Nightwork: Stories (2 page)

“You’re so fucking out of it,” T said, and all the other boys said, too. “How do you know one man from another?”

The heavy-lidded eyes, the brittle hair and color of her father: first off, these things, and his voice she knew. The juicy sweetness of his voice when her father was drinking, the way even the words came unbuttoned, the way he said her name, she could be done in by this much about him.

Also the money he gave her—and why not?—presents between the covers of oversized matches:
Don’t strike
in gold from O’ Something’s bar.

“Are these from us?” she asked her father, holding up matches. “Have we been here?”

“You,” she said, in the car again, free to speak and ready—even her earlobes oiled, every part of her clean and cleaned. She could get off looking at and petting
the hair on her arms. “I don’t understand,” she said. “What are you doing with a wife who beats you?”

“Oh,” her father said, and he was sad, or he was tired. Hard to give it up, the look out onto water, someplace to go. Neighbors far apart on either side—not seen until the winter, then sighted in the forked spaces: women standing at windows waiting to be seen. “But it is hard to see them,” her father said. “The glare hurts my eyes, and the bog of common plants—the sappy heart-shaped greeny danglers—beads the windows. Nothing happens, besides,” he said. “I don’t know why the wife is jealous.”

She said, “The light in rooms like that puts me to sleep. I know the daughters,” she said. From schools and summers, she knew them, diving for soap chips in the boathouse, she and the daughters playing to know what it felt like. The winner held the soap between her legs the longest—oh, yes, she remembered everything about this game. The way it ticked inside of her. “I wanted to melt down soap,” she said. “But all of us girls got to play,” she said. “We all got to fold our hands over the burning part.”

They switched places. Her father tipped the seat and shut his eyes. She said, “I’m my mother’s daughter. I want more than others.” The way it was for her to wake up in the morning: The reason you think you have been here is you have been here. “I don’t want it the same,” she said.

“Everyone I know is broke,” she said. “The night shift doesn’t pay much. My boyfriends never work.”

“And your mother?” her father asked when she had already told her stories: grandfather and uncles making house calls on her mother and scolding the poor woman before they made it better, every day less charmed by her mother, opening their wallets, saying, “This has got to stop. There is only so much we can take.”

“Do you remember at all? Do you remember her at all?” She said, “Nothing has changed.”

Her father said, “I can’t get excited when I think about your mother.”

“I am shivering,” she said, and he was, too. She could see the cold in his shoulders and in her arms resting on his shoulders; and both of them, she and her father, white, blue-white—November still—and the horizon cindered thin, burnt-out, quite black. She put her bare foot against the car door window and said, “Look at my leg.” No-color sky, battered grasses. After a while, she asked, “Is this doing anything for you?”

Her father smiled. He said, “I’ve had better,” which made her laugh, his saying, when what did he know?

“Just ask me how many times,” she said. “I couldn’t tell you.”

She said, “I’m always in love with someone.”

Her father said he meant it, he was tired, and she put her hands on his face to feel the bristle grown in driving
just to get away—a day, a night, another day, as he had said.

“We don’t have to do anything,” she said.

Her father asked her, “Do you think I look young, or do you think I look like some old guy who got his eyes done cheap?”

“Look at my feet,” she said, parked near the boat launch to a lake they didn’t know, iced over, gray-white, no clear shoreline. “Look at the footmarks I’ve left on the window.”

“Such white feet,” her father said, and he put his foot over hers.

“Have I told you this before?” she asked.

But T didn’t answer, bapping pencils against her head and dancing to his made-up music.

Her father said, “Find some music.”

“Not that,” her father said. “And no to that, no, no”; then he forgot about the music or was indifferent to it; she could stop at anything she liked.

“But do you like it?” she asked her father.

•  •  •

“Do you like this dress?” she asked. “These shoes?”

Her father said, “It’s hard for me to see. My eye still hurts.” So she drove again, and she told her father what it was as they passed it, and in what connection to him were these women at the end of narrow drives in houses near the water. She spoke of aproned Annes and pretty Susies. “You knew them,” she told her father.

Her father said, “Did I?”

