The Parallel Apartments (4 page)

Justine got in line for her ice coffee. Ahead of her, a homeless woman whom Justine had seen in here several times lately leaned over the glass doughnut case and pointed at the least appetizing thing in there: some kind of jellied cruller. The woman was wearing a heavy white canvas cloth with a hole cut out of the middle for her head, in the poncho style. What the original function of the cloth might have been was not immediately evident. A deaccessioned jib, maybe, or a shred of an infield tarp. Except for her height—at least six foot two—she looked like ten thousand other homeless women who'd gotten three dollars together and needed something better than the goddam mini-cans of water-packed tuna fish New Yorkers had recently taken to giving out instead of cash.

“No, not the cruller, thank you,” said the woman. “Please give me two dozen doughnut holes. Plus I'd like a house-shaped box to carry them around in.”

A Texan. A Hill Country Texan at that. But Justine had no energy to contemplate the dialectology of the homeless; she needed her damn ice coffee and her crying corner.

After doctoring her coffee with Splenda and sugar and milk, Justine squeaked a straw into the lid, sat down in her spot, and waited for the spigots to turn.

Her cries always began with a holding of the breath. Then a purpling of the face, a pulling-back of the lips, a baring of the gums, and an attenuating of the neck sinews. A squeak pitched at G-flat. Then: snot, drool, tears milky with salt, followed by a long, steadily amplifying
gnnn,
which, at the instant it began to tremolo, dropped two octaves, doubled in volume, transformed into a short, syrupy growl, and ended with a whistling gasp that dwindled to silence. Repeat.

After her third cry cycle, Justine looked around for more napkins; she had cashiered the chrome napkin holder before her.

She sensed behind her a large, canvas-draped presence.

“Here, baby,” said the presence. Her pleasant warble reminded Justine of her grandfather.

Justine shook her head, shedding the memory like a wet dog twists to dry. Justine turned around.

The homeless woman looked like a witch in a German fable. The witch's hand emerged from a narrow opening in the stained canvas poncho, holding a thick stack of napkins.

“Thank you,” said Justine, taking the offering. It seemed that the witch took advantage of proximity to brush Justine's hand with her own. It was limp, damp, and permanently soiled, like a root. She stared carefully at Justine through large, red-framed glasses that might as well have come right off of Sally Jessy Raphael's face. Her teeth shone, white and even—not something often seen among the homeless. Her nose was turned up, red and round, like a little Christmas bulb.

The witch leaned forward and stared into Justine's eyes with the curiosity and investment of an ocular surgeon. Then the witch jumped, turned away, and threw her head back with enough force to flip her long, ashen braids against her back.

“Oh Christ, the green there,” she said to the ceiling.

The afternoon's lone employee, Meenakshi, paid as much attention to this outburst as she had ever paid to Justine's concussive bawls;
viz.
, little. This Dunkin' Donuts might as well have been the world's Parnassus for the public-outburst-prone.

The witch whipped back around, sending the braids into brief orbits.

“Hole?” Her doughnut carton emerged from the same opening the napkins had come from. There were seven left, all plain.

“That's okay.”

“Why are you crying?”

“I'm… tired.”

“How long have you been tired in New York?”

The witch stared, smiling, beseeching. Perfect white squares. Oh: dentures.

“Since, well, I guess 1988.”

“Oh, poor thing, you came right to New York after you left, didn't you?”

Bullwhip hair. Watery, malarial eyes.

“Uh, do you live here?” said Justine, only subconsciously apprehending the witch's remark. “In New Y—”

“Are you married now?” said the witch, putting her doughnut house on the counter next to Justine's ice coffee, and throwing the wings of her poncho over her shoulders like a magician. Or a superhero. Or a vampire.
She sat down on a pink stool, put her elbows on the counter, then rested her enormous head in one of her roots.

Justine looked over at Meenakshi, who was leaning over the sink trying to bite off a piece of powdered-sugar doughnut without dusting her lipstick, a magnetic sienna Justine committed to memory in order to reproduce in magazine parings an abstract collage that would hopefully guide Justine into deciding what to do with this pregnancy. Abort the fetus now, or allow it to self-destruct after delivery, be it three days or seventeen years?
Do it now,
said the sword-wielding Justine;
Just let it do it to itself,
said the opposing Justine, crouched behind a poison sumac with her thumbs jammed into her ears. Justine sighed with such hot volume that condensation formed on the lid of her coffee.

“So,” said the witch, like she was Justine's best friend, greedily begging for the sopping details of a one-night stand. “What's he like? Are you happy? Does he tell you how wonderful you are every day? Children?”

She reached out and touched Justine's hair, which was slick and matted from the sweat she invariably squeezed out of the pores along her hairline whenever she cried hard.

“You should have him brush your hair,” the witch continued. “Prestige Mélange, I love that brand, it's good to cry now and then, you cry a lot, I've seen you cry, I know your cry, I've known it.”

Justine stared back.

“I worry, you know,” continued the witch. “Oh, daily, I think, What have I done? Why did I? I have no excuse, I offer none, I blamed him, but
I
did it; I didn't act quickly enough, that was what I did… didn't do. I know you hate me, and you should, you should. Darn it, we could have made it, too. We could've stole off in the night, together, I mean really together, as one, and gone to Phoenix. Or Richmond. Richmond was a good, pretty town then, 1971, or that's what people said. Could've gone there. As one.”

Justine did not like being accosted by anyone, especially the occasional chatty homeless person who appeared to have modest gifts of historical clairvoyance and who could focus like a ruby laser on their particular vision. Justine reached into her apron—had she been wearing this the whole time?—for a dollar and slid it across the pink Formica under a root. The witch disappeared the note like a conjure.

“Thankyougodblesshaveanincredibleday.”

