Snap, p.26
Snap, page 26
Ida wonders where they’d land if they rolled off the world.
Wondering, she knows: the world is a cake, round and flat. Down its iced, lacy cliffs the ferry would skid, onto a lazy Susan in a giant, music-filled kitchen.
Well, not music, exactly, but the kind of ta-laaing Martha used to do and which Ida now recalls with an ache in her heart. John Barleycorn flute, and Martha’s cigar-strained voice breaking ingenuously at the highest trills, while the world spins and spins on its big cake stand.
Delicious, Ida thinks, pleased with this alternative to faith in God. She watches Nina at the bow, throwing popcorn like confetti, shaking her Wonder bread bag at the sky. All the unpopped kernels skid into the surf while the popped ones dance in a circus of wind, playing catch-me with the fast, circling gulls. One gull is a runt and can’t manage to flap its way into the crowd. Instead, it perches on the railing near Ida’s shoulder, tense and eager, its tiny eyes fixed in its tapered, jerking head. It just watches the popcorn and hopes for a miracle. Which happens, sort of. In a minute, Nina, grinning, turns from the bow and drops the last popcorn kernel into Ida’s open palm. It’s a nugget bright as fool’s gold. Ida’s gull dives. Ida, not thinking, sticks the morsel between her own teeth and bites into it.
popcorn salt Wonder bread water water water water water
Where are they going? There’s a sort of island. At least, its coastline tapers like an island’s, out of sight, and its topography slopes like that of an overturned pie plate. No sooner does the pickup slide from the ramp of the ferry than it begins to ascend, a gradual climb on a curved, paved lane too narrow for easy passing. On either side are terraced gardens buttressed by lengths of railroad ties. Wild grape vines spill over the dark wood steps among tendrils of oily leaves and abrupt growths of prickly pear. Nina lets her arm trail bobbing from the open truck window, and Ida grows jealous of Nina’s ring-laden fingers, heavy in the fragrant island air. The ground drops to a wide ocean view, and there’s the lolling, quiet echo of the ferry as it waits to depart. The landscape looks uncivilized, like the ruins of a bygone civilization. In fact, there is the very same hill they’d passed from below, tangled as a thicket except for the railroad ties and a couple of benches, covered with ivy, that haven’t been sat on in years. Ida hears the echo of the ferry again, like a sound from the past. She is sure it is an echo; real sounds must dissolve the very second they hit this air, which is moist, sweet, fruity and dense. She hasn’t seen any people yet. They must all be crazy, hiding inside in a paradise like this. Perhaps they are floating on their backs in swimming pools concealed by walled courtyards. This place must have courtyards, anyway, with tiled swimming pools. The driveways, of sand, are fenced and thick with plantings. Epiphytes clamor for space in the trees. From a tree on the corner hang baskets of purple fuchsia among filamentous aprons of Spanish moss. Ida is reminded at once of her air ferns, abandoned, drying brittle and forlorn in the corners of her living room. The regret is acute but momentary; Ida is too distracted. Where is everybody? she wonders. Why are we here? How long are we staying? When are we going to eat?
Nina jumps. “Stop!” she yells. “We’re here! We’re here!”
Big Stan lowers his shiny black boot onto the brake, but casually, and rotates the wheel as if he’s got all the time in the world. The truck ambles under an arbor of peach-colored roses into live oak shade flecked with blackbirds and tombstones. As the truck bumps through, the blackbirds flit from headstone to headstone in abrupt, skittish silence.
Nina’s sister is another Nina, only older. How much older no one could possibly guess. For one thing, she dyes her hair an inky blue-black, and for another she lacks the age spots Nina has on the backs of her hands. Perhaps she smears them with bleaching cream. However, she’s got circles under her eyes, and that same sleepy yawniness that Nina has perfected. Too, she is lazy about dying her hair, so the roots are salt-and-pepper like Nina’s whole head. Her bikini, loosely fastened, reveals stretch marks like Nina’s, silvery, deep and extensive. Her breasts and belly are Nina’s. Her wrists are hidden by bracelets, but her fingers are free of Nina’s numerous costume rings. She smokes like Nina, and is as careless with her limbs. When she sits in her chair, her arms and legs are uncontrolled, and you can see the hairs curling from the crotch of her bikini and the dirt between her toes.
She wears thongs, like Nina does, only not of rubber. Nina’s sister’s thongs are of elaborately knotted leather and probably cost real money, as did her house and everything in it. The chairs have ottomans, and the sofas are of leather so expertly tanned it seems to melt around your body when you sit. The carpet is wool and the tables glass, and the stereo components climb from floor to ceiling in their nook of built-ins.
