Cardinal Numbers: Stories Read online

  I really love you,

  Holly

  Bright but backward, much too old to have a crush on her teacher. Or possibly I’m misled by embarrassment, lured into evasion. Might this be a defect of the “interesting woman”? I drop the card in my bag, knowing I won’t write back.

  I catch a chill at Thriftway just from shuffling through the frozen entrees. Indecision is always dangerous. So I stick firmly to inedibles: a set of jumper cables, wood glue, mouthwash, aluminum-foil loaf pans, a plastic helicopter, Self magazine. In the checkout line, watching a short, placid man watching me, I realize the rubber band is still in my mouth.

  IT’S Friday and I go to see Corey. The temperature has sharply dropped, turning yesterday’s slush into mean ice troughs, making the drive difficult. But I never miss a Friday. I sway and spin up into the hills, past long black driveways and houses built, in a simpler period, to be above the soot.

  Corey’s father comes out across the porch and puts his arms around me. He’s all overbearing bone at first, then something gives inside and it seems the only thing holding him up is his chin hooked over my shoulder.

  “Everything smooth?” I ask.

  “Tolerable.”

  He takes my gloves, tugs at my coat, but I won’t let him have it.

  “I don’t warm up till April.”

  He smooths his mustache, which is yellowing like ivory. “Go on ahead. He’s heard the door.” His eyes ascend so slowly, as if counting each carpeted stair.

  Corey’s room overlooks the back garden, but the spot he prefers for his chair is away from the window, under a wedge of white ceiling where the roof slants around a dormer. He pretends to be surprised.

  “Na aun. Aun!”

  I lift the bill of his Pirates cap, tickle his lashes with mine.

  “Loom spox,” he whispers slyly.

  The damage came not from the accident but from surgery afterward, a futile try to reattach his right arm, severed by the guardrail. An anesthetist’s blunder, loss of oxygen to the brain, permanence. Corey’s father might have sued, but the blunt mechanics of the process made him turn away.

  “I’ve made a lot of money, some of it in not very pleasant ways,” he said. “But, goddamn, I won’t squeeze my boy like he is for profit.”

  Corey can walk just fine, even dance, but he’d rather sit, his one arm gone above the elbow, the other one withered, useless mostly, nerves crushed when his Kawasaki came back down out of the air.

  “Potos,” he says, nodding at the chocolate apple as I break it into sections. “Owow potos.”

  It’s hard to know how much he remembers or now understands. The doctor says to think of it like a stroke, certain sectors of the brain cut off. But which ones? I think Corey cries at magazines because he can’t take pictures anymore, but I’m not sure. He adores music sometimes, or it can send him into a rage. Sometimes he’ll turn his back to me if I speak, but not today. I feed him chocolate in small bits to make it last and describe a John Garfield movie, the new prison going up at the north end of Rock City Road, about Barbara’s party and why I don’t want to go. Quizzically, he watches my lips. And, as always, when I take him out of his pants, he’s all ready. What I always say: This is something he can’t do for himself. But, of course, it’s at least as much for me, a small stolen serenity, all his veins and capillaries. And so I think of the big house over us, of joists and beams and lath. Corey looks gravely at what he has put in my hand. I make a fist around it, stand at the window. Catbirds swoop to millet in the feeder. There is a jagged trench in the snow where Corey’s father has shoveled, thrown salt, given up.

  TODAY the sun is bright and kids are playing hockey in the street. I spend an hour putting on toenail polish, as if planning to appear somewhere in sandals. Barbara calls, very tense about her party. I turn up the radio, pretending someone else is here, promise to call back later. Then I make a pot of gunpowder tea and, as though back in high school, write down this dream I had.

