Onion Songs (12 page)

THE CHANGING ROOM

He wakes with the door behind him. It rattles, rattles again. He hears the eager key opposed by the reluctant lock. He hears the torn breath of the key’s owner, as if even this is too much effort. He hears a familiar language whose words he still cannot understand. He hears a music of distressed syllables, low vowels, painful consonants.

He risks a constricted, claustrophobic breath: these objects in front of him so close and yet somehow unreachable: the miniature table with the picture of the young girl: the bright red necklace arranged about the neck of her black and white image: the necklace moving one segment at a time down her throat: the click of insect legs on glass as the narrow red body disappears around the edge of the stained silver frame.
A few inches away the square of soiled handkerchief, its aged stains graying into a spotted lizard hide. And on that cloth square, the ruins of the young girl’s comb, metal teeth broken and handle cracked, a swatch of blonde hair caught and held for decades, the whole of it collapsed like a wolf’s decaying grin. And beyond that grin, crumpled like a life regurgitated, lie the meager remains of her last letter, paper fingered again and again almost to transparency, the blue ink of her words floating above the shadows.

And
, hanging around him, the clothes he wore that day, as if he were standing in the changing room of a large swimming pool, as if the objects on the table were the things from his pockets, laid there, away from the dampness that must eventually creep, that must eventually spread everywhere, and soften everything, and dissolve us all in its path.

The back wall of the room shimmers, as if metal or glass, but he knows it
’s not metal nor glass, but he knows... nothing. And leaving the realm of factual carpentry, he understands that this is the corridor outside the changing room, leading to that grand public swimming pool. The passage glitters, reflecting the pool that lies beyond the doorway, around the short hall to the left, where the water extends as far as his mind will allow, as deep, where every word he speaks has an echo, where the other swimmers repeat his awkward speech, but will not show their faces.

But he will not go there.
He is not ready to go there. He hasn’t done enough, even with all these rooms to show for what can and has been done, each one holding a moment he can climb into. He hasn’t gathered enough. There’s never enough time to gather everything he needs, and never enough space to hold it all. And what is there to do when every moment he’s collected demands focus, insists upon his attention? Sometimes all he can do is leave.

He turns around and grabs the handle.
He runs through all his keys, trying each in succession. The door rattles, rattles again. The reluctant lock resists the eager key. He hears his breath begin to tear in the close space of the room. He rests his hand on the interior wall and is alarmed at how leathery it has become, how brittle, how yielding. He starts to pray in a familiar language whose words he cannot understand.

His repetitive plea becomes a music of distressed syllables and low vowels.
The consonants are painful in the tender space of his mouth.

CHARLES

The night before Charles
’s wedding, his mother took the long bus ride from her small house in the suburbs to the run-down apartment building downtown where he had been staying for many years. She had never visited him in this place, and although she missed him terribly she didn’t at all look forward to the meeting. Off and on during that day she had such spells of absentmindedness—misplacing her keys, forgetting why she had gone in to this or that room, walking out to the clothes line with her blouse all undone, finally losing the worn-out slip of paper with her son’s scribbled address—she eventually just had to sit down and have herself a good long cry. She really hadn’t thought she’d been sad, and wondered if sadness was really the right word for what she was feeling. Sometimes her body seemed to feel things she herself had no knowledge of.

Eventually she did find the piece of paper with the address—she
’d put it in the canister with her teabags—and she managed to get herself dressed. It was one of the outfits she regularly wore to church, and it bolstered her. But even with these improvements in her condition she discovered that her hands weren’t working properly—they trembled so badly she dropped her fare by the bus driver and he had to pick it up for her. And maneuvering her feet down the narrow moving aisle proved difficult, her shoes feeling oversized and full of stones.

Her son
’s building was shabby, but not as bad as she had expected. A sharp odor of urine in the lobby made her clasp a tissue over her nose and mouth. She was relieved to find that the odor did not follow her up the stairs. She stood outside her son’s door, sniffing self-consciously, then made herself stop. She rapped the door. It wasn’t a very loud knock, but it was the best she could manage.

