Nightwork: Stories (5 page)

“Those mothers sound drugged,” Cory’s grandma said.

Sometimes, yes, they moved that way. In the river, after standing an eternity cut off at the ankles, they walked—dared to walk—along the shallow stony bottom, moving as mystics move with feet turned out over nails or coals; when pierced by some sharpness or benumbed by the cold, the mothers kneeled into the water and swam out. White necks and weedy hair on these mothers who squealed in the open air, sharing worn soaps and saying, “Doesn’t this feel good after such a winter?”

“Stop crying!” I said to my sister. “You and your
tears—you sticky baby, you aren’t the only one who misses Mother.”

“Of course,” said Cory’s grandma, “but see here,” and she pointed to the streaked trees outside the car windows. “Look, children, what we are coming to!” Tasseled shrubbery and ragged bibs of lawn, snow shovels on front porches, narrowing blocks, less green and higher buildings, chips of colored light blinking on for evening—and us driving into it. April this was, mid-April, May, when the cold rains kept the earth black, before anything could burn.

DEAD MEN

T
here is a man on top of her up on the top of the bed, and there is a man under her down under the bed, but the man down there is dead. Some years dead and still in the phone book, the dead man under the bed is wrapped in canvas, skull-colored, brown and freckled, though he is not changed, this same long man—caved-in chest, enormous shoes. She will not polish them and wonders can the man on top of her up on the top of the bed see the dead man’s shoes—and if he can see them? If the man on top of her—she has no name for him—can see any part of the dead man peeking through, will he stop doing what he is doing to her? Because she likes what he is doing, the man on top of her—call him lover, he is so new to her and taken up in such a hurry, she does not
know his name yet—she likes the way his hands move over her, curious and knowing that here is a spot, and here. “Yes,” she says, and no one has been right here for a while, so this feels very good, this hand between her legs—forget the dead man.

The lover is good, shucking the split part of her, using his thumb. His hands are cupped for this work; the ready ends of his licked fingers worry deep.

The dead man’s fingers are dry; the dead man is a dunce, waiting and sullen. She has to do it for him, the dead man, but not for the lover.

The lover’s mouth glistens when he asks, “Can I look?” and he looks at how she is before he puts his lips to her again. He uses his teeth, and when he looks up at her from between her legs, she sees his lips are swollen.

What a wonder—and she likes him here on the bed, the lover, but his feet are over the side of the bed, and she thinks he might inch off the bed to do other things to her on his knees. He might; he might even now be moving nearer to the dead man and the dead man’s things under the bed.

“Oh,” she says, thinking of those things the lover might dig out—used, dull objects belonging to the dead man—when what she wants to want is what the lover has, which is only himself, and the way he is coaxing her with his tongue.

Before the dead man, she had slept by herself with her hands to herself like a poultice.

Easy to play nasty then with the dead man not quite dead but ashing ash on his bare chest and picking
at his teeth with any envelope: windowed bills and notices, heavy paper—ominous address—a letter from her mother asking, “Will you tell me, please, what are you doing with this man?” Printed invitations or credit cards—the dead man made a blade of anything. And she never said. Don’t do that. That is not very nice—not very polite. She watched—she watched the dead man clip his nails into last night’s coffee and found bleedy streaks on his pillow—but not now; no streaks on the pillow she uses with the lover.

“Here,” says the lover, and under her back he stuffs the pillow, which is clean—no sign of the dead man. “Here,” he says, and uses his fingers. Even to be grazed here by the lover asking, “Yes?” and she saying, “Yes” is exciting—does he know that? Does the lover know what a tease he is lifted on his arms and knees and swishing his swishy sex, until she says, “I am jealous of it,” and she takes hold of him, and they watch his rising over the nest of her.

With the dead man, there is no looking.

“Yes,” she says, turning over, tucking under the dead man’s pillow and never telling about the dead man, and how it is to wag him feetfirst out from under the bed, thumping the pillow at his back, and then unpacking him, pulling away the canvas—pretending.

She is tired of thinking about the dead man.

