——
With Murph gone, I moved my desk away from the window, where the leaking draft would chill and hunch me. I made the computer screen itself into my sole window. From here only I would look out into the world. I googled my father to see what others were saying about his produce and to check out his website and what it indicated about the coming spring crops. I googled Sarah and Le Petit Moulin and learned that she had once cooked dinner at the White House for President Clinton. Perhaps it had gone badly and this is why she’d failed to mention it. Wine before swine? Pearls before martians? Perhaps she had served actual swine. Apparently she had indeed served them pork, local and organic and deposited in what I now thought of as a diaperlike tortilla. Tortillas seemed to me a mistake. She had also served them a walnut and buttermilk sorbet. Perhaps there was also a salad — mesclun with lemon-shallot dressing (I was making up names of dishes in my head: Kiwi carpaccio! Funnel of fennel! Couscous with frou-frou!) — and surely other things. But only the pork and sorbet were mentioned. I googled myself, my laptop screen becoming not only a window but a mirror. I wanted to see how I was faring out there in the world, or rather not I but the other Tassie Keltjin I’d discovered who was a grandmother and an emergency 911 volunteer outside of Pestico. Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Weekly I would google her and see how she was doing. One week she celebrated her fortieth wedding anniversary with her husband, Gus. Another week she tied for second in a pie-baking contest. And then one day I googled her and her obituary flashed up on the screen, and that is when I stopped googling her for a while.
When next I went to the Thornwood-Brinks’ it was Edward who again greeted me at the kitchen table. Did he not have the speed-dating of fruit flies to chaperone?
He smiled at me in a warm and charming way that made me look behind me to see if someone else was there. No one was.
“I wanted to let you know that the cleaning gay is coming today.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m sorry. He’s gay. He cleans. I call him the cleaning gay. Sarah yells at me for that. The cleaning guy. His name is Noel. Though he sometimes likes to be called Noelle. His vacuum cleaner used to frighten Emmie, but now she’s obsessed with it. He sometimes lets her push it around. That’s all OK.”
“Sounds good,” I said. “Is she napping now?”
“She is,” he said. And gave me one of those smiles again, full of craggy warmth and intelligent twinkle. I turned around to see once more if someone was behind me. And then he left.
When Noel came, noisily bursting through the back door with buckets of cleansers and sponges, I introduced myself.
“Just call me Noelle,” he said of himself. “When I was little they used to call me Noel, Noel, the toilet bowl. Although now I have thought of painting that on the side of my van. It might be good for business? I don’t know.”
“How long have you been working here?” I asked.
“Too long,” he sighed. “Though I love Sarah. She’s fabulous.”
“How about Monsieur?”
He sighed and leaned on his mop. “Gay men don’t like straight men.”
“Really?” I somehow doubted that.
“Why should they?”
I shrugged. “No reason.”
“Little Emmie’s a doll, isn’t she? I’m so thrilled for Sarah. I hope they’ll get a swing set out back for her.”
“That would be good,” I said.
“Today’s my birthday,” he added.
“Happy birthday. How old are you?” He looked somewhere in his thirties.
“Sixty,” he said. “It’s a biggie.”
“Well, you sure don’t look that!” Although even as I was saying it, beneath his dyed black hair I could see the leathery skin and rheumy eyes of age, or the fumes of harsh cleaning fluids, whichever it was.
“Actually, it’s not my birthday.”
“Oh,” I said.
I had read some Lewis Carroll — but clearly not enough.
“I’m just trying that out — it is coming up, so I’m trying it out on people.” A test. Perhaps it was a test of me as well. Still, I thought we could be friends. There was a nice kind of upstairs-downstairs vibe I was getting from him — we two could be the downstairs. Or was it upstairs? We would be the back stairs.
“Well, as I said, you don’t look sixty.”
He flung his hands at me. “Oh, don’t say that! It makes me feel worse, like you’re lying. Look! Emmie!” I turned and there she was, having awoken, rashy-cheeked and tumbleheaded. She’d made her way over the crib rails, down the stairs, past all the gates.
“Tassa!” she said, and ran and hugged my legs.
In Sufism I continued to sit next to the Brazilian. WHAT THE HELL IS THIS PROF SAYING? he wrote to me.
“He’s actually very smart,” I murmured back. “He’s talking about the four stages of the tariqa and their rituals. There’s a lot of piety, renunciation, and yearning for Paradise.”
Then he leaned toward me and whispered, “I can see you don’t join that easily in complaining. That’s a good quality. But so is joining easily.”
Walking out of the lecture hall he said to me, “Did you know it’s blackbird days—i giorni della merla?”
“What is that? I’ve never heard of that.”
He studied me for a moment. “It’s a celebration of the white blackbird who has taken refuge in the chimney, which blackens him with soot. It celebrates the soot.”
“Interesting,” I said, thinking of Mary-Emma and other possible myths of the white blackbird.
“It’s Brazilian,” he said.
I nodded. My head filled with the renunciation of renunciation. And a yearning for yearning.
I began to dress for him, relying mostly on a new gray-brown sweater dress I had bought in a boutique downtown with my new wages, a store where the clerks were chicly eager to help and where each item of apparel was in a color called Peat or Pumice or some such word. There were subtleties of neutral hue I’d never encountered before: Pebble, Pecan, Portabella, Peanut, Platinum, Porcelain, Pigeon, Parmesan, Pavement, Parchment, Pearl, and, ah, Potato. There were the brighter colors, too. One could recite them all like a jump-rope rhyme. Paprika. Pinot, Persimmon! Pimento! Pomegranate, Pine! Poplar, Pistachio, Peacock, Petal Pink, Polar Peach, Pumpkin, Pepper, Plum, Pineapple. Periwinkle, Peridot, Primrose, Palm, Pea, Poppy, Puce. My new dress was in a shade called Oyster, which was a lot like Fig Gray, I noticed, and which I called Stick, since it was the color of a stick. Growing up far from the sea, what did I know of oysters? It was the same hue as a muddy russet potato before the potato was hosed off. I felt it made my eyes dark and my hair shine, but maybe the color appealed because unlike so much else I owned it was not a yellowish shade of green that threw itself in with the natural tinge of my teeth. On days I wore the dress, along with my water bra, the Brazilian was friendlier. Soon, and after an unfortunate but not totally annihilating laundering, I was calling the dress “shtick.” Did he not know these were not my real breasts, or not really? Did guys even bother to want to know? Girls were walking around wearing these soft protrusions and guys were just going “Do-dee-do” like Homer Simpson. Perhaps when God said, “Let there be light,” in the original and correct Bible, still undiscovered, he also said, “Let there be do-dee-do.” Thank you, God.