  A white-trashy house where I’m staying in Los Angeles, old TV sets in the yard and an avocado tree no one ever picks from. A big screen porch with everybody sitting on car seats, or the floor, men with ponytails and marijuana-leaf belt buckles. Woman in underwear with runny nose, two others passing a can of mushroom soup, spoon sticking out. Can’t understand how these people have three Hindu servants (father, two small sons in bellboy suits). Disparaging remarks made to and about servants. Laughter. Very nasty. I say to frog-faced man, “You should keep your fucking mouth shut,” start to leave. “Is this civilization?” he asks. I say, very righteous, “No, just decency.” Then walking past motel where there’s been some disturbance, street littered with broken glass: green, milky, clear, ribbed, frosted. Nature of perception. Real possibilities. Walk on to unkempt park, eucalyptus leaves on ground, newspapers in lake. Police everywhere. A child has been murdered, they need a culprit and I’m handy. Hemmed in with questions, knocked down. They’re kicking me. Black jackets, yelling. Then Corey pushes in to the rescue, but they grab his hair and it comes off. His head is all white. Running in the water to escape is when I wake up.

  Barbara calls a little after four, very upset. The artichoke bisque has scorched. The illustrators have quarreled and aren’t coming. Okay, okay. The minute I hang up, I realize the only thing I have to wear that’s interesting needs to be cleaned.

  I’m the last one there, the only one wearing a dress, and Barbara seems mad. I say how nice everything looks, and what are these called?

  “Flowers,” she growls, vanishing into the kitchen.

  We drink Algerian wine and talk about the furniture. The same piano piece plays again and again because no one will turn the record over. I smoke Luckies till there’s nothing left to hold. Dinner (spaghetti with mussels) is easier since the woman from NPR gets going and everyone can relax and be mute. She asks if Israeli men aren’t naturally legalistic and oppressive, doesn’t wait for the answer. Dessert is by the oncologist, bread pudding soaked in sherry. I imagine the stout girl alone in her dorm room; she methodically finishes a box of cinnamon doughnuts, then makes herself throw up.

  Barbara serves coffee and I see that glitter again which I’d taken for the effect of snow. I wonder if authenticity is something she worries about in her writing. “How about a game of Botticelli?” she says.

  We pretend not to hear.

  Sue Willens is terribly horny, repeats this confidence to everyone as if she’s trying to borrow five dollars.

  ALICE stayed in all weekend. “It wasn’t so depressing. I made cupcakes and read up on Watteau.”

  I untie the green ribbon and peel away Saran Wrap. With rainbow sprinkles, Alice has outlined a steep profile in the icing.

  “Watteau at twenty,” she explains.

  One by one I pick off the sprinkles, swallow them whole.

  This morning, looking for someplace to park, I watched a dutiful student strap on a shiny black motorcycle helmet, and in it, for just a second before he rode away, a distorted reflection of trees. I thought: Corey wore a helmet, but it didn’t protect his head. Then I repeated this aloud and my speech condensed on the window. I should get the heater fixed.

  “Baking,” Alice says, “baking is not an art.”

  I have removed all components of the head, but the shape is still distinct in their oblong tracks, a pattern: Cut on dotted line. I smear and smooth the icing with my thumb. Inside, I make what seems to be a point: You are so complacent you don’t even regret it. But I can’t repeat this one out loud. Alice, back turned, is watching me.

  Darker than usual, heavier, the river could divide two disputed zones. Curfew patrol, interrogation by broom handle—just pictures that we know. Out of the car, I walk about, peer. Snow tires hum above on the bridge decking. The SX-70 slides easily out of last year’s gift box. Before pushing down, I close my eyes. Green Dumpster. Standpipe. Rust-streaked wall. Loading bay with pallets. I watch them pass from yellow haze to unilateral form. History condensed to a minute is wrong. More c
hemical tampering, and we’ll pay for it all. I spread treated squares across the hood; they’re so shiny against crackled blue paint, like artificial food. With black tape from the trunk, I stick each picture to its subject: nametags. Hello, I’m …

  Too bad you can’t see them from the road.

  I DON’T have the kind of mentality (acquisitive, analytical) that I need for my job. This revelation comes, uselessly, every few days. I put on lipstick, wipe it off before sucking at coffee I know will burn me. The active life-style, the impossible dream—just slogans that we know. Corey’s father called this morning for advice, and I gave some.

  “He can’t relive his childhood, but you can.”

  It’s snowing again and the car won’t start. Barbara will already have left and Alice lives too far away; a cab to school means twelve or fifteen dollars.