He didn
’t say anything when he first opened the door and looked down at her. He was wearing the kind of baggy shorts he’d always liked, except much bigger, of course, man-sized. And a T-shirt—it had always been hard to get him to wear anything but T-shirts. This one had some logo she did not recognize, whose jagged lines and garish colors made her uneasy. When she looked away from it she found herself following his long, sturdy legs down to the floor, to the huge, dirty gray, and almost disintegrated tennis shoes. She stopped there, staring, somewhat sickened by the look of the rotting canvas and rubber, and wondering if the tennis shoes were exaggerated, or if his feet were actually that big.

“
Hi, Mom.” His voice had a phlegmy sound. She looked up into his expansive face, the tall forehead, the soft doughy cheeks and chin. The eyes buried inside that face appeared tiny, dark, and feverish. “I didn’t know you were coming.” His oversized head bobbed unsteadily on the thin neck when he talked.

“
I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes tearing. “I should have come before.”

His eyes blinked rapidly before focusing.
“Do you want to come in?”

“
Oh. Of course, honey.” The
honey
was meant, and deliberate, and caused her pain.

He stood aside awkwardly to let her by.
He seemed not to know what to do with his hands, like he didn’t know how to invite someone into his apartment—he didn’t know how it was done. So he raised them above his head and allowed them to hang and flutter there. Then, before she had a chance to step inside, he asked, “Are you coming to the wedding?”

She stared up at him, feeling very much a small woman.
It seemed to her she had always been a small woman alongside her son, even when he was a little boy. She did not say anything for a time, but watched his face intently.

“
I will be there,” she said finally, “because I think that’s the right thing for me to do. But you must not get married, Charles. You really mustn’t.”

He blinked and looked away, and she thought about how raw and sore his tiny eyes appeared.
When he was small he’d get these terrible colds and eye infections, and it just seemed like they would never go away. “Mom, my name is
Charlie
. I want to be called Charlie now.”

“
I apologize, Charlie. That’s a very nice name and I will call you that from now on. But Charlie, you just can’t get married. That’s something you must not do.”

“
I’m old enough.”

“
Yes, you are old enough, but that’s not the point.”

“
She says she loves me, and I told her I love her, too. I promised. So did she.”

“
Oh, Charlie, I’m so glad someone said that to you. Really, I am. But you can’t do something like this.”

“
We have to, now. Everything’s all ready. There’s a party after, but you can’t come if you keep saying things like that.”

“
I have to be honest with you, Charlie. I loved you when you were a little boy and I love you still. I have always loved you and I will always love you. You will always be my son. Forever. But you just can’t get married.”

“
Why?” He said it looking around the room, looking everywhere but at her. She looked down at his feet wrapped in those terrible tennis shoes. He was rocking back and
forth on those two huge feet, lifting one and then the other.

“
You can’t marry, honey, because you passed away. You died when you were just six years old.”

He blinked his eyes a couple of times and then started rubbing them with the swollen mitts of his hands.
Soon he was rubbing them so hard she was afraid he might hurt himself—a genuine, but ridiculous fear. She thought she knew now why his eyes were so raw, so red, so small. He let his hands flutter up above his head, stretched, and yawned deeply, with all his body, like someone awakening from a long and extraordinarily deep sleep, unable as yet to muster the power of speech. He stared at her, frowning. Finally she looked away, not knowing how to interpret the look in his eyes.

“
We never talk about that,” he finally said. “It’s just too silly.”

“
Charlie,” she said with a sad smile, “that’s my fault. At first, well, of course I wanted it that way—I wanted to pretend. The alternative was just unacceptable. But then when I couldn’t pretend anymore I still couldn’t talk to you about it. How could I? I suppose I thought if we didn’t talk about it, it would, well, take its own course, and that things would evolve as they were intended, in a more natural way, if natural means anything at all in your case. Charles, oh Charlie, do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

He looked vague, or bored, or perhaps he was trying to pretend he was bored.
“You think I’m stupid.” His lips contorted in an ugly way. “A lot of people think I’m stupid. But I’m not.”

“
No, of course you’re not, honey. It’s all my fault, this whole thing. I’m your mother—it was my obligation to help you...
adjust
to this in some way. I just thought that, I always assumed that, you did not know you were dead.”

