or house you're in, to ask an older person to shut it. So come away from it immediately—get down, right now!” and she steps down, seems as if she's about to cry, and he says, “No, don't cry, it isn't your fault and I'm not angry,” and takes her hands, kisses them, and presses her face to his belly, and says to his father-in-law, “Jesus, Phil, why do I even bother? Listen, please, and no offense—but you got to, you got to, for you saw what she can do,” and Phil says, “I'm truly sorry, it got hot; I thought it was too early in the spring to use the air conditioners and we hadn't had them serviced yet this year…. I didn't think what I was doing, that's all—never again,” and she looks up at Gould and says, “Are you mad at Grandpa?” and he says, “No, why would I be? You don't get mad at people older than you—no, that's not true—but your grandpa's the nicest guy in the world, much nicer than me, so I'd never get mad at him,” and squeezes Phil's shoulder.

SWIVELS AROUND, SHE
'
S
not there, looks around and there are hundreds of people, kids and adults, woman carrying two small dogs, walking all around him, but he doesn't see her, scans the area again; where the hell could she be? “Dammit,” he says, “doesn't she know better?” Dashes into the store they just came out of and quickly looks around—“Anything I can do for you, sir?”—and he says, “My girl, this high,” and puts out his hand to show how tall, “blondish hair … well, blond, almost bright blond, and I was just in here with her and thought she came out with me,” and the man says, “Oh, they can get away from you very fast, can't they,” and he says, “Yes, but did you see her, long hair hanging past her shoulders—combed down, kind of wavy—and about that high”—his hand out again—“and very pretty?” and the man says, “I don't remember you from before, did I take care of you?” and he says, “No, we were just browsing; in fact, she dragged me in,” and looks around the store again, man's saying something to him, but he runs out and stands about twenty feet in front of the store and starting from the last store to his left before the escalators makes a complete sweep of the area and then, a little faster, sweeps back again, then turns around and does the same kind of sweep of all the stores there and the little public rest section, thinking, What the fuck, where is she? Goddamn kid, why's she always running off like this? Man, when I find her I'll really let her have it! and goes inside the first store to the left of the one he was just in, a pipe and cigar shop, though he doesn't think she'd ever go there—the tobacco smells, but he's being thorough—looks quickly around and then goes into the next three stores to the left and then the stores to the right of the one they were in, five of them—in a large one, with lots of aisles, dresses, and displays concealing most of the place, he says loudly, “Fanny, are you there? Fanny?”—and then outside in the public walking area he thinks, How far could she have wandered off? Maybe some guy grabbed or enticed her and is putting her into his car now, or just now taking her out of one of the ground-floor doors and walking with her to his car in the lot, or just approaching one of those doors and walking her somewhere, maybe to some out-of-the-way spot like where the garbage trucks pick up most of the refuse here, when he remembers the large square pool they passed in the center of the mall under the glass rotunda at the end of the long corridor they came in; she wanted to stop there and look at the fish in it, and he said, “Later, I came in for something, first we do the shopping; then if we have time we do the snacking and fun,” and runs to it, about three hundred feet away, keeping an eye out for her as he runs, and she's sitting on a little wall around the pool and looking at the water, probably the fish inside, and walks the rest of the way to her. Jesus, does she ever get to me sometimes, he thinks, and says, “Fanny,” and she continues looking at the pool, hands folded on top of her purse on her lap—he forgot the purse, which he also would have mentioned to the man in his description of her—and he says, “Fanny, listen,” and she turns her head to him and says, “The fishies are so big here, can we take one of them home?” “From here? To home?” He sits beside her; what's he going to do, teach her another lesson? He can talk about it in the car. “Don't wander off. You wander off and it scares me. You don't understand what can happen to you. You can be stolen. I hate telling you that, but you can. You're beautiful, and little girls and boys are sometimes stolen by horrible men, and the more beautiful ones the most.” He said that to her once and she said, “By women too. At school I learned that,” and he said, “Your teacher told you?” and she said, “A policeman at assembly came in,” and he said, “So, he's right,” and she said, “The policeman was a woman with a gun,” and he said, “Then she's a policewoman, and she was right, but kids are stolen mostly by men.” So he sits with her and says, “Not that we can take one—the mall owns them all and we'd get stopped by a guard and maybe fined lots of money and perhaps even barred for life; the last thing I said's an exaggeration—but which fish do you like best and would take home if you could?” and she says, “A big orange and black one with stripes; it was here before but now it's gone.”

