The refrigerator motor cycled on again, and a puff of cold air, dusted through with baking soda, blew against my face, scattering the dark scents of last night. I stood up, pushed the vegetable bin back into the refrigerator and closed it. It was now perfectly clean. Of course, I also considered not telling Jack anything at all, but I was more afraid of making the orgy invisible, of filling the ever-growing space between us with an insane circus of bodies that only I could see. So I went in to clean the living room, feeling like a dog with my face being pressed into the mess I had made.

The sun beamed in like a policeman’s searchlight, routing the images of the night before, sparkling off the trail of Maggie’s silver straight pins in the carpet. It was so hot that the room still smelled like strangers and the ashtrays were glutted with red pistachio fingernails and fat dusty elbow macaronis of cigarette butts. ESS IS ESS—I could spell out Maggie’s magic saying from her wall collage with the cigarettes. She said it had mystic significance because new letters could be added so it would read either “Bless This Mess” or “Cleanliness is next to Godliness”: It was the essence of this senseless mess. I decided to leave it all a little longer and get back into bed to repair myself with a tiny nap before Jack got home. The house was more resilient than I—it could wait an hour.

But when I lay down on Jack’s side of our bed, Debbie’s bed kept floating back up. Although I wanted to think hard about why exactly I had thought it was going to be such a good idea to go to bed with a complete stranger, the picture I needed floated away each time I grabbed at it, like the good witch in the bubble when Dorothy lands in Oz. I knew I had some sort of feeling for the person from Michigan, but it was nothing more, really, than I feel when I pull into someone’s driveway just to turn around. I knew I desperately wanted to have an orgasm, because I had the idea that when you do, it’s like making an oily spot on a piece of parchment paper, and for a second your body, which is the paper, becomes transparent and you can see through to yourself. But since I prefer there be a pane of glass between me and my emotions so that I can see what’s hitting it rather than feel anything directly, it’s just as well I didn’t have any orgasms … or I’d lose my Winky Dink screen.

The oily spot is like the spots on the grease-dotted hoagies Aunt Ruth used to make and wrap up at the sandwich store where she worked. I sometimes came downstairs to watch her as she worked at the counter. She was bitter, matter-of-fact, and she always seemed to be mad at me. She would slap a long, hard roll on the speckled Formica and then slice it, from the side, spinning the roll under her broad, sharp knife. Crumbs would fly from the crust as she pressed the splayed roll down and then gouged out some of the bread from the center of it. It all happened so fast. She splashed olive oil onto the roll from a ginger-ale bottle with a sprinkler attached to the top, the same kind of bottle she used to dampen clothes with when she was home. Then she spread fingerfuls of onions, tomatoes, and red peppers over the oil-soaked bread. She always had peppers under her nails when she came home, and I was always afraid she wasn’t coming home.

My chin was level with the counter and I watched in terror that she’d be hurt as she sliced meat and cheese at the big white porcelain meat machine. The round blade spun with a loud whine and caught pieces of prosciutto, boiled ham, and provolone as her fingers pressed the heel of the luncheon loaf closer and closer to the blade. The circles of meat would fly from the blade into her wide palm, and machine-like, her arm would swing over to the roll, and she would lay the slices of meat one by one over the other. The scallops of meat would advance and cover the tomatoes, the onions, and the peppers, slowly filling the sandwich, and then she would turn the machine off. It stopped with an angry snarl, as if disappointed. She always said that the machine wanted to take a bite out of her, just like everything else in this world. Then she threw the pearls at me. And, finally, I remembered they were supposed to have been hers for the day she got married, and now she was giving them to me, since she knew she was never going to use them. Why now?

She wrapped the sandwiches tightly, snugly, like little babies swaddled in giant sheets of heavy white paper that had transparent splatters of grease on them. She put the sandwich on one corner of the paper and then quickly rolled it up, tucking in the ends and sealing them with white tape. She labeled them with a crayon, and then the people came and took them away. She always smelled like onions to me. I wished she were around now to wrap me up the way she did those sandwiches. And then I remembered the cancer, embroidering along in its invisible pathways, the most insidious of all the invisible things that can hurt you. I felt I had to move very slowly through that memory, through all those colors and images.

I remember the wind that particular day—the wind eating at my skin as I walked home from school with my science project, which had gotten the best grade in the class. It was in the bottom half of a cardboard beer carton, and the wind was trying to balloon under the dish towel she had given me to cover it up with, puffing itself into the box with my project, so that it looked just like I was carrying home a roast turkey in a carton instead of my sand scene of Egypt.