Her father said, “I don’t miss many people.”

She said, “I don’t understand how you can stay with a wife who beats you.” There, running after her father down the hallway in his story, was a small woman with a small head and a racket in her hand. Why did he stay with this woman? she wanted to know, and he never answered her, or not that she remembered. What could he have answered, besides, married to a woman such as this: marigoldy hair and bright mouth. After all those daughters, the wife still blushed. Some sweet name it was, flicked loose from the roll, a Cathy, a Jane, ring guards clanking on her wedding finger.

She said, “You should live with me.”

She said, “Maybe you don’t want to know this, but it doesn’t take much.” She was talking numbers—two
and three a week, once that many in a day. “And I’m not very big,” she said. “A bigger woman could take more.”

“Once, here at the park,” she said, driving her father slowly through the main streets of the town, pointing out where she had been. Here, the last time, with some doper—boots and lots of hair—the two of them on the roof, overlooking the entire fucking wayward county. She said, “Oh, Dad, anyone with what we had could have seen everything, too.” Mother and one of her guys in her Mustang or her Bronco—the woman turning in cars as fast as she did men—grandfather and the uncles honking close behind. Keep your wallet shut; sign nothing; say you don’t speak the language. She said, “What do I care about those guys? They’re not looking out for me.”

“I know who lives there,” she said, and she pointed to insinuating driveways, raked gravel, money. She told her father she was easily coaxed into cars, at times even asking for it, waiting in obvious places for something to happen, in bedrooms and bathrooms, at doorways with lots of traffic. She said, “I can be dumb sometimes. I don’t always know what I am thinking.”

Look at the shoes she wore and the dresses.

Mother’s mother was still sewing flaps on the cups of the girl’s brassieres, so she would look flat, more boy-girl than girl, as if that were going to change things, as if there weren’t other ways to do it. “I know lots of ways,” she said to her father. “Look,” she said, and she lifted up her shirt. “Look at what the lawn did to my back.”

She showed her father something else that she had
brought, but he said, “No.” Her father said, “I don’t feel like it today.”

T said, “The shit you deal wears off too fast.”

“What do I care?” she said. “There are always men somewhere with money. I’ve got my grandfather, remember. I’ve got my uncles.”

A friend of a friend had a place for them to go in a big-enough town where a lot went unnoticed, but her father said, “No. I don’t feel like it today.”

“No,” her father said. “No, I have no place to keep it. Just let me kiss you,” he said, which she did. Arms crossed and eyes shut tight in the cold of the car, she moved a little closer to him and waited for the blow.

THE SUMMER AFTER
BARBARA CLAFFEY

I
once saw a man hook a walking stick around a woman’s neck. This was at night, from my mother’s window. The man dropped the crooked end behind the woman’s neck and yanked just hard enough to get the woman walking to the car. I saw this and saw rain winking in the yard in the light around our house.

Our house has the streetlight.

Mother says, “Our house marks the start of this corny town,” and the two of us laugh at what it takes to be the start of something.

Here is the house at night, lit up tall and tallowy. And in the morning, here is Mother, first one up by hours and already in a swimsuit and weeding muddy beds on her hands and knees. She has mud on her back and in her hair, and streaks have dried behind an ear where Mother says she has been scratching. Her
arms are scored with bleedy cuts, nails mud-dull and broken, and there are mean-looking bites on her back, white swellings she must not feel or will not yet give in to touching, brave as Mother says she is to get hold of what she wants. I have seen shaggy weed ends spooled around my mother’s hand rope-tight. “But look,” she says, and wags off dirt from balled-up roots the size of shrunken heads.

This is what I have found to show Mother from the garden: one of a pair, dime-store flip-flops, size large.

Mother frowns at it. “Not his,” she says. “This last Jack didn’t have feet.”

“Garbage, then,” I say, like all my other finds—an upper plate of teeth, scarves, umbrellas, pens, and once, in the middle of the driveway, a ruined shirt so flattened by the weight of cars driving over and over, it had taken on the shape of a dead thing, and I had carried it to Mother on a stick.