But there isn’t any music, not for the hour and a half that they sit in that room with their bloody marys. The ocean blurs in Ida’s vision. You can see it through the far glass wall of the living room. That’s all you can see, just ocean and sky, not even a railroad tie or a ribbon of rock or sand. The house appears to occupy a tenuous position, as if at any minute it might tumble headlong into the surf. It is built into the terraced, sandy landscape on three levels, with stairs going all the way up the inside wall. A zebra skin is draped across the balcony railing above, and on the ceiling are some long, narrow skylights. Any light from this source hits the angled walls and ceiling and bounces right back to meet the ocean’s glare dead center of the room. There, the light perpetually explodes, and jumps around among the glass-topped tables and the hard gleam and polish of the stereo, leaving no shadow anywhere, as far as Ida can discern, not even under the chairs or in the deeper reaches of the bookshelves. These are high-gloss oak with a responsive glow, and Ida swears she sees a seagull reflected there, skidding into and out of the grain. She may as well be on the ferry again, in the middle of all that water, feeling seasick, and watching the waves roll by in the wood. She tries to concentrate on this sudden change in circumstance, and on what it might hold in store. What she comes up with is the sense that they are all to stay put for a while. Nina’s sister’s name is Anne, and in Anne’s presence Nina is drowsier than ever. Perhaps they’d shared a bedroom as children, perhaps they’d raced each other to sleep. Ida sees that they yawn in unison, and that when Nina lights a cigarette, Anne sits forward eagerly to beg. Then she waves it away, and then she reaches for it once again and smokes. Anne gave up smoking out of penance, she says, after Stinky ate a toadstool and died. The penance lasted for a week. Stinky was a poodle. The toadstool was gilled, and before the dog died she ran in circles for an hour, yipping with what seemed, to Anne, like happiness. Then, with a shake, she just flopped right over. She was buried in a box from a Fisher-Price toy, out in the garden. Her headstone reads, STINKY, NOW MORE THAN EVER, and Anne invites them out to see it. They all carry their drinks, like passengers strolling on the deck of a ship. The little graveyard is a quarter of a mile away along a private lane. Oddly, even from the graveyard, Ida cannot find the latticed arbor of peach-colored roses that signify the entrance to the rest of the world. Perhaps this is a different graveyard, then. Perhaps the other is for Anne’s cats, as this is for her dogs. Most of them were struck by cars, but one climbed out a window and another drank a sinkful of Drano. On each grave Anne has placed a tendril from a honeysuckle vine. This she does every time another dog dies, she tells Nina.
“I can’t manage to keep a single living creature alive,” Anne laments. “I can’t even keep Laura alive, I’m afraid. I don’t even know where the poor thing is. I haven’t thought about Laura since breakfast.”
Nina puts her arm around the tense-shouldered Anne and kisses her earlobe. Anne kisses Nina’s forehead in return. It could be Nina kissing Nina, but still Big Stan gets silently enraged. He kicks Stinky’s pink tombstone, forgetting that Nina had made him take off his boots in the house so as not to dirty her sister’s carpet. Big Stan yowls horribly and yanks off his sock, but Nina doesn’t seem to want to help him. She doesn’t seem to notice. She is engrossed in Anne, as Anne is engrossed in her. Therefore it is Ida who sticks Big Stan’s toe in her chilled bloody mary and then runs to the house for an ice cube and cloth. Approaching the house, she is blasted by sheer noise, and opening the door, she gapes in wonder at the magnitude of sound. It’s a miracle the noise hasn’t blasted the house off its footing. Ida knows the album, too, in the second it takes to identify the pitch and resonance of its vowels. Jethro Tull. This was not one of Martha’s favorite songs; Martha frequently fell silent when it played and stirred her stew, and only with the start of another lyric resumed her ta-laaing. Ida liked it, though. She liked the headiness, and the way the melody contrasted with the moodiness of Martha’s fierce kitchen. She liked everything about those days, she remembers, and for a moment she forgets whose house this is and what she’s returned to it for. Come to think of it, she’s lost. She doesn’t know the way to Anne’s kitchen, so she sways for a minute in the blaring, pounding battlefield of musical notes. Even the sunlight catches the rhythm. Only then does Ida notice the person on the floor, another Nina, but younger, much younger, with her thumb in her mouth, rocking vigorously a beat behind the music. The small girl’s ears look frail as eggshells, pale and luminescent, and a blood vessel throbs in her temple. Her tiny, rocking knees double up to her belly with a slam-slam-slam, and a river of tears runs into her ear, collecting in its delicate channels. Ida lunges for the child, then changes her mind and lunges instead for the stereo, where a monitor blips flashes of bright green lightning.