The last turkey I carried home, from the Catholic Charities Appeal at our school, got thrown out into the trash, unwrapped, before I could even explain that I never asked for it—they had just given it to me. When I got home this time, I went into the empty kitchen and waited for her to come in. I shut the wind outside and set the box on the kitchen table and looked all through the house for her—in the bedroom, the basement—but she was gone. I got some milk and started setting the scrambled Tootsie Roll palm trees and cardboard pyramids back into their places in the sand, hung the Q-tip scroll back on the camel’s saddle. She had written something in Russian characters on the brown-bag papyrus—that touch alone probably won me the prize, although my favorite pieces were her cottonball lambs, which still smelled like the aspirin bottle with their glued-on rottini tails. I waited, and the shadows from the pyramids tilted and lengthened slowly like dark syrup across the sand, and still, still, she didn’t come home.

Now I lay frozen under the quilt, feeling like a church window that someone had covered with blankets and pounded with a mallet. If you peeled the quilt away, you’d find another quilt underneath, and that would be me, glittering in this empty sunlight with all these memories. I remember I watched Howdy Doodie first, and then Winky Dink, and still she didn’t come. When the news came on, I could taste electricity in my mouth, I was so afraid they were going to say they’d found her dead somewhere. It was nearly six o’clock, and so I went outside to see if she was coming down the street, maybe with groceries. The wind, waiting, blew the front door back at me, and pushed into the living room, rattling the silver fringe on the floor lamp, and tussled with the lace curtains at the side window. A round salmon-colored pillow blew off the couch and rolled across the floor.

I ran around to the back yard and nearly screamed in terror when I saw them there, madly thrashing in the wind like flags of surrender. The clothes—the laundry—it was all still on the line and it was nearly dark. The sheets were sailing high, high over the line, in ribbon undulations, and with a smart snap they pulled at their clothespin moorings. They spread wide and bluish in the cold winter twilight, miles over my head, a semaphore message I was afraid to interpret. I grabbed at the clothes prop that held the lines, but it scraped out of my hand and rocked back and forth against the wind like a devil’s metronome, giant and relentless, ticking away the black hours.

I kept still and covered up and quiet, and a car came swishing down the street below my window, all the way from 1953, and behind my eyelids I saw the white Venetian shadows rise up to the ceiling. I picked the splinters from the clothes prop out of my hand and watched through the window as the clothes, out at last at night, danced up to meet the first raindrops that came with the dark. I turned on the kitchen light and went back to the window to watch for her. I saw my own face there; deserted, with raindrops tracing past the black craters that were my eyes. And then I heard a car door slam and I knew she was coming home. I knew the bad thing was going to happen again. Then there was pounding on the back door, pounding, and I rose up out of the memory and got out of the bed, because I also knew it was only a matter of time until Maggie came.

She was still banging when I got to the door to unlock it.

“Boy, do you look terrible!” she said. “I thought an active sex life was supposed to put roses in your cheeks at least.” While she talked, she took off a fuzzy beige sweater that she was wearing in this incredible heat and folded it carefully. She dipped into the living room and picked up a piece of the cheese that must have gotten shoved under a table, sniffed it, and threw it into an ashtray, knocking over a candle that had burned a black hole into the center of an apple. She looked at the torn quilt I had thrown over myself to answer the door.

“In general, I’d say you’re falling apart,” she said, walking into the kitchen and then stopping to poke her finger through a spider’s web in the kitchen window frame before she sat down at the table. “Messy, messy! Very messy … this place is beginning to look good!”

I leaned against the sink as I filled the teapot and wished she would leave. I’d seen a week’s worth of her last night. Her wrecked car was gone from my driveway, and she seemed to have forgotten that she was here almost all last night. Suddenly, now that it was clean-up time, it was my orgy, not hers. She was sitting in a direct path of the sun at the table, and to look at her was painful because her hair shone as if it were on fire and it was floating in delicate strands all around her head, as though she’d just broken through a spider’s web herself. I looked at the just-washed floor and wondered if she would notice it, instead of all the mess. She interpreted my downward look and slump against the sink as signs of misery and dejection, and so she started talking again, suddenly inspired.

“Well, how’s it feel to be an official adulteress? Are you going to tell Jack?”

“Do you want some tea?” I asked. She usually refused because she could never decide if she would stay long enough to finish it when she did come over, but this morning it looked as if she was feeling sorry for me, so she said, “Thanks, half a mug.”

I turned from Maggie and tried to look into the past one more time.

