Dan (8 page)

“I am psychic,” said Melba Zuzzo.

Don Pond whistled. He had a very nice, full whistle, so nice that his whistling might be considered a quality in its own right. But Don Pond did not stop to comment on his whistle. He was focused on Melba. Melba stood with her arms straight at her sides while he admired her.

“Well, that’s it, then, Melba,” said Don Pond. “Psychic. Wow.” He shook his head. “I don’t suppose anyone knows about that, or I’d have heard. It’s only fair that I tell you my secret, not because of intercourse, just because you told me one of yours.” He shut his eyes. For a long time he didn’t speak.

“There was no splinter in my classmate’s foot,” he said at last. “Oh, I showed her a splinter alright, but it was a pencil shaving from my own pocket. I dug in her foot purely for my own gratification. I’ve slapped people, too, Melba, hundreds of times, during mosquito season. ‘Hold still,’ I’d say. ‘There’s a mosquito.’ Then bam! But do you think the mosquitoes were really there?”

“Not always,” said Melba, generously.

“That’s right,” said Don Pond, slowly. “Not always. So you see,” he continued, “I don’t deserve anything, not compared to people who’ve never slapped for no reason. I don’t know why I’m so favored in this life. It’s not in reward for my sterling character! I suppose, Melba, we were all of us given paths to walk in life, and some paths are lucky paths that lead you where you want to go in advance of the hordes. Shortcuts, if you will.”

“Your house is very close to the bakery,” Melba agreed.

“I don’t know if it is,” said Don Pond. “But my
path
is shorter. Luck has nothing to do with where a man builds his house. That’s a zoning issue. I’m talking about getting from A to B. What if there’s an ocean between A and B? It would take you a little while to cross that ocean, wouldn’t it Melba?”

“It would,” said Melba.

“Well there is no ocean between me and the bakery,” said Don Pond, and let the matter rest there.

Now Melba almost cried out with relief as Don Pond strode across the bakery. To face Don Pond across the counter—surely this was normal! He did not look at all tentative in his dark knit cap and earring.

“Thank you, Don!” gasped Melba extending her hands. Don Pond grasped them. His hands were ice cold and Melba noticed that his wrists, which extended past the cuffs of his dark jacket, were a vivid pink.

“You’re cold!” she observed.

“The temperature’s dropping out there,” said Don Pond. “I almost turned back several times.” He paused, perseveringly. Then he tightened his grip on her hands. Melba braced herself for the outburst.

“Officer Greg was here!” cried Don Pond, a catch in his voice.

“He didn’t buy anything,” Melba said loyally. “He didn’t come in the capacity of a customer. There haven’t been any other customers, I swear it, Don.”

“He left holding a bag …” Don Pond’s large, glaucous eyes began to shine. “He had what could have been a Danish in his hand …”

“Evidence,” said Melba. She realized Don Pond was trembling. His teeth chattered within his trim beard.

“Hold on.” Melba pulled her hands free and hurried through the swinging door into the depths of the bakery, turning all of the ovens as high as they would go. Then she opened the back door, and, returning to the front of the bakery, opened the front door as well, propping it with a gallon can of chestnuts.

“We’ll see what that does,” she said with satisfaction. “I don’t expect it will warm the whole of Dan, but, then again, it may. For now, come around the counter. We’ll go into the back and stand in front of the ovens.”

“I couldn’t,” said Don Pond. “Even as the first customer, I don’t deserve that kind of privilege. It isn’t authorized.”

“Oh,” Melba blinked. She found his attitude provoking and didn’t like this newly revealed aspect of his character. It seemed to her that Don Pond couldn’t be resisting out of modesty alone. What if Don Pond wasn’t simply modest? What if he was, in fact, some kind of stickler?

Melba tried not to hold it against him, but it was difficult. Zeno Zuzzo loathed sticklers and Zeno Zuzzo was an influential man, a man with whom it behooved Melba to share beliefs. Zeno Zuzzo did not like to name names but he did enjoy speaking knowledgeably about types, or worse, maintaining an ominous silence about the type in question.

Melba remembered a particular episode.

“Look!” Zeno Zuzzo had exploded, pointing out a large and a small woman loitering outside the town hall, perhaps eager to be viewed by a passing committee. Melba followed his finger, straining to make out details but only reconfirming the relative largeness and smallness of the figures, which struck her suddenly as very funny.

