Father would stand in the door and stare at the bared body, noting the synthetic blanket that had been drawn carefully over her head, over the pillow on her face. The hands laid across her naked belly, the fingers folded in a last prayer. The legs straight and close together, alabaster with fine blue veins. Like a statue that had fallen over. Father would recognize the dignity with which the body had been handled. A still life of death. Father would observe the silk panties and risk a brief moment of near-recognition. He would lift the blanket from the torso and suddenly see the purplish lace at the decolletage as if it were covering other breasts, against familiar skin. And how would he react then?
Armin turned over in bed. He’d have loved to be there, to watch it all, while Mama sat unsuspecting in the living room, reading and looking occasionally at the clock and the hands that moved much too slowly.
Father would have to think of the bodysuit. He wouldn’t be able to help himself. The uncertainty would tear at his mind. He’d run home, rummage through the drawer. Note the absence. One apricot and two plum-colored. Oh, how that would pain him. Armin groaned with pleasure.
What a dilemma! Father would have to cover up for him. He’d be the only one who knew. There were no other clues, no traces. Armin had been careful, had considered everything. And then the birthday this weekend! The package with Mama’s gift. Delicate underwear. Or maybe, this time, satin pajamas for him, wrapped around a book. Father loved coffee-table books on historic gardens and famous roads. Europe’s Amber Roads. The Via Appia. Route 66. The Silk Road. Armin giggled. No more silk for Papa! And just how would he explain that to Mama? Or would he be able to bring himself to go on buying lingerie, pandering to this secret vice in their relationship, all the time knowing everything? Imagining the dainty things on strange, cold, dead skin, and simultaneously on her, rosy and alive?
What a choice! What a life! Father in the vise grip of all the variations on deceit and silence. Mama would never forgive him either the one or the other. Father would be terrified that she might leave, terrified that the truth might come out. Career over. Marriage over. It was too wonderful!
A car drove by, and stopped in front of the neighbors’ house. Then a second. Armin’s brow creased. Usually nothing happened on their street in the evening. The house door opened. Father was home! At that instant, the apartment doorbell rang. But Father never rang the bell. Armin jumped out of bed. Downstairs, he heard his mother’s voice, astonished. A step creaked. Someone threw open his bedroom door, turned on the overhead light.
Blinded, Armin shut his eyes.
“You filthy...” whispered his father hoarsely. “You disgusting beast.” The voice broke.
Then Armin heard his father turn and go into his bedroom, and he opened his eyes. Two police officers stood there, shocked into breathlessness.
“Get dressed.”
They focused past him at the sky-blue window curtains with their pattern of white clouds. His mother appeared, her hair disordered, her hands covering her mouth. She gazed at him in horror, stared as if he weren’t merely a stranger, but also incomprehensible, unfathomable to her.
“Mama!”
He began to cry, and then suddenly to tremble all over. His body was seized with shudders. He shook so hard that he fell to his knees, and yet he went on screaming for her, wailing her name in desperation even between the spasms of nausea that made him vomit his dinner all over the floor.
“Now he’s throwing up the last remnants of his soul,” he heard one of the police officers say in disgust. His mother turned on her heel and disappeared. As if through a fog he registered that someone was handing him something to wear, insisting again that he get dressed. There was no answer to his cries. He heard nothing from the next room, nothing, just a silence that swallowed and utterly buried his hopes.
Minutes later, as they pulled him from the house, he was still shouting her name through his sobs, outraged that his father had chosen this response, aghast that his mother had made a choice that called into question everything he was, everything he believed. All his plans, all his prospects had turned out to be false, without substance. How could that have happened?
Hands pushed him into a car. He huddled there, a foul-smelling bundle of misery. Not a single neighbor would have given him credit for the evil of his thoughts, the ruthlessness, the cool planning. He tilted his runny-nosed, tear-streaked face up toward the brightly lit window of his parents’ bedroom. Naturally the curtains were already closed against the dark, but he could see the silhouettes of two heads, like black paper forms against the light.
He had no idea what they were saying, how they were looking at one another. He couldn’t imagine what lay dumped unceremoniously on the bed between them. A crumpled pile of stretch lace and Swiss guipure embroidery, flowers flocked on fabric, baroque richness in charmeuse, satin, and silk. And of course, he couldn’t possibly imagine his mother’s feelings, his father’s feelings, the purgatory he had made of their future.
And as he lay in his cell, his thoughts circling obstinately around the question of why his father had turned him in, his mother left the house, a sack in her hand. She ran down the street, turned the corner, ran again, until finally, at a safe distance, she came to a stop next to a garbage container. She raised her arm slowly and turned the sack over, allowing the contents to spill. The streetlight illuminated a glowing waterfall of lingerie slipping languidly down into the container, steel blue, the purple of figs, white, burgundy-red. Peach-colored chiffon wafted down to join the odors of decay and mildew.
Then she turned and staggered, crying, back to her home.
Copyright (c); 2003 by Beatrix M. Kramlovsky; “Die Seidenstrasse” first published in Liebestoeter (Scherz Verlag). Translation (c); 2005 by Mary Tannert.
The Busboy
by Donald Olson
Solitary people and solitary places — like the busboy of this story’s title and his “Hideaway from the World” — often figure in Donald Olson’s work. The upstate New York author has become one of the genre’s most prolific short story writers. He is also a frequent contributor of articles on the craft of writing to publications such as Writer’s Digest Books.
Until he found the wallet his life had been a string of short-lived jobs, menial and unrewarding: gas-station attendant, dishwasher, whatever came along to pay for a place to live and the basic necessities, including an ancient Harley which on Sundays he liked to ride into the countryside around Unionville.
His name, Tyler Berlinghoff, might have suggested a young man with a dash of the debonair, with respectable well-connected family ties. Such was not the case. Tyler Berlinghoff had no family ties, certainly not to the string of foster families who had nurtured him with neither love nor understanding; they considered him “slow.” He was a forgettably featured young man whose darker than brown eyes never looked deeply into anything but what would satisfy his immediate needs or beyond the dull daily routine that never varied. He cherished no secret dreams or immoderate ambitions.
During the first week of that hot dry August, Tyler had been working first as a dishwasher and then as a busboy at the Golden Griddle Café in downtown Unionville. Late one morning while clearing a booth on the windowless side of the café, Tyler chanced to glance down at the seat and discovered a wallet, a slim blue leather wallet more like what a woman would carry than a man. Absently, he slipped the wallet into his pocket underneath his apron. That he didn’t turn it in at the counter was not with any intention of stealing it. He would never have done that. Tyler Berlinghoff was an honest young man.