I knew Aunt Ruth had gotten dressed up to go out that day because her black work shoes were in the closet and her patent-leather purse was missing. I looked through her closet, and my favorite dress, the red-and-white polka-dotted one with the big flat buttons, was gone. The tub was wet and the soap was soft. The lid was off her jar of Mum, and I smelled it and rubbed some on the back of my hand so I could think she was nearby while I waited, hiding in her closet. Hiding.

“I’m sorry there are no lemons,” I told Maggie from the sink. “I threw them out when I cleaned out the refrigerator this morning.” I sat down across from her and pulled the quilt down around my legs and took my first sip of tea. My corner was in shadows.

“So you’ve been cleaning the refrigerator. You’re already on a little guilt trip?”

“Why not? I’m enjoying the guilt more than I actually enjoyed the sex. And it’s given me lots of new things to think about.”

“Like?”

“Like how sick my aunt was when I thought she was just a mean old lady.”

Maggie’s eyes narrowed and glazed when she realized that I was serious. Remember, I told you that people never want to hear what you have to say.

“You mean the one who made that quilt? I’ll say she was sick! She’d have to be to make that, right? So, she was a sick old mean old lady. So what else is new?”

Maggie is the only person I’ve ever met who really believes in the Smiley-face poster that says, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” That yesterday gets burned away by the morning sun. That nothing matters but her.

I watched the sun on her flowered blouse as it changed the colors in it from red to gold to rust, and then back to gold again as she breathed. The little hairs on her fingers looked fuzzy in the bright light.

“So, are you going to tell Jack?” she asked again, squeezing the tea bag against her spoon. She took a long swallow while the tea was still scalding hot, steaming in the air under her nose. I always wondered how she did that.

“I don’t know, I haven’t even begun to think about it yet,” I lied. “First I’ve got to worry about getting rid of the rest of the actual party garbage, and then I’ll worry about the stuff you can’t see.”

“Did I wake you just now?”

“Yes,” I lied again. “Too much wine.” I’ve been lying an awful lot these days—doesn’t that mean there’s something drastically wrong with your life if you have to keep lying and lying? If your car keeps veering to the left, you should probably get the steering wheel fixed, rather than give in to the pull.

“Thank God for wine,” she said. “I wouldn’t be able to stand Chuck without it.”

“Well, we’re beginning to sound like a couple of alcoholics, aren’t we?” I said, because I thought a tiny touch of honesty, like a dash of bitters, might sharpen things up a little. Maggie got up to go. Too much, too soon—I can’t seem to get the art of conversation down just right. It should feel like preventive dentistry, not the Spanish Inquisition.

“I never thought I’d say it, but I’m glad I married Chuck,” she said, picking up her sweater. “He may not be exactly perfect, but he understands me, and he’ll still be there when I come back if I need him. I could never stand being alone as much as you have to, but then, I’m not as strong as you.”

I watched from my corner as, one by one, she turned the leather buttons into their holes until her shiny golden silk blouse was folded like wings into her woolly shell. I took another sip of tea, deliberately not moving, and said, “What are you going to do about your car?”

Maggie, pinned in a shaft of sunlight, stood poised while the question floated around her like bitter ether. She sniffed, and then turned her head. “I don’t know, maybe I’ll sell it or something. Chuck wants another Mercedes, and I know it’s just going to sit there and rot in the driveway the way it’s all ruined now. Neither of us will make a move to fix it because that would be like admitting feelings we’re pretending we don’t have for each other any more.”

“But won’t you lose your investment?”

“Maybe.” She was playing with a button, turning and turning it in her fingers until it came off. I knew she’d never sew it back on, either, but instead throw the sweater away. “I’m getting tired of just letting everything go all the time, you know?” she said. She looked at me from deep away somewhere, and her voice was empty, the way your fingers are empty when you feel around and there’s nothing and you’re sure there was one more Raisinet in the box in the darkened movie theater, but they’re all gone.

“What am I going to do?” She leaned her head against my doorway and her hair flattened out against the woodwork like a halo. “I just can’t keep running away, giving everything up, just because we fight every now and then. He’s the best thing I ever had. Yet I can’t stay here either—it’s such a mess …” She breathed out little dust motes into the air that spun away into the stream of light where she stood, and then vanished when they came into the shadows where I sat.

“Listen, why don’t you help me clean up the living room, and maybe you can talk about it,” I said.

She lifted her head off the wall and the halo shrank away.