She hunts among the buttons for an on-off switch, then flings herself on the child-Nina and cradles her in her arms. Silence. Still the child rocks and kicks, and punches Ida’s belly in time to her rocking. Her cheeks are red-hot, and her eyes are shut tight as her fists. She is perhaps three years old, perhaps four, but she wears Nina-clothes already, a too-big dress and no underpants. There’s an open locket around her neck, but the locket is Anne, not Nina, because it cost real money. It has delicate, hand-wrought hinges. Inside, its empty picture frames show naked gold hearts.
Ida closes up the locket and lays it gently at the base of the little girl’s throat, in the hollow where the clavicles meet. There, it jumps and trembles in time with the child’s pulse. So do the fists in Ida’s belly, slam-slam-slam. Ida places a palm on the rib cage, where the heartbeat’s too big for so tiny a frame. It doesn’t seem to be slowing at all. Worrying, Ida grabs hold of the bony feet the way she learned decades earlier to capture a frog. Sure enough, the trick works. First the ankles relax, and then the calves, the knees, the sturdy, muddy thighs. Beneath the folds of the skirt, the child’s belly heaves and heaves, but more quietly than before. Then the locket stops jumping and the pulse in the temple slows. After a while, the ears turn color, as if the blood has flowed back into them, and soon the tears begin to dry on the chin and cheeks. With the balled-up hem of her T-shirt, Ida swabs the flooded channels of the lovely ear. There. Pursing her lips, she blows into that ear and then into the other, with a steady cool stream of soothing air.
For a while they sit, and Ida blows on the child’s wet lashes until the lids flicker open. Her eyes are hazel like Nina’s and Anne’s.
“Okay,” Ida says, and smiles a little. “Which way to the kitchen, Laura?”
I have no imagination, Ida thinks. I would never have imagined that having steamed the ice cube tray, extracted three cubes, wrapped them in a pouch of dishtowel and handed the pouch to the child that by the time we reached the graveyard the ice cubes would all have been eaten. I wonder if she swallowed them whole. Maybe she’s starving, like me.
But she has no time to ask, because they’ve reached the little graveyard, where Big Stan still sits with his toe in the tomato juice and vodka. Nearby, Anne and Nina discuss the pros and cons of a picket fence to mark the little cemetery.
“The thing about a picket fence is it almost has to be white,” Nina argues.
Laura straddles a tombstone and rocks. Max’s tombstone, not Stinky’s.
“Max was a poodle. He was hit by a car and got a concussion,” Anne begins to explain. “After that, all he did was run around in circles. Small circles, like he was running around a kitchen table or something, except usually he wasn’t running around anything at all. He even dreamed about running in circles, and the dreams made him dizzy. The second he woke up, he fell down. When he died I found a bracelet in his mouth, one of these bangles, lodged in the roof between the upper gums. My God — here’s Laura! Where have you been all my life?”
“Listening to music,” says Laura.
“Look at the lovers,” Nina scoffs suddenly. “I’ve heard of whipped cream but never bloody marys.”
She gestures toward the kneeling Ida, who swabs Big Stan’s toe with the wet dishtowel. There’s no blood, just tomato juice, but the toe is grape purple. The foot smells of Tabasco, but Ida feels the talc on the arch of his foot where he’s laid it to rest on her hand. So, there is Nina’s missing talc. How moving to think of him rooting around in Nina’s ridiculous bag, his big, careful fingers picking among the junk. How they use each other up, Ida thinks, without either one of them knowing a thing about it.
She wraps Big Stan’s whole foot in the dishtowel, stands up and waits while he gets up beside her. Then she lays his passive hand on her shoulder and leads him, limping, to Max’s tomb stone to collect the rocking Laura. Anne and Nina have disappeared somewhere, maybe to the cat cemetery.
“Stinky’s underground in the graveyard,” Laura says as they go.
“Yes, and I’m sure he’s very happy there,” says Ida.
Big Stan begins to laugh.
The music is on again at the house, only not as loud, and not Jethro Tull. Ida holds Laura’s hand as they enter, but Laura breaks free and skips ahead into the center of the room where Nina lies on her belly on the sun-struck carpet, flipping through a magazine and trimming her split ends. She and Anne seem to have made an exchange: half of Nina’s finger rings for half of Anne’s bracelets. Nina now wears three bangles, one of braided brass, one of tooled silver, and one skinny silver wire topped with a single square knot. Light rays explode off the bracelets, which clink faintly as Nina reaches for a fresh lock of hair. The snipped ends fall upon the columns of the classified ads, which she seems to delight in, barely lifting her head when Laura says, “Hi, Mommy,” and flops down beside her.