“They’re different sizes!” She giggled and Zeno Zuzzo glanced at her approvingly, then gave a brief hard guffaw.

“Do you see the ears?” he asked. “Those women are conspiring, always conspiring. Why else would they need ears set so close to their mouths? They’re whispering things to themselves, Melba. They’re stirring themselves up. They won’t be satisfied until they assassinate, someone, anyone. If you can drop a person like that with a well-aimed rock, you should do it, before they have a chance to attack. If you don’t notice the ears until they’re upon you, prepare for close combat. Soap in a sock is handy.”

Melba nodded, fingering her own ears. The earlobes were not attached, but then again, they were not nearly as long and loosely formed as her father’s. Zeno Zuzzo had extraordinarily long earlobes and his ears were set far back on his head. He was very proud of his ears and emphasized their shape and position with his signature haircut, the Belmondo. No other man in Dan was as well-suited to his Belmondo as was Zeno Zuzzo.

“Someday somebody should write a book about me,” Zeno Zuzzo often remarked. When Melba was a student at Dan Elementary, Zeno Zuzzo would say it while reviewing Melba’s report card, which always indicated satisfactory performance in the literary arts: penmanship and spelling. Zeno Zuzzo would nod meaningfully at the report card and wink. Zeno Zuzzo was very good at winking.

“A wink is a friendly gesture with a little something extra,” Zeno Zuzzo explained to Melba. “A little oomph. Like when a man calls another man ‘sweetheart’ then riddles him with bullets between the groin and knee.” Before leaving Dan Elementary, Mrs. Burr had told Melba’s class that a wink was a wizard’s kiss, but Melba knew better than to repeat anything Mrs. Burr said to her father. Besides, in this case, it was irrelevant. Melba Zuzzo could not wink.

But on the subject of sticklers, Zeno Zuzzo maintained a chilling silence.

“Don’t get me started about sticklers,” was all he would say, then he would sink onto his haunches, stroking his lower lip with his thumb, his dark brow beetling, and Melba would back away, sensing the restrained malevolence and understanding implicitly the lowliness of the stickler, his lack of all human worth, and, worse, his inability to contribute to the natural world, the vegetable and mineral kingdoms to which all beings who are not sticklers tithe.

Don Pond, a stickler? She wouldn’t believe it. Swiftly, Melba changed the subject.

“I had an idea for a new kind of pastry,” she said, brightly. “Instead of using ingredients, I would use quintessence. I would combine the quintessence of multiple things, quail, I think, for one, and custard, and I’d make a glaze of course and sprinkle nonpareils on top, either whole nonpareils or their quintessence, I’m not sure.”

Don Pond’s expression did not change, but Melba reassured herself that his face was still quite cold; she couldn’t expect it to flex readily just because she’d said something fascinating. She gathered garlic sticks and brownies and presented Don Pond with a large bag.

“Thank you, Melba,” said Don Pond. He took the bag and held it awkwardly, and Melba watched him closely, moistening her finger with her tongue. She waited impatiently for him to open the bag and begin to speak, rapidly, self-loathingly, waving a garlic stick from which salt and garlic chips would shower down. She held her moistened finger at the ready. But Don Pond did not open the bag. Don Pond looked around the bakery as though he had no status there at all, as though he were not the first customer, as though he were not even finite, and therefore had no ascertainable value whatsoever.

“I’ve been talking with some of the other men,” said Don Pond. “Melba, you’re not safe here in the bakery. What’s that on the floor? Never mind. Don’t look. It’s better not to look. Listen, Melba, I’m not blaming you. Some employees try to get themselves killed at work. They say they’re fetching the stepladder to change a light bulb and the next thing you know, they’ve let the ceiling fan take their heads off. That’s not you! What’s happening here is beyond your control. Melba, you need to leave the bakery at once.”

“I wouldn’t want to say that you and the other men are wrong, Don,” said Melba. “But I know that I’m safe in the bakery. Once I cracked an egg on the side of the mixing bowl and a chick fell out. That was startling and I felt shaky for some time afterwards, but I finally came to terms with it and accepted that there’s an explanation. I mean, eggs are supposed to be eggs and not chickens, but there is a point in the genesis of eggs and chickens when they’re the same thing. In the bakery, I have things I do when I feel afraid and they really help. I’ll show you.”