“Sure, why not—I’ve done worse things. God, this place is really a mess,” she said, lifting up her skirts and picking past the Passout game. “That was some party. I’m still sore …” And she eased herself into the fireplace chair, where she sat down on a long, grinning crust from the pizza. She put her feet up on the coffee table, and for the first time since I’d moved to the neighborhood, someone finally looked comfortable in my living room. I took the quilt from around my shoulders and looked at my watch: Jack would be home in about four hours.

“I don’t have much time, do I?” she asked. “Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home. Your house is on fire, your children are gone.”

“No, it’s not that. I’m just trying to see how much time I have to get rid of all of this.” I started folding up the quilt.

“You can never fold anything eight times, did you know that?” she said, and I knew she’d never watched Aunt Ruth fold sheets.

“See a pin, pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck,” I answered, picking up some of her straight pins. “Did you know that?”

“Stop bobbing up and down—you’re giving me a headache. Listen, sit down for a second, we’ve got to talk—all this can wait … please don’t pull the clean-freak business on me again.”

She could sense it, I knew. Crazy thoughts were racing through me to my fingers, making them twitch. If I could just wad up some of this cheese and get it into the fireplace, I could get to the three glasses on the mantel before she noticed. Then I could carry them and an ashtray back to the kitchen on the pretext of getting more tea. I had only four hours until Jack would be expecting his dinner.

“Can I get you something else to drink?” I asked, balancing, nearly crouching, on the edge of the carpet. One word from her and I could move, leap, undistracted, into the abyss of mindless work, of grateful straightening up, up, a clean sweep of movement through this slow, cadaverous drag of time. I waited while she looked at me. The word:

“Yes.”

It’s begun—I can move.

“Are you serious? I’m scandalized! After all you had last night—that you can even think of drinking! I love it! God, kid, you really are shaping up—here—reach me over the bottle … wait, no need to work—we can use these glasses right here—I mean, why go to any more trouble?”

And like a trapeze artist who just misses the bar, I’m falling down, down, into the humiliating net of this sloppy mess again.

“Ah! I can see that pained look on your face–you want to get something picked up, don’t you? I’ll help … What’s this?” And she held up something small. “Look! It’s a tiny little star earring, isn’t that cute–not mine–not yours—it’s pierced. Probably belongs to that fruity fat girl who thought she was a guitar. Tacky, tacky … Ach! My poor head, when I bend; my poor ass, when I sit … I got so twisted around last night, I felt like I was posing for Picasso. … Listen, what I wanted to say is just this …”

And I sat down.

“You’ve got to understand that sometimes when people do things and it seems to affect you directly, they’re not actually doing anything to you; maliciously, I mean. And besides, it’s better not to believe literal things people say about people, words, gossip. Don’t even believe what they say themselves. Words are so short of the real meanings people have. Are you with me so far?”

“So what are you telling me I should believe, then?”

“It’s like the Bible, which is verbal, and God, who isn’t. Believe in your gut instinct. Whatever your original feeling is about a person, you might as well go with it. I sound defeated, don’t I?”

“Well, tell me what you’re getting at.”

“Our guts are not as self-serving as our brains are. I mean, if your stomach turns, that’s natural, but your brain can really screw you up, wreck your whole body, and for no good reason. Of my rations and my emotions, I’ll take my emotions any day. Which is why I came to say goodbye, rather than just splitting, as would be the wise thing to do.”

“You’re leaving?”

“Well, obviously I’m not staying. All the violence I seem to bring out in Chuck—somebody’s gonna get hurt one of these days if I stay—me or the kids, and I’m getting out. I seem to bring out the worst in people, and I can’t figure out why, since I try so hard to be a positive force in this here particular cosmos.” She took a long glub, glub, glub of the Mateus, and the place where her Adam’s apple would have been throbbed. “Well, I’d love to stay and help you clean up, but I’m sure you don’t need any more of my help. You know, sometimes I think they’ve got it all backward with the brain controlling the body—I’ll bet you it’s more like the brain’s just sitting there, it’s a dumb lookout at the top of a submarine or something, calling out the orders that are really coming from below. The body thinks! Only faster, better—it sends the hormones that make the brain get off its ass and move its legs and even if you don’t want to go, you go.”

And then she got up, and the chair held her shape in its lap for a long minute afterward and then breathed out. The crust from the pizza was gone, either absorbed into the chair or clinging with its ragged tooth marks to one of the folds of one of the layers of her skirt.

“Can I take the rest of this wine with me? It’s gonna be a long drive.”

“You’re leaving right now, this minute?”

