“Bev Hat was quite the speller, wasn’t she?” he said. “Don’t answer! You don’t have to say anything else. Not yet. I’ve already had Bev Hat’s report cards delivered to the station. We’ll see about her spelling.” He jammed his arm roughly into the bag and removed the Danish. Melba looked away, but glanced back in time to see Officer Greg opening his mouth wide, inserting the Danish to a considerable depth, and tearing it fiercely with his teeth. For a long moment, he chewed.
“You claimed this was a Danish?” he asked, sniffing at the glistening, gibbous object now balanced on his palm. Melba wrung her hands, mind racing. Soon her thoughts were all behind her, distant and small, impossible to distinguish from one another. Had she claimed that the baked good in Officer Greg’s hand was a Danish? Hadn’t he been the one to call it a Danish? With his free hand, Officer Greg manipulated his roll of tape, unspooling a long strip. He wrapped the Danish with grim, exacting motions. No trace of friendliness softened any plane or angle of the features presented to Melba’s anxious gaze.
“Don’t leave town,” said Officer Greg. He was looking at the taped-up Danish in his hand, but Melba knew he meant her, whoever she might prove to be. After he banged out through the door, she sank down upon her stool.
~ ~ ~
The phone rang and she leapt up, lifted the receiver, and let it drop heavily, severing the connection.
“There!” said Melba viciously. Would Bev Hat do anything so discourteous? Mothers hardly hung up on morning callers! Mothers seemed to expect people to call in the mornings. They coveted these calls: calls from friends who wanted to report on some developmental benchmark of interest to mothers, or calls from older, informed people who kept abreast of the prevailing wisdom on hazards and could advise mothers accordingly. Often mothers called each other in the morning to discuss achievements or to hint that an alternative to a popular consumer good could be made by hand. Why, try keeping a mother away from a ringing phone, from the prospect of an engrossing conversation!
How do I know so much about mothers? thought Melba, and shivered. Surely she hadn’t known so much yesterday?
But is something different about me? thought Melba. Or is it just a different morning? Melba tried to think about the morning. What kind of morning was it? Damp, but that was the weather, not the morning. Unpleasant, but that feeling — that feeling of being not entirely pleased — that was her feeling, not the feeling of the morning. The morning did not feel anything. The morning was precisely that: unfeeling.
A monster, thought Melba Zuzzo.
The bakery was hot, stifling, but Melba shivered again. Before morning, it was night, thought Melba, but what kind of night? She tried to remember the night. She had heard a long, lonely hoot outside her window, and finally, unable to sleep, she had gone downstairs to cook a tiny pancake. Meanwhile, Bev Hat had died and Ned Hat had become an old man. Grady Help had crept into her house and crouched beneath her kitchen sink, and maybe Dr. Buck too, and Hal Conard had made his rounds through the streets of Dan.
Nothing can really be known about the morning or the night, thought Melba. I suppose that’s why we have dates. The numbers make tiny equations and we can learn the numbers and feel like we’ve settled something. Melba, not for the first time, marveled at the strangeness of morning and night sharing a date when they were so palpably distinct.
If Melba were mayor of Dan, she would see that this was changed. It would be her first initiative. Day and night would be divided, no longer lumped together by the chuckleheaded mandate of the calendar. The change was bound to be popular; it was reasonable, and it would serve to speed things up — dates flying past, two or maybe even four dates in a twenty-four hour period — so one no longer had to drag along from midnight to midnight, forced to consider an experience so protracted and yet so disjunctive as a single unit.
But when before did I ever hanker for a political voice? Melba touched her throat gently, then pinched and wiggled her windpipe, rather roughly.
I’m so tired of thinking, she thought. The only distraction is small bodily manipulations and I’m tired of those too. She looked with hope at the bakery door. The bakery door banged open. In walked Don Pond.
Thank—, thought Melba.
Don Pond was the bakery’s first customer every day, but he never boasted.
“It’s luck, Melba,” Don Pond had told her, long ago, back when they were still assessing one another’s prospects as people. Melba had just handed him his bags of garlic sticks and psyllium husk brownies and listened politely.
“I don’t move faster than other men,” Don Pond had said, “and I don’t wake up any earlier. I can’t say I’m more deserving than they are, either. In fact, many would say I’m less deserving.”
Soon a precedent was established. Don Pond would always linger after purchasing his baked goods, making modest claims and waving a garlic stick so that salt and chips of toasted garlic fell onto the counter. He and Melba would lick their fingertips and press them down on the counter, returning their fingers to their mouths and sucking off the savory crumbs. Melba came to enjoy these interludes with Don Pond, except on occasion, when Don Pond was in a mood and his modesty became taxing.
“I’ve caused a lot of suffering, Melba,” Don Pond would confess.
“Oh Don, you’re in a mood,” Melba would interrupt but he would not be put off. When Don Pond was in one of his moods, he interrogated himself ruthlessly, finding fault after fault, and nothing Melba said to encourage leniency made any impression. Just the other week he had stomped into the bakery and Melba could tell from his patchily shaven head and bare, goose-pimpled arms that he was in the throes of a mood the likes of which he had never before inflicted upon her.
“I’ve caused a lot of suffering, Melba,” he began. “I mean physical suffering! To others. In podiatry class, I discovered a splinter in the sole of a classmate’s foot, and I dug for the splinter with a needle, dug deeply, until I had exhausted myself. Can I tell you a secret, Melba, something I’ve never told anyone?”
“Is it because you see me as a person of little consequence?” asked Melba. She retreated through the swinging door into the back of the bakery as she said it, overcome by emotion. She opened and slammed the walk-in refrigerator door so Don Pond would think she was checking on the pitchers of eggs. The cold blast of air felt good against her face and neck. Melba liked Don Pond. She felt close to him when they laughed together, licking their fingers and tasting the pungency of lightly charred garlic: such a flooding, intimate taste to share with someone before most people were even awake. Then he had to spoil it by bringing up secrets, secrets he would only tell to a nobody. But maybe he didn’t see her as a nobody, maybe he saw her as Melba Zuzzo, and, as such, peculiar and unassociated, unlikely to share his secrets with others.
She pushed back through the door and marched to the counter to face Don Pond, who had pulled several paint squares from his shirt pocket and was holding them up in different combinations.
“Do you see me as a person alone, isolated from intercourse?” demanded Melba, blushing.
“Intercourse, Melba?” said Don Pond delicately, stacking the paint squares and sliding them back into his pocket.
“Dealings,” said Melba. “You know how secrets spread through Dan,” said Melba. “It’s like wildfire! Or butter! What do you call that if not intercourse? But sometimes intercourse skips a person, an isolated person, a person so unlike other people that that person is on the brink of extinction. Is that how you see me? As a person skipped by intercourse? On the brink of extinction?”