Mother is still on this last Jack and on all the things about him that were missing. “For that matter,” she says, “this last Jack didn’t have hands.” She says this with her hands under cold water, cutting off the ends of flowers. One end pellets off the wall, then rolls under the kitchen table. I watch where it goes, but I will not pick that up, please.

No, Mother.

No telling the things under there—oily tacks and combs, bread crusts and withered peas, always more, and furred with such a dust that I think they come alive at night and breed.

Mother says, “Don’t be such a ninny. Go and get it.”

But no amount of teasing will send me looking for the bits of flowers that fly out in her wild cutting.

“You put your scissors up too high,” I tell my mother.

I tell her something else she may or may not know: how we used to stand in line for it, me and Barbara Claffey, shivering in our new bodies and waiting our turn for instruction. Barbara Claffey swore the last Jack used his tongue.

Mother doesn’t believe this story. “So where was I?” she asks.

“Chawed grass,” I say. “That’s how he tasted.”

Mother smiles at me. “Just be glad you were there,” she says. “You are probably smarter for it.”

In and out of doors, I slug around the morning in my baby-dolls. I have nothing to hide, I tell my mother, although I don’t know what to play with anymore.

Mother says, “Bored, bored, what’s to be bored about?” and she moves from room to room, hitching rolled papers under her arm, clucking glasses in a grip—two, three, swiped off her bedside table in a motion. She uses water on the table and her nails to get up bottle rings of cough syrup that she says help when she can’t sleep. Snaking the vacuum under her bed, Mother snorts up Kleenex. “Last night was bad. Coughing,” she says, “and coughing.”

“I didn’t hear a thing,” I say. Right through the
streetlight’s sudden extinction, the house went on sleeping with me.

Mother on her hands and knees, in the garden, is what I wake to, day after day, pressed out of doors by the midsummer heat rising in the houses of this hokey town. The Smiths across the street, the Dunphies next door, all the way to the end of the road—in what Mother calls a farm and Barbara Claffey calls a subdivision—are neighbors dressed in scant disguises. Too white. Mother says, or too fat for these clothes, but they don’t know any better. Mother calls our neighbors hicks and winces when she sees Junior Klenk cut through our yard. Ready for a girl, she says, if he knew what to do with one.

Like that last Jack—he knew. Yipping the way he did that time in the yard when I saw him pricking Mother’s legs with a weenie fork.

“Not mine,” Mother says. “Some twangy girl’s from someplace south. Watch out!” Mother warns. “The girls down there are dumb as foxes.”

I think of us, me and my mother in this nowhere town, in the flattened middle of the country. What do we know?

Barbara Claffey knows how to wad a pair of socks into bundles tight as baseballs.

“But does she know how to kiss?” Mother asks, shuffling through bills and bills and more bills, saying, “This is what I have to do now. I have to figure out how to pay for things.”

•  •  •

I have to do nothing. Nothing, nothing long into the afternoon with the morning just-remembered light rising in her room.

“No reason to panic,” is what Mother says, and she looks over her shoulder as if expecting trouble, when all I want to know is. What is there to do? “I’ve left things for dinner,” Mother says, and takes up her glass and makes like this is coffee she is drinking, and she, a busy lady, elbowing the fridge, on the run, no time to talk, when she is talking all the time to friends in other, smarter towns. I sit between my mother’s legs with my shirt hitched to my shoulders. “Scratch,” I say. This way, I don’t mind when it is phone, phone, phone. This way, there is company.

“The tomatoes are alive,” I say, in the kitchen again, worrying about my dinner. I lift off foiled lids to things she should have thrown away: jellied gravy, old rice.

“I can guess what you’re thinking,” Mother says, “but all that Barbara Claffey could do was fold cubed fruit in Jell-O.”

I know how to mix drinks and make good scrambled eggs, buttery and smooth and not overstirred.

I know how to use a phone if I can recall a number.

“But there is never any paper,” I say. “And where are all the pencils?” Not like when the last Jack was here and bringing home the pens he said he stole from office girls. Big on where to put things, that Jack, left and right, above, below. The boxed cuff links, the
money clips, the sized and guttered coins at the front of the drawer he shared with Mother.