“Oh, yeah, I almost forgot, I set it all up for you so Sherry will call you one of these days for tennis—don’t waste your time with some of the deadbeats around here, like that idiot who sits around in her greenhouse all day. There’s nothing wrong with you. Sherry will take care of you if you’re straight with her, but stay away from her Aaron, or she’ll claw your eyes out and then eat them in front of you. Aaron doesn’t go in for the stupid games Chuck gets off on—you’ll be out of your league there. He’s a real ramrod.”

“But wait, Maggie, there’s something I’ve got to know about …”

She turned full blast toward me, and the tiny black wedge in her eye glinted, and when I saw her eyes flash, I thought that if she had been sleeping with Jack, maybe I’d just as soon not know. “Oh, yeah! it was the gypsies—whatever did the gypsies do to their kids?”

She thought for a minute, and then another, and another, and I’m sure Jack’s plane was by that moment descending, coming in to land, breaking through the very clouds above our heads. Finally, she brightened, as the old story glinted off her memory. “Of course! Jack and the brace business! Now I remember. You are an unbelievable nitpicker, or you don’t forget a damn thing. They used to put them in pots, and when the kids grew up and broke out, they were still shaped like pots.”

“Oh, God—”

“It’s not that awful, really. Look at it this way: The kids were artists! And besides, they made their parents a fortune at the circus. See ya around …” And she leaned over and quickly kissed me on the cheek. “Take care …” And she was already out the door, with the light tangled in her hair, caught at the moment of blazing, like the trees in the fall, those reds and golds, the colors in the fire, the setting, the separating sun. The pizza crust swung back and forth as she walked away, hanging on for dear life.

It took me only about an hour to clean up the living room, and while I did, I felt as if I were clinging to a secure rock while something was washing the less secure, like Maggie, away. Maybe I’m going to end up like Lady Macbeth, washing and washing and washing what will never come clean. Or maybe Maggie is like the miner’s canary, the one that is the first to die if the air’s no good. Maybe there’s something wrong with this neighborhood and the rest of us are too dense to sense it yet. But if you look out the window, nothing has changed. And once the room is cleaned up, nothing has changed here either.

I checked the time and listened for Toby to wake up from his nap. He was still sleeping off the interruptions from last night, and Debbie was back balancing on her head outside, waiting for me to push her over. I’ve got to get out of this house. The orgy was fine while it lasted, but the minute it disappeared into time, the minute I cleaned it up and it was over, invisible, it entered the world of the ghosts, and now the ghosts are in an uproar over it. If I stay in here, I’m going to have to make them an offering, and I’m afraid of what they’re going to want this time. This time I’m afraid; really afraid.

Something has shifted with them, I can feel it. Aunt Ruth is angry—she wasn’t in the kitchen holding out a piece of toast for me when I came in just now, with little specks of black crumbs in the yellow margarine because the toaster is on the blink and she’s late for work. Nothing. Somehow I think they think I’m one of them now that I’ve actually gone through with it, and now they’re not going to take care of me and hold my hand and scare me any more. Now they think I’m one of them. Richard Speck has left my closet and is waiting to shake my hand. I saw Charles Manson put his bloody knife down for a second to applaud quietly when I took the chickens out for dinner. Aunt Ruth will hand me her sewing needle and say: “You mend the rip for me now, won’t you?” If I stay here.

At least I haven’t contaminated the outside. I found Debbie on the front lawn, where it slopes down to the mailbox, and I decided to stop being so honest with her about life. A little lie here, there, and at least she’ll have the confidence to somersault. So I sat down with her and told her about the power of positive thinking, of the imaginative hope that can help a person to leap over physical barriers, stand immense pain at the Olympics, conquer space and time. The Winky Dink sort of thing—you get the screen and you’ll be happy. Then I put her in proper somersault position and told her to think of success, to think only of rolling, of completing the motion successfully.

“Picture yourself doing it, doing it, and you will, you’ll be successful,” I lied.

Then the bigger lie. I turned her body ever so slightly toward the sun and bent her head to the grass so that her positive thinking could take place at the top of a gentle but significant slope in the lawn, and God would take her the rest of the way if that’s the way He wanted her to go. She felt her first somersault, and I went back into the house to cook the chickens. When I looked out the window a half hour later, she was still continuing with her chain of circles, her green knees were in the air, her brown hair was speckled with grass bits, and I heard her voice trailing behind her saying, “Turn, turn, turn.”

There is, I should note, no slope on the side of the house, so she was doing it on her own. And there is no sunlight in my kitchen at that time of the day. 🏠

☜* previous Chapter Eleven 🏠

next *☞ Chapter Thirteen 🏠