  Why shouldn’t they believe I’ve got the flu? But I have to double over on the bed, hack into the phone. Behind my complacent scrim, I could be a cheap broad in no time. A luxury? Then I’m under the covers with my boots on, scanning an Italian design magazine. Right now the stout girl is taking vitamins. Barbara, on the highway, composes paragraphs in her head. A minitractor plows the campus drive. Chrome twinkles in Milan. The river folds.

  I want to swirl in a great black cape, but I only have the lining. And Fridays.

  SLOW GROUNDER

  UP OR DOWN, IN motion or asleep and half asleep, Speed has the same musical questions that slosh in his head. How could you play twelve years in the majors and end up like this? Did you go stupid on purpose? Where is the curly wife birdfeeding you popcorn tinged with lipstick? And the little girls begging to stand on your big feet to be danced in circles? The Barca-lounger? The riding mower? The tropical aquarium? Going, going, all long gone.

  So now Speed has transistor radios in his place, on sills and ledges, hanging by wrist straps from bedpost and cabinet knob, on top of the fridge and the toilet tank. They have silver aerials that always point up. They have leather casings that snap over the top like overalls; or go naked in turquoise Jap plastic. Below, their countable speaker dots and on top a grid of numbers make super dominoes. Very advanced. Dominoes from Outer Space.

  But even playing all together so Lurtsema downstairs spears his ceiling with a mop handle, they can’t drown out Speed’s musical questions. What happened to the four-bedroom house with skylight and sundeck? To the Chrysler New Yorker with gray velour upholstery Kimmie called mouseskin, chanting it at her sister and bouncing?

  Back in Dakota, when he was still Russell and a boy, there’d been Gramp in his chair. Gramp clicking his plates on the stem of a cold pipe. Gramp in full expectation, bird gun across his knees, and sooner or later the door would suck open on a winter-crazed redskin come to take, and let him reach for one potato or lump of coal, Gramp would blast him back across the frozen porch.

  You were supposed to be on guard, block the plate. But Speed had his chest protector on backwards, or something. Now he’s getting the razz. The hotfoot and the horselaugh. “This bum,” and he can see his picture coming down in delis and barbershops. Bumhood like something he could pass over wire so the guys duck out when he calls. “Going south for the tarpon, Speed. Keep in touch.” Even his roomie four years with the Sox saying, “I’m kind of extended now, Speed. Maybe you could put it in a letter,” then hanging up before he can get the address. And what had him extended was a thing called Bob’s Bag-O-Salad, three of them opened around Philadelphia there, the shaved lettuce and carrots, so on, in a special plastic bag you could eat out of, then throw away, and the dressing faucets, your choice of ten. People were flocking to the greens, trying to ward off cancer.

  Back in Dakota one year when he was visiting for Christmas, the wind had come down off the Canadian plains to swirl snow and dirt into what they called a “snirt” storm. It clattered against the house. Mom said, “Hardly recognize you in those clothes.” Pop said, warily lifting his present, “Is it something to eat?” Pop had been three years at the Colorado School of Mines. As a cook. It was still snirting the next day and the day after that. “That dog can’t but hardly see,” Pop said. Perry Como sang about mistletoe and Mom sniffled. Speed went to the cellar. He put his hands in the bin of seed potatoes. Things can live in the dark, he thought, and didn’t feel any better.

  Speed gets out his fourteen gum cards, still shiny. Twelve full seasons, plus the one in front when they sent him down to Asheville for seasoning, and the one in back when they said you’re not in our plans for this year. But we could let you be a batting coach in the Bean Dip League. He remembers the Fargo girl who sent pictures of herself on a horse, or in her band uniform. “Carry me up there and hit the big one.” And the one night he puts her in his pocket Fuentes throws a no-hitter. Sandi, with a heart over the i. He thinks about pictures as a residue of time. “Adams led the club last year in RBIs.”

  Back in tenth grade in Dakota, geometry had calmed him down. Nothing he knew was so pure as those angles and arcs. Not even the hiss of a fastball inside the four points of a diamond. He made figures with compass and ruler and colored them in. Numbers might be a trick, but he could understand the laws of shape.