But she can see, or thinks she can see, parts of the dead man peeking out from under the bed—his shoes, the breathing canvas—so that it is not the lover but the dead man she is waiting for, his icy lubricants, his
long reach for hard objects, his saying, “You could take my fist, you cunt.”

And she is all mouth, it is true—a wanting of shameful proportions—not even the dead man’s shoe will do, and the lover, she thinks, must know this. His touch already is exhausted, small and dry. Under the bed, she thinks, the sack is still there with its unwashed objects, and the lover might find and use them.

“Do that,” she says. “I like what you are doing,” and she does, but at this angle, from over the side of the bed, she can see the dead man or what is covering the dead man. The heavy buckled canvas catching on the bed’s jostling, she hears it catching and puts her hand out as if to press the dead man still when he is forever making noises—gaseous exhalations in the downward drift.

The dead man always said he was dying.

Yet the lover is alive; the lover is well and moving against her in the half-dark room that is her own again. Only under the bed are things belonging to the dead man—his sack of gadgets, his ledger book of checks. There are golf tees yet in his pocket, although the dead man did not play; the dead man was deadly serious about what things cost and meant in ways, it seems to her, the lover does not know. The lover, she thinks, does not know or want to say he knows what she is—a sore, a hole, a blankness he must try to strike.

The lover says, “I can’t do what it is you want me to do.”

“Take anything you can find,” she says. “Anything off the table,” she says, thinking of the tissue box with
boxy edges—something not so soft as this lover is soft—and she wonders should she tell him; she wants to tell him about the dead man. He should fucking well know that there is nothing he can do but she would, could, take it.

DAYWORK

W
e enter the attic at the same time, which makes it all the more some awful heaven here, cottony hot and burnished and oddly bare except for her appliances, the parts our mother used to raise herself from bed. Here they are tilted against the attic walls: the legs, the arms, the clamshell she wore instead of a spine. Here is some of Mother leaned up in the attic.

“We shouldn’t be in this room,” my sister says. “She isn’t dead.”

I agree; we might be too much in a hurry taking Mother’s house apart. “Mother could get well again,” I say, unhooking hangers, finding some of what our mother wore for hair.

“I wouldn’t touch it,” my sister says. “Don’t look.” But we look and look at how the blistered skins of covered bins and clothes bags have gone yellow.

My sister says, “It feels as if someone is watching.” And she opens a long box—but whose, we don’t know.

“I’m glad it’s you doing that,” I say as she sniffs what looks like gauze, rusty in places, violently stained.

“Little worms,” she says. “I’m not kidding.”

“Throw it out,” I say, waving away what things my sister brings me. The netting and the tape and the wired sheets—what good are these to us or anyone? I sling a fat sack down the attic stairs to pile with the others. Dark bags full of Mother’s house—so much we don’t know what to do with we throw out: old clothes cut to fit over the parts that Mother buckled on.

“This stuff, too?” my sister asks. She is looking at the hinged machinery hooked on the attic walls: a cane with teeth, a bedside pull, a toilet seat with armrests.

“Pile it,” I say, wondering who would ever choose to use and save such things? Who would sit behind a flimsy screen attended to and cleaned while visitors made shadows on the other side? The low-pitched
Oh
embrace of it, the pain we have heard, and how our mother talked to it, talked about it, showing off her bruises, saying, “They don’t know where to stick me anymore. They can’t find a vein,” or saying, “Look at what they’ve done to me,” or saying, “Remember, will you, visit.”

One of the visitors, I have heard our mother easing into sleep and whispering to nurses, “Lover.”

“Why did she let them do it?” I ask my sister, but my sister says she doesn’t know.

My sister asks, “Did you see these?” And she holds out spongy socks meant to pass as shoes. “What about these?”

“Oh, Mother never liked to walk,” I say.

Lately, she gives up in the middle of a sentence. Mother fades away and chews her gum against the mouthpiece of the phone. There is all this fuzz between us; “I don’t belong here,” Mother says, to which I don’t know what to say.

You will never get any better, Mother?

You should wish yourself dead?

We make such terrible confessions, my sister and I, which is why we are uneasy in the attic in the presence of these parts of Mother that seem a part of her still, quite alive and listening in on what we talk about. The way our mother lets herself be seen getting in and out of beds—the stained lips, the patched-on nipples from when her breasts had seams and looked shut as drawstring purses.