Melba ran through the swinging door. In the depths of the bakery, the air had turned hot and acrid. Melba squinted in the dull orange light and sniffed. Something inside the ovens was definitely burning. The top shelf of the oven billowed smoke. Melba finished squinting and didn’t pause a second longer. She considered herself a veteran of such situations, situations in which nothing can be saved. She had no qualms about allowing whatever it was inside the oven to burn itself off. She rushed past the oven with her hands over her nose and mouth. No, she would not open the oven door. Why create a mess out of false sentimentality? She pulled a heavy bucket from beneath the long table and struggled back toward the front of the bakery through the smoke. A moment later, she was heaving the bucket around the counter, dropping it by Don Pond’s feet. She yanked off the lid.

“Salt,” panted Melba. She ducked behind the counter, rummaging, and returned holding a wooden dowel. Crouching beside the bucket, she thrust the dowel into the salt. For several quick, shallow breaths, she stirred the salt in the bucket with a wooden dowel, then she stirred for several slow, deep breaths, and, finally, she released the dowel and sat motionless on the bakery floor, her elbow in the bucket, the top four inches of the dowel pressing against her inner arm. She looked up at Don Pond. He was looking at the ceiling.

“You don’t even have a ceiling fan,” he said.

“Don,” said Melba. “Maybe I can’t trust this sensation, but I feel wonderful right now, warm and confident. My palms are even tingling. I couldn’t feel half so good if I were somewhere else, if I weren’t in the bakery, if I were in my bedroom, for example, thrashing on the floor between rolled-up balls of tights. Even if I kept buckets of salt in my bedroom, and installed a tower of ovens, I’d always feel more imperiled in my bedroom than in the bakery.”

The essential nature of Melba’s bedroom differed from the essential nature of the bakery in ways she couldn’t quite pinpoint, but that brought her vivid apprehensions of impending doom.

“If I had to describe my bedroom to someone, not to a future tenant, to a disinterested party, to you Don, I would say that my bedroom has a demented, disconsolate nature. Have you ever discovered voles in your pillowcasings?”

“Of course, Melba,” said Don Pond, but he was still looking at the ceiling, shifting from foot to foot.

“I’ve made you uncomfortable!” cried Melba. “I shouldn’t be talking about my bedroom, but Don, it’s so frightening. Maybe you and the men are right about the bakery. Maybe I don’t notice how unsafe it is because I’m always comparing it to my bedroom, and the bakery is a kind of Elysian Field compared to my bedroom, not to sound snobbish,” added Melba, who could be shy about her admiration for the classical world.

Don Pond was no longer looking up. His head was sinking between his shoulders and he looked stricken. Melba knew she had to stop speaking. She pressed her lips together and clutched the dowel with both hands, stirring as she mastered herself.

There was something essentially upsetting about her bedroom, she thought, assured by the pressure of the dowel on her palms. It was as though her bedroom had been built on the site of an ancient burial ground. The walls were a sickening, fertilized color, lush and waxy. The carpet fibers broke easily between her fingers, just as hairs would break after centuries of neglected grooming.

Melba disliked the way bakery customers white-gloved the bakery, fingering the refrigerator, the counter, the walls, the window, and even the linoleum, zinging her with their haughty observations about dusts, greases, and molds, but at least the bakery customers usually had the good manners to hurry, shouting orders as they charged the counter and rebukes as they barreled out the door. There was something affirming about their outrage. The bakery’s customers seemed to harbor a belief in standards. They seemed to believe that excellence existed, that it was attainable, by Melba herself, if she just applied herself more vigorously and with greater attention to sanitary procedure. The visitants to her bedroom, on the other hand, were silent and unhurried and their abuses could not be attributed to ideals. These visitants circled her bed in rotting smocks, displaying flesh of disturbing translucency, brindled here and there with rope burns. They often huddled on Melba’s stomach, compressing her diaphragm with heels and clammy buttocks. That would never happen in the bakery! Her bedroom was a different order of place, a place that emanated malignancy, and Melba had wondered on occasion if this emanation fell under the purview of her landlord, Mark Rand, or if the emanation was beyond his jurisdiction.

Melba’s pulse hammered so hard in her temples that she jerked up, gripping the dowel as hard as she could manage, swirling the salt until her palms chafed and she turned away from the bucket, scooting to lean her back firmly against the counter.