Then Nina grins.
“I’m not Mommy,” she says. “Mommy went for a ride on the ferry. If you go to the window and wave, maybe she’ll wave goodbye.”
That evening Big Stan and Nina convert the kitchen into a darkroom, first draping its windows in yards of black felt and then locking the door. Over the next couple of days, all sorts of noises emanate from within. Ida can make out a constant trickle of water, an occasional gush from the faucet, assorted clicks and clangs, the frequent clinking of utensils and of Nina’s new bracelets, along with whispered consultations and screamed, garbled accusations. Ida can’t be sure what the screaming is about, but she senses that the photos aren’t coming out as desired. Big Stan spends frenzied moments searching the truck for “the film Nina lost,” and then, at around two o’clock one night, Nina slyly asks whether Ida might possibly have switched Nina’s bottle of bleach with one of dish soap. When Ida doesn’t respond, Nina says, “Seawater, then. I knew it. That explains the corrosion, you creep.”
Ida ignores her. The kitchen door is locked, and Ida hasn’t set foot in there since the time she got the ice for Big Stan’s toe. She and Laura eat ice cream from the open green truck down the road, and little paper cups of coleslaw from a hot dog stand near the ferry. Ida is leery of hot dogs, having fasted for so long, and Laura likes sucking the coleslaw off the long plastic handle of her ice cream spoon. Seated on the stone wall facing the ocean, Ida and Laura make a game of counting the ferry’s plaintive hoots. If they listen very hard, they can tell if the ferry is coming or going. The third hoot of the day means it’s lunchtime, and the sixth means it’s time to start home. They climb back to the house in gathering shadows. From below, Anne’s house appears to be leaning, like a balancing rock in a desert. One push and down it will slide. But each night passes safely, and dawn comes with the promise of another sandy day. Ida and Laura lie flat on matching beach towels, reading coffee table books that Laura pulls from the nooks surrounding the stereo. Later on, they bob and wade in the surf along the small public beach, where the lifeguard allows Laura to sit for a minute in his tall white chair to play with the megaphone. Laura never speaks into the funnel; instead, she holds it to her eye and watches for the ferry, to see if her mother is on it. The public beach is fronted by a painted cabana whose cement patio holds a water fountain, several circular picnic tables, a garbage can and a pay telephone. When Laura begs to phone her mother, Ida, not knowing what else to do, holds her up to the phone and places a call to her own phone in Williamsburg. She does not even think about Ruby. It’s her kitchen she thinks of, because suddenly she longs for its confines. In her mind she reviews the contours of that space: its shelves, cubbies and lazy Susans; its cake pans, pastry sheets, rolling pins and wooden spoons; its canisters of flour, sugar, salt and cocoa; and on its windowsill a corked glass tube containing one fresh vanilla bean, whose scent she used to inhale when she wanted a high. Ida never cleaned up as she baked, but let the spatulas lie where they fell, along with the bottle of anise extract, the open tin of spiced walnuts and the rolling pin still buttery with flecks of pastry dough. Then, while the cake was in the oven, she retraced her tracks, and picked up and sponged and mopped and cleaned, and followed the trail she had left behind, back to the spot where she’d begun. How familiar it was. The tin of spiced nuts belonged on the open shelf of cookbooks next to a small jar of cloves. The wooden spoons and spatulas stood upright with the whisks in a glazed ceramic urn whose handled lid she had broken years ago in the sink. The dishtowels got tossed into the washing machine, and sometimes the kitchen rug went in there, too, along with the potholders, aprons and Ida’s T-shirt. The rolling pin, brushed and dried, she hung on its rack on the wall near the window, and the skinny vanilla bean stayed where it was, where she wanted it to be. Sometimes, she’d stand half naked and look at the well-ordered room, and sniff the cake in its oven and then, remembering, dig around on her knees in the big stashed box, in search of an appropriate bride and groom. These she set on the counter, still safe in the wrapping, and began to plan, with pencil on a sheet of onionskin, the cake’s decoration. Then she poured herself a glass of iced coffee and drank it like a smoker taking a break, standing one-footed in the open doorway leading to the screened-in porch. She never wanted Ruby around. Not while she was working. She needed her space, her air, her privacy and the sound of her own feet moving on the floor as she crossed and recrossed from one side of the room to the other. How naturally she moved in that kitchen, and how certain she felt of everything, of anything. Even reaching toward a cupboard she knew just what she’d find when she swung the latch — a nest of notched icing tubes, one package of heavy bond paper, two pairs of scissors and a compass. Ida in her kitchen always knew where she was going: forward in time. There was always a future, and the future was a cake, and the far-off future was another cake better than the first.