  It’s almost dark outside, so Speed turns some radios on. The sound is tight, a pressure leak, but Speed hears his questions the same. And what they want is the clacking logic of one domino tipping the next one as it falls and the next and the next and the next. But all he can remember is what the things were, not why or where they went. From the couch to the John to the bed is the only geometry left. The lines don’t really meet, okay.

  Noticing the buzzer, he can tell its been going some time behind his radios. Getting up, he feels light, light as paper, when the door sucks open on a man with silver eyes, skin with a rubbery shine, and where the ears ought to be, holes in a circle like the mouthpart of a telephone.

  He says, “Bless my stars.”

  Speed says come on in, but the shape of the doorframe seems to make him nervous. He tries to smile and it’s like something he had to learn in a hurry.

  Nodding to the radios: “You’re a listener.”

  Speed shrugs a little. Those eyes are really terrible.

  “So you’re ready to go, then?”

  Speed doesn’t say, “I don’t care if I never come back.” He sings it.

  “Really very nice there.” The man gestures vaguely, impatiently. “All the lines meet. It’s very forgiving.”

  Speed really wants him to come in now, but the man says he needs to run a couple or errands first.

  “My vehicle’s parked on the roof. Wait here.”

  Okay. In the kitchen Speed empties a can of Hormel chili into a pan. Hearing the traffic report is nice. He breaks two eggs into the pot, stirs. It doesn’t require a look to know there are bits of shell in there. But so why take them out?

  RUBY DAWN, PRIVATE DUTY NURSE

  SKY DISAPPEARED FROM BAY City at this time of year and the lighthouse never went out. Foam crackled like burnt candy at the edges of the beach. Nightfall came as a relief. She sighed. She leaned into the casement and felt her own pulse. There was muzzle steam from dogs fighting in the yard. There were newspaper bits spinning in the wind. She turned back to the room and a white beam squared across her eyes like M-G-M key lighting.

  SHE’D spent December on an alcoholic case, a cartoonist who lived at the Forest Park Inn, a relentless man. He seemed able to breathe up gin from out of the air. On Christmas Day they ate chicken pot pies. He made her portrait on a napkin, told jokes, sang Gershwin. He said, “This is the A material, buttercup.” He raged, wept, and went to sleep at last.

  She called the rich uncle, said, “I’m only a nurse. I can’t stop him from killing himself.”

  Now she was on a palsy case, a lady author who lived on the top floor of the Tarleton Arms with Turkish carpets and a Siamese cat. Attempting a new book, the old lady could dictate only one chapter.

  One day it would begin: This was the morning it was meant to happen, and
I lay there trembling with nervous anticipation, with excitement I should have been saving for the climax, lay there as darkness faded slowly from the window and the sounds of a sullen city came up …

  And the next time: Rusty woke up knowing he was going to kill her, as surely as the morning insects hummed in their grassy retreats, as birds sang each to each, palm fronds trembled in a nervous breeze …

  And then: The first shaft of sunlight to pierce the mullioned windows found Dr. McCoy still at work, poised with excitement over the cluttered oaken table …

  And it would go on and on without ever reaching a period.

  She still felt pride, walking out in her navy-blue cape, red enamel Medic Cadet pin shining over the clasped collar. Her steps echoed off the row-house fronts. Mist curled over slag piled by the tracks. Then came the warmth of her own address, ribbed brown rubber matting on the stairs, that smell of radiator paint. And the single privacy of her room. She took off the hard starched cap, white lacquered shoes. She fixed a hot bath with lilac salts and alum. Her training explained that you could never really be clean, free of invisible organisms. She did not mind this. The white iron bed was drawn under the steep roof slant, by the low dormer window. Her open pores felt the weave of candy-stripe sheets. Her sleep was sweet as a fever.

  ALL kinds of heat records were set that July. There were, every afternoon, ice-cream-and-lemonade parties for the house staff at Goriot Memorial. From balcony windows at one end of the activity room she looked out over the lawn, wilting now in the interval between morning and evening sprinkler time, at pansies and geraniums burned in their beds. She dabbed pink cupcake icing from the corners of her mouth.

  “If you like this view, I know a better one.”

  The new surgeon had come up behind her. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with clear, inviting eyes and an insistent jaw. She clutched the railing, sick at the odor of his brilliantine.