Purses, there are none here in the attic, only overnight bags fitted with zippers to expand and expand for Mother’s longer visits, months spent in hospitals, listening to the
pling, pling
of some necessity—nurse, elevator, doctor, dear! What does Mother want? we wonder. For what cruel attentions does she still lie down? Our husbands, how they tremble at the very sound of their hearts, not to mention Mother’s stuttered welcome: “Come in, come in. This isn’t the Ritz, but it’s my home.”

My sister is sorry Mother couldn’t keep this house. “But Mother needs looking after. That much is clear,” my sister says.

I agree—the smell of Mother’s house! Everywhere, but in the attic, the insistent odor of cat from all those cats Mother kept alive long enough for them to fray
the chairs and spray the curtains before meeting bloody deaths. Mother never should have had cats!

Here in the attic, at least, it is fragrant and dry, flamy grains of wood and moted air—still. We are guessing a long time ago Mother did rough cleaning here, and then, as with so many rooms, she shut the door, forgot. Think of what we have found in these closed-off rooms: old chocolates in drawers and sample perfumes and pulverized tablets, a mint-flavored dust fouling the drawers. Tin cabinets, their rusted shelves threatening as old razors and full of medicines—we have cleaned the cabinets of aspirins and strips of pills for allergies or sinus or whatever it was that day. “If one is good, two is better!” Mother was always saying, ready, unready, impatient, slapdash, our Mother, repairing furniture with florist clay, leaving spoons to pit in salt, and books! We find books somehow gone moldy, with only scrub outside: buckskin landscape, thin clouds. Coyotes, wolves, bigger cats—whatever it was that got Mother’s kitties is out there in the desert. “You can see from the attic,” I tell my sister. Eroded, arid country this is, agave stalks and cholla thickets, creosote in the wash.

“Look!” I say. “The distances—how chalky!”

But my sister says she doesn’t want to look. She wants to be home now and not here clearing out, calculating, wondering how long Mother means to live. “It seems purely in her power,” my sister says, and she talks about the glasses we have found, lipsticked rims and salty residues from whatever it was Mother went on drinking. “I warned her,” my sister says.

“I didn’t,” I say. “I sometimes bought it for her.”

“No!” my sister says, and her face is open, all surprise. Does she wonder what else I have done for Mother? Does she suspect how many times I have let our Mother smoke, then watched her wave her hands at me for help to breathe?

Bad daughter that I am, I have bought her favorite kind.

I have gone along in the top-down car with Mother driving fast on empty stretches. The trees chink past, chink past a watery green, and the fields that I remember are smooth and yellow. We want to lie down in them, and,
ah
, until we get to trees again, when Mother presses forward, reckless to get there: home or away from home. “May this never happen to you,” Mother is saying, when everything has happened to Mother. Stillborns missing necessary parts, men who turn out to be dangerous. Sickness, excess, indulged goutish heart—her kind of dying. I shut my eyes and listen to us coming into houses—such quiet on these streets and the sound of Mother’s scarf in its furious beating. Out in the desert, too, there is the sound of Mother’s scarf, its harsh snaps, its language:
I want, I want, I want.

“Don’t tell me what,” my sister says, then tells me what it is she wanted: to see Mother grow the old of old ladies in their skeletal nineties—so papery and thin, their deaths seem just a blowing out and not this messy, limb by limb-seeming, slow dying Mother practices. My sister says, “She won’t be around to see my children.”

“You don’t know that,” I say. “She could always come back.”

This man-size woman, my mother, I have seen her home from hospitals, pulling herself up by the window
of the car, growing taller and taller until she stands full height, taller than all the mothers I have ever seen and wearing her body as she might a loose coat—tissues off the tongue of her turned-out pocket—leaving hair and mouthprints wherever she has been.

My sister says, “I was too young. I missed the early miracles.”

I look at Mother’s legs, how they stand up by themselves in the attic. Whom will Mother find to kiss her now is what I wonder, thinking of Mother in the cranked-up bed, wearing someone else’s old mouth.