The witch selected a hole, opened her mouth grotesquely, and tossed it in. Her lips snapped closed over it like the shutter on a large-format camera.

“But after all that, I really worried when you disappeared. I didn't expect it. I saw it on the news, your picture, in color. Yearbook picture, I know—I dropped into the school library later on to verify. Justine, so youthful, you look exactly the same now—”

“How do you know my name?” said Justine, exhausted, done from a dehydrating cry, not ready for whatever was now happening. The witch talked and talked.

“—a baby. I was so alone, before you. Who could I talk to? Not Quentinforce.”

“Who are you?”

A vagal nausea, different from morning sickness, that she hadn't experienced since Austin began to rise like a moon in her gut.

“The only comfort Quentinforce ever offered me was when on our first anniversary he bought me my own bed. When you came to be with us I was never lonely. Even after they stole you—even if I didn't see you more than once every couple of years afterward—I would never be lonely again. I let you be, you know, when you were growing up. I knew that was best for both of us. I didn't seek you out; as long as you were near, in the city limits, I was all right.”

Justine turned to make sure Meenakshi was still here. Yes; she had finished her doughnut, her twenty-dollar lipstick undusted.

“What's happening?” said Justine, unsure if she was addressing the witch or herself.

“Sometimes we would meet, by accident… you don't remember, I'm sure. I saw you a few times at Fiesta Mart, the one off Thirty-Eighth? At least three times. Isn't that funny? Once in the makeup aisle, you tried on blue mascara, bought that and a bottle of Dr Pepper and a Skor bar, you dropped your receipt outside and the wind blew it almost to I-35 but I caught it, I still have it. You paid with your ATM card 5545 1000 0678 3401 expiration 10/90 and once I saw you walking down South First with a boy, a little sweet thing, he loved you and I wonder how he is, is it him you married? and another time I saw you in a drugstore, working, you were working so hard behind the register, selling film and Brach's and Cogentin and Haldol, those're what I bought, do you remember? and once and I'll never forget this I saw you at St. David's emergency room, me I was there
after Mrs. Cracy from Progress House dropped me off for not taking my pills and for getting loopy and falling off a bus-stop kiosk and cutting myself and you were there with a nice policewoman, Officer Prado, do you remember her? Big, big, big and strong, enough to carry you all by herself, you didn't have on any shoes and there must've been a hundred beach towels wrapped around your arm but there was so much blood soaked all the way through I thought you were holding a dead baby, I've never seen so much blood, before you got through the swinging doors you looked at me once, during an ad for Squirt gum—remember that stuff?—it was on the waiting-room TV, oh, I bet you weren't paying attention to TV at the time, hahaha, and I remember thinking the gum goo was the same green as your eyes, a green there's no name for except maybe in a dictionary but I wouldn't be able to find it, oh, they're just as mysterious and beautiful now as they were then.”

The witch leaned within five inches of Justine's face and looked into one eye, then the other, then back again.

“And my pain disappeared,” said the witch. “I told a nurse I was your mother and I asked if you were okay and she said you were going to be all right, and I was going to go inside to visit with you, but Officer Prado wouldn't allow that, she was just coming out from behind the swinging emergency-room doors, her black uniform shiny from blood, I decided I didn't need stitches for my little scratch, so I left, a man was already there with his dirty yellow bucket on wheels mopping up all the drops and smears of you on the floor, there were footprints in it, oh, I was sad all the way home to Progress House. Look, here's my little scar.”

The witch extended her right arm. It was bare, smooth, hairless, and sunburned to a color that reminded Justine of canyon walls. On her bicep near the crook was a white, raised and rippled scar in the shape of a fishhook. It even appeared to have a tiny snell.

“
J
,” said the witch, smiling, her dentures stuck loosely to scurvied gums. “Isn't that something. So can I see yours?”

The nausea rose. Justine did remember. Not this witch, but the emergency room. She hadn't meant to cut herself that badly, but they didn't buy that, and as soon as she was stitched up they trundled her off to Austin State Hospital, where she stayed for months and months, till Christmas, 1987. Justine laughed.

“Ha ha, yes, isn't that amazing,” said the witch, laughing along with her.

“You're scaring me.”

“But then, one day, a few months later I remember, April 5, 1988, you left and I was alone. I know I deserved it. I left you once. Then you left me. It was my punishment. I hated myself so much. Then when they came out with the internet I found out you were in New York—”

“How?”

“Oh, I don't know, I just asked a man at the library how to find you, and, like magic, there you were, a picture and everything, right on the screen, something about space, it said you lived here. So I left Austin to find you, baby Justine, to ask you back, to explain and apologize, to beg, but I couldn't find you, the internet doesn't tell you everything, so long outside in this moody steam-grate city. But then one day I heard you.”

Justine looked over at Meenakshi, but she seemed not all interested in, or even aware of, the accostment in her shop.

“And now,” said the witch, “we're together again.”

She leaned over and hugged Justine so quickly Justine didn't have time to even blink: her bare cornea touched the dirty white canvas shoulder of the witch's poncho.

“Oh dear,” the witch said, in a way that seemed systemically familiar. “I so want us to be one.”

Justine slipped away, and backed slowly toward the restroom, blinking.

“Justine, oh, forgive me. It wasn't my fault. It was my husband. He took you and threw you back like small-fry. But I got away, and he's still in Austin, we'll never see him again.”

Justine ran into the restroom and locked herself in a stall. She hung her apron on the unsure-looking hook on the door, lined the toilet seat with toilet paper, sat down delicately, and waited for the danger of this frightening woman and her distressing monologue to leave. Justine tried to pee, with no result—she had done all her peeing on the e.p.t. strip a couple hours ago. Presently, the witch's shoes, grimy, cracked Air Jordans with zip-cord laces, appeared underneath the stall's door.