He scratched his belly absently.
He wasn’t skinny, he had a bit of a bulge there, and she wondered how that could be when, as far as she knew, Charles did not eat. And if he was eating now, she did not want to think about what he might be eating. “I dream sometimes I’m dead, I think. Or maybe I just remember it. And sometimes when I want to care about something, I can’t. It’s like some things I think about are just movies, and I’m not in the movie, I’m just watching it. Sometimes I lean on one side when I walk, and I think I’m going to fall over, but I don’t, and I always think about that, but I don’t want to. It makes me scared and mad.”

“
When you were six years old we were having the downstairs re-carpeted. I was in the kitchen and you had wandered away from me.” Her face felt suddenly wet, but she didn’t try to wipe away her tears. “We had a conversation pit, they called them that back then. They were somewhat popular in the seventies. They had put the huge roll of carpet down on the edge of it and gone back to the truck for something or other. We never found out exactly what happened, but when we found you, you were at the bottom of the pit, the end of the carpet roll on top of you.”

All through his mother
’s explanation Charlie felt around his head, his fingers finally settling into a particular spot three inches above his left ear. “I have this place here.”

“
Yes, Charlie. That was one of the results of...”

“
Couldn’t you have gotten it fixed? I don’t like it at all. My cap never fits right, and my hair grows funny.”

“
Charlie, you were
dead
. There seemed no
reason
.”

“
It’s not
your
head, Mom. You don’t have to comb your hair over and over again until it looks right.” His mouth suddenly seemed like this
uncontrollable thing. He turned his head to the mirror just inside the apartment, and she watched as a sneer spread across his face in the glass. He turned back and frowned at her. “You should have watched me better. When Ellie and I have kids you better bet we’re going to watch them better than you did me.”

His mother trembled.
“I made a
mistake!”
she cried. “And I have paid for it every day since then. You have been a constant reminder and a knife in my heart! But I never complained—I never even told you. I have only loved you.”

He backed up a few steps.
It pained her to see. “You let me die,” he said, his hands held up between them.

“
I’m your mother, Charlie, and I’ve always loved you. And I know it’s sad, it’s terribly terribly sad, but you just
can’t
have children. Just think of what they would be like. Something like that was never meant to be. My own grandchildren.”

“
They’d be like me, Mom. Maybe they would look like me. What’s so bad about that?”

She gazed up at him, drying her eyes on the edge of her sleeve.
“Oh, nothing, nothing, sweetheart. I’m sorry I got so upset.”

“
Do you want some tea? Ellie likes it, so I have a lot of it. You can see my place. That’s what Ellie calls it—‘Charlie’s place.’”

“
That would be very nice, Charlie. Thank you for inviting me.”

He held the door open for her as if he were a doorman at attention.
She stepped inside carefully, watching her feet. Once inside, she sniffed. It was a bad habit. Her son had no smell, virtually none. He never had. But the mind plays tricks, and after he
’
d died she
’
d found herself attributing almost every unknown smell to him.

There were also no cooking smells, or smells of garbage, or unwashed clothing or unwashed body smells, the smells she generally associated with young men.
There was a strong aromatic mix of soaps and disinfectants. Her son was no corpse. He was something else. He was his mother’s son, and no son of hers could be referred to as a corpse.

Charlie
’s apartment was profoundly neat. The area appeared completely without clutter, the rug well-vacuumed, spoiled by not even a thread of lint, her son’s few personal items (if an empty vase, a stapler, and a battered dictionary could be termed “personal”) equally spaced on a single white plastic shelf mounted on the wall. There were a few toys—some cars, a plastic soldier, a yo-yo, scattered by the bed. While she was looking, he walked over and nudged them under the bed with his foot. “I don’t play with those,” he said. She gazed at the neatly made bed. “I have some cookies here, Mom. I used to like cookies. Ellie likes to have a cookie with her tea when she stays over. Would you like a cookie with your tea, Mom?”

“
That would be nice.” She noticed his politeness, and noticed how his politeness pleased her. She went over to the bed, trying not to look at it too directly. On a small table beside the bed was a young woman’s photograph. She picked it up gingerly, as if it might go off. In her experience the most innocuous things sometimes had a tendency to go off, ruining everything. She stared at the image of the creature who chose to “stay over” with her dear, dead son. She didn’t like to think of these things, but how could she avoid it? The young woman in the photograph had a shy smile, and the saddest eyes she had ever seen. She put the picture down quickly.