“Well, hello,” he said. “You come bearing a lovely warm perfume!”
The heat of the house quickly thawed every part of me but my toes.
“You’re not at the lab today?” I asked, listening not for his answer but upward, for any sound of Mary-Emma. I thought I heard a repeated bleating sound that could simply have been a plastic smoke alarm with a low battery.
“I was waiting for you,” he said.
“For me?”
“Waiting for you to get here so I could leave.” His hands came out of his sleeves.
“Am I late?”
“Not really,” he said. His expression was mysterious: a stern, amused indifference. The look of maverick science, perhaps! I knew the Mayo Clinic was showing some interest in his work. “Sarah’s working down at the Mill, as we say. She’ll be back at six. She thought even though it’s cold that you might bundle Emmie up and take her for a walk in the wagon. You’ll see there’s a red wagon on the front porch, which may work better than that stroller on the ice.”
“Yes, I saw the wagon coming in.”
“Good,” he said, fixing me with his gaze.
For a moment I was forced to study him back. His nose, bony and beakish in profile, was wider and tuberous when looked at straight on. His eyes were trying to do something with mine, but I wasn’t sure what. He seemed too old for our eyes to be doing anything. Not only had the years eaten their way into his hairdo, two prints of scalp astride a central silvery lock, but it seemed he had darkened the roots, perhaps with the shoe polish I’d seen at the bathroom sink upstairs. His shoes were always brown. Like Sarah’s, his hair was a production, of nature and art: it was as if his face had washed up on his head, like a tide, and left its mark, and then some artistic boy had come along to the same beach with a little paint.
“Sarah believes that babies should be aired,” he said finally. “She also believes in forcing hats on babies even when they’re screaming against it. She believes in doing this because they look so cute that way and we want a lot of cute pictures. Apparently.” He sighed. “And so we just shove the hats on.”
“Beauty is painful, as the supermodels say.”
“Right!”
The alarmlike bleating was intensifying. “Is that Mary-Emma?” I asked.
“Yes, that is. I’ll leave her to you.”
I went up to find her and behind me heard the back door shut, the car start and rumble out of the driveway and away.
Obviously I didn’t know how long she’d been crying. But her face was puffy and swollen, her cheeks fever-bright. The hot stink of diaper was in the air; she would need to be changed. “Hey, baby!” I chirped, and she swung her arms up to be lifted out of the huge crib.
“Tassa,” she said, as if reminding herself. She was needy and sweet. Her new life story, beginning here, would perhaps be a triumphant one. And when I picked her up and held her, she seemed something so very lovely and uncorrupted — no matter what terrible tale she had actually been plucked from.
Pulled steadily, the wagon bumped along the icy walk to Mary-Emma’s great glee. “Whoops-a-daisy,” I would say — the wagon would tilt and then fall back, or get stuck in a rut and need a sudden tug that would knock her back hilariously. She would giggle and exaggerate her own falling, leaning every which way in her new puffy pink snowsuit, a small drip of clear mucus appearing at her nose, which she would fetch with her tongue. If we stayed out too long her face would be chapped and as red as a radish. Even with her darkening skin. These kinds of details I was learning. When it seemed too cold I would look for inside venues. Up on the main street of the neighborhood I would take her to a supermarket that had handicapped access and let her race up the ramps, play with the electric doors, attempt hide-and-seek in the aisles. Or I would stop at the mattress store, wheel her in, and look over the place, the real idea being to let her run around and jump from bed to bed while I discussed springs and firmness with the salesman. He would sometimes look worried, seeing her leaping around. “Do you mind if she does that?” I asked hopefully.
“Oh, no,” he would say, but with a slightly sickened look on his face as out of the corner of our eyes we watched her bouncing and flopping and squealing.
Because the upcoming March Democratic primary was, in effect, the general election — since no Republican had been elected to city government, perhaps ever — the city plows spent much time in the weeks before the primary clearing the streets. In Dellacrosse we might have gotten some summer road repair in time for the fall showdown — PHIL POTT FOR CORONER (Dickens lives!) — since there the Republicans had a prayer. But here in progressive Troy, apparently, mass seduction by the incumbent had to happen early, and so the mayor resorted to assiduous snowplowing. The plows seemed to come from everywhere, with their front shovels angled like petrified fish lips. The scraping of metal on ice and then on the street surface itself set a steady metallic treble line to the low rumble of the trucks. In consideration of the spring soil and grass, Troy had also bought a truck that instead of salting the roads sweetened them with beet-sugar brine, and its drip along the streets looked like the trail of a sad thing with bad kidneys.
I took Mary-Emma up toward Wendell Street, which was the only street nearby with actual restaurants and stores and other businesses, probably nine establishments in total. It would have passed for the downtown of a tiny village, and I knew the sidewalks were more cleanly shoveled there. On Wendell we headed through the salted-to-slush ice toward the neighborhood branch of the public library. I would show her the children’s books, and despite Sarah’s preference for baked books, we would sit at a table near the radiator and read. Few people were on the street, but the ones we passed smiled at me, then looked at Mary-Emma and then back at me, their expressions not exactly changed but not exactly the same: upon seeing us together, our story unknown but presumed, an observation and then a thought entered their faces and froze their features in place.
But then a car on the opposite side of the street, full of teenagers, it seemed — I could not tell how old they were — slowed down and looked at us from across the lane. I kept going, headed for the library, but glancing back I noticed that the car had pulled into a side street and was now turning around, coming back down Wendell in the lane closest to me. It pulled up to the curb. A guy with a bright orange mohawk, a big silver ring in his brow, silver studs like cake decorations up the cartiliginous rim of his ear, and a thick black leather jacket that made him look as if he were wearing an expensive chair, leaned out the window. Two other boys were in the backseat — if taciturnity could kill! — and a very ordinary-looking brown-haired girl was at the wheel. I thought the mohawk guy was going to leer at me. Or maybe he would ask to see my breasts or shout that he wanted to put them in his mouth or maybe he would offer to do things with his studded tongue, lick me up, lick me down, suck me head to toe, or maybe he wanted my juicy lips on him or to tell me I had a fat ass but he liked fat asses or that I had a skinny ass but he liked skinny asses and wouldn’t I like to get my skinny ass or my fat one into this fine car with him and his friends so he could do all these fine things? Instead, he glared right at little Mary-Emma and shouted, “Nigger!”
Never before in my life had I understood so deeply what it meant not to believe one’s ears.
“My-kull!!” exclaimed the girl inside driving. The boys in the back snickered a little, and she swung the car away from the curb. The rear tire spun and flung snow into the wagon, which made Mary-Emma laugh at first and then, when the rock-frozen snow hit her face, made her cry. I hadn’t known any of this was possible in this town. Dellacrosse, perhaps — although I’d never actually heard it there — but here? Here was so proud of itself. Here was so progressive and exemplary. Here was so lockstep lefty. Here was so — white. The only color they knew here was the local one they took on for camouflage and convenience. If this were Salt Lake City, I knew, half the people here would have happily been Mormons. Instead, righteous and complacent and indistinguishable from one another, they were all members of the ACLU and the Freedom from Religion Foundation.