SITTING IN THE
enclosed patio of a restaurant in New York having lunch with a friend. Fanny's in her stroller beside him, was sleeping while he and the friend ordered, but now stretches her arms up to him, wants to be unstrapped, maybe changed or just held, but taken out. Hears a noise from the street, something rumbling, getting louder, sounding as if it's rolling around loose inside the container of a truck. His friend's sipping a beer, eyes closed dreamily. “What's that?” and his friend opens his eyes and says, “Wha'? Talking to me?” and he says, “That noise, don't you hear it?” and his friend shuts his eyes and makes a pretense of listening a couple of seconds and says, “Noise?” People on the sidewalk by the patio are now looking up Columbus where the noise and traffic are coming from. Then one of them points and shouts, and they all run in different directions on the sidewalk; one man makes a move to bolt into the street and then jumps behind a car, and Gould stands and sees in the street about a hundred feet away a wooden cable spool, must be six to seven feet high, rolling down the street at an angle straight for the cars parked adjacent to the patio. Must have fallen off the back of a truck and landed upright and started rolling and picked up momentum, and now it's heading for the one free parking space, between two cars, and their window table. He glances at Fanny—she's still sitting up with her arms out, looking as though she's hearing the noise and is wondering what it is—and he yells to his friend, who's back to sipping his beer with his eyes closed, “Watch out—duck!” and throws himself on Fanny, knocking her stroller over but covering her, and listens for glass to smash but is later told by his friend—who said, “I never moved, didn't budge, figured if I'm about to die, I'll die, so no use fighting it, though I did keep my eyes open to see my own death, if that's what happened”—that the spool jumped the curb and hit dead center a thin parking signpost on the sidewalk and somehow didn't knock it down or roll over it and keep coming but dropped flat on its side and wobbled, the way an ordinary thread spool would, before stopping. How come nothing like this ever happened to Josephine? Why always Fanny? There was also the time she was in her car seat in back of their car and his wife didn't engage the emergency brake far enough when she parked, and the car started rolling backward after his wife got out of the driver's seat, and she screamed and he looked out the living room window of the house they were living in at the time and the car started down the steep hill and could have gone maybe all the way down till it crashed but was stopped about twenty feet away by the front bumper of the one car parked anywhere near their home on that side of the street. Josephine's fallen on thin ice she was skating on but didn't crack it, ran into a door or a wall a few times and bumped her head and saw stars but never cut it, fell off a chair arm she was sitting on and sprained her hand, if it was even that; he took her to Emergency (didn't want to, since didn't think it serious enough, and only did it because his wife and a doctor friend over the phone thought it the safest thing to do), and they waited for four hours and her hand was x-rayed and he was told it wasn't broken and probably not even sprained and she was given a sling to wear a day or two but, because she liked the attention she was getting, wore it for more than a week; when she was around five and had only till then swum by herself a few feet at a time she suddenly started swimming to the deep end of the pool, and he yelled, “Josie, stop right there!” but she kept swimming and he thought, Maybe she can do it, and swam beside her and she did the doggy paddle all the way and when she reached the other end and held on to the edge of the pool and was panting he said, “Fantastic, who knew you were such a great swimmer, the entire length of a long pool, congratulations, but from now on—” and she started to swim back to the shallow end, and he said, “Stop, that's enough, both lengths are too much, you're exhausted from the first one; I was just going to say that from now on you wait for Mommy or me before you try another swim like that,” but she kept swimming and he swam beside her and she made it without any help from him. But that's about as close as it got to a real accident or mishap with her in her first eight years, and nothing he or his wife did ever put her in danger. He doesn't understand it.

WAS IT ONLY
last week when some guy called and said, “Hi, you Mr. Booksomething?” and he said, “Yeah, Bookbinder, what can I do for you?” and the man said, “Good, I got you. You don't know me but your wife gave me your number and a quarter and said to say she's at Broadway and a Hundred-eleventh, north corner of the street on the east side of the avenue; that's what directions she told me to give,” and he said, “What's wrong, she hurt, spill over?” and the man said, “No, but she told me to say her motor cart stopped dead while she was riding it and she can't get it started. I was passing by and she asked would I push her to a phone booth a few feet away, so me and another guy did, but the phone was broken, the whole change part where the coins come down ripped open. And because we couldn't push her to the next nearest booth a block away, or she didn't want us to—the cart weighs a ton and she said it was too hot for us to do it, and much as I hate to admit it, she was right: we would have died—she told me to say you should come with the wheelchair so she can get off this hot street and home. So I called you and you know where she's at and you're coming, right?” and he said, “One eleventh, northeast corner,” and the man said, “I guess it's the northeast—right by the Love drugstore or a few stores away, but downtown from it and that side of Broadway,” and he said, “Got it. But you're sure she isn't hurt, just the cart that won't operate?” and the man said, “Altogether stalled. This guy and me gave it a hefty push to see if we could turn over its engine like a car's after she started it, but it wouldn't because it only runs on batteries, she said, and she tried every other which way and she needs the wheelchair. And if you could hurry, she said, that'd be great, and if I didn't get you would I come back to tell her. But I got you, right?—you're her husband,” and he said, “Yes, and thanks very much, sir, very kind, for everything,” and the man hung up.

Now they're in the country, five hundred miles away, it's sunny and cool, city's still hot, they hear on the radio every day, and he was glad to get out of it for another reason, because every time she left the apartment something awful seemed to happen to her. He thought, after he spoke to the man, What's he going to do now? He can't leave the cart on the sidewalk while he pushes her home in the chair, and she can't get home in the chair on her own. The cart he can dismantle, as he's done a couple of times when its lift didn't work and he had to get it into the rear of the van by hand, batteries disconnected and removed, seat taken off, and back and pole separated from it, and so on, and he can get the five or six parts into a taxi and carry them to the apartment from the cab and get someone to fix the cart there. But the cart cost more than two thousand and is still in pretty good shape and not insured, so he doesn't want to leave it on the street to be stolen. He can wheel her into an air-conditioned store, he thought, then break down the cart, get it to the apartment and come back for her, unless she has to get home immediately for some reason. But some way, he thought; he hasn't figured it all out yet. Maybe he can drag the cart into a store and say it's worth five bucks to him if they just keep it there for a half hour or so while he wheels his wife home, though he doesn't think any store person would accept money for something like that. Then he went downstairs, wanted to run the four blocks and one long street to where she was, but it was very hot and sticky out and he ran about two blocks, stopped because he was breathing so hard, and suddenly sweat burst out of what seemed every part of him and he said, “Dummy, what're you doing running in the sun?” and walked quickly in the shade, mopping his head and neck and arms with a handkerchief and, when that was soaked, with his T-shirt.