And, predictably, the first man she fell for, a teetotaler nearly twice her age at thirty-six, had her bedded and wedded in a matter of weeks. She called him Popeye because of his forearms, and he called her all sorts of things, but only in a whisper. They bought everything on time.
Heidi was supposed to have been a spring child, but came prematurely. A week’s weight of ice took the lines down and the incubator she was in had to be powered by a backup generator. Finally they brought her home and were frightened; the baby didn’t cry, would not even blink. Heidi’s mother doted happily until speech came to steal her little pet and leave her feeling swindled. Heidi’s father worked for a coal company. He went to look at mines in West Virginia and Kentucky, sometimes for a few weeks. Further swindle. There was much “us girls” talk around the house, but it didn’t seem to help. The bits Heidi’s mother read from the paper were about women abandoned or molested or beaten. She would curl up her mouth and nod, as if to say, “Your future. Get used to it.”
Heidi wore T-shirts and high-tops, chopped her hair short with blunt scissors, burned caterpillars. Her father was bewildered, but saw this was his only chance. He bought a football and tossed it to her in the concrete alleyway that separated the garages from the kitchen doors. So skinny her hipbones were like little holsters, but she could throw three garages. And they’d see her mother coming through the dusk from work in her stiff aqua uniform, coming home just long enough to change out of it and then float off, never a word, toward the taverns.
Heidi wriggles, sighs, continuing to pull me down the damp aisle between her buttocks.
“I always remember that slow nod of hers when something bad would happen. Like she got some perverse enjoyment out of it. ‘Another pound of flesh.’ So was she wrong? Drowned in an ambulance, just barely thirty-two.”
I breathe into the taut nape of her neck, sink further into the amorous mist amid which I have received this family history. Heidi sighs again, relaxes everything but her grip on me. I suppose the exposition, her release of it, is meant to represent some new increment between us.
“Once more, love. Let me.”
“We came out of the high country,” I begin. “Tall timber.”
Squabble noises intrude, child whines and thunking car doors, a tourist family working out a history of their own. An out-of-state station wagon…
“I’m listening. Go on.”
Hands that have scrubbed a hundred miles of bathroom tile, exactly right.
“My one grandfather owned a planing mill and the other one built boats. Rugged capital. Hymns. They both died in nursing homes, not remembering a thing. My dad went to England to study, except the war happened and he had to come back. They said astronomy, okay, you must be good at maps, put him in some underground Washington war room where he pushed little plastic battleships around like a croupier. He heard my mom singing on the radio and went AWOL to follow the band… Hey. Watch your nails.”
Heidi says to keep talking. Her face is hot and fever-dry when I touch it, her eyes trying to penetrate my viscera.
“They had a restaurant the New York newspapermen came to. There was a picture of my sixth birthday party in the Daily News. We lived in a duplex on top of the restaurant and there was a roof garden where my dad kept his telescopes….”
A skinny trunk chafed expectantly numb but rumbling in its liquid roots, her fingers telescoping, digging sweetly there. I can’t get out the words — my mother at the Village Vanguard, my sister with hemophilia. Heidi grunts encouragingly, circling my prostate, and curls above, an alarming little gymnast breaking compulsory form. I reach for Carla, bathed in teardrops of blood like a saint, and Heidi descends to catch my trembling shot against her stomach. A perfect ten.
Mist now a low canopy of fog, we roll apart. She takes one of my cigarettes and plays with it unlit. I still can’t get any words out, my heart an oversized lump and my head slowing its spin, wobbling like a juggler’s plate at the end of a stick. Heidi, who dislikes aftermaths, must immediately fill them, begins to talk about her daughter — Tasha on her tricycle, Tasha’s first longdistance call. Aftermaths reassure me, and so, her hand stroking mine, her words drifting into fog, I go protectively to sleep.
I dream of Heidi serving me grape soda in a deserted luncheonette. Bandages thickening her hands are stained with an aqua bactericide that matches her dress. She lines glasses on the counter, refusing to talk. The glasses are slick and slippery, but I must empty every one. This is important.
I wake up alone, at night. I have coffee and aspirin for dinner, realizing it is time to satisfy a certain curiosity — if curiosity is really the word. And is lying the real word for the spinrack plot of astronomy and big bands which I gave her?
I climb back into my clothes without washing, into my car without misgiving. The night is moist and warm, a culture medium. I pass adobe remnants, angry dogs, a pancake house, a heavy-equipment yard. The road is empty under sodium lamps. I turn right into the housing tract that went up at the same time as Cherry Ames Hospital, park two houses down and walk back, forlornly toeing the patchy brown lawn as if it were my own.
Kitchen curtains are parted, the window set so low I need to bend my knees. A pretty child, hair tied back in a bow of purple yarn. She gnaws a carrot, looking coyly at her father, who leans against the checkered countertop, naked to the waist. His torso is well defined, still beaded here and there with bathwater. The child slides into his hip and he swings his arm thoughtlessly around her. Eyes lowered, he says something to his wife that is sheepish or apologetic.
It seems from this angle as if Heidi is looking right at me, her one hand stirring something in a crockpot while the other comes slowly up to rest on the naked chest. Her child moves the carrot up and down like a distressed airplane. Her husband plants a kiss on the air and bumps it to her with a motion of his chin. Heidi tastes, smiles, stirs.
In the closeness of the car I discover her smell on me, an aftermath that spirals inside like a worm. I drive slowly, fingers barely touching the wheel. I pass dental offices, a drive-thru bank, unmoving horses in a pen, lobes of rock, depthless shadow. The road is empty under dim, anonymous stars.
21
WITH MY LITTLE ELECTRIC stylus, I etch data codes on the emulsion side of leader tape. I am transferring kinescopes to half-inch cassettes using the latest digital equipment. Riffle through the punch cards, prepare Storage Clearance. Enhancement niters clean the wobble and grit out of the old pictures. Philco TV Playhouse #26-A w/ spots & ID, and the ingenue’s teeth are as even and white as tombstones in Arlington National Cemetery. Drudge work. Maintenance. I don’t pretend this is craft, like some cellular operators down here who give themselves dignity the way a street creep hypes morphine.
As, in my mail slot today:
The use of computers in archival management is the topic of a program entitled “Computer-Aided Archival Management,” to be held from the 8th to the 11th of this month at the Institute for Advanced Archival Management in San Diego. The program will focus on the uses for computers in the management of archives. Anyone interested in attending should please…
“Is your headache as bad as mine?”
Ellen has stalked in from next door, her face the usual tense puzzle. She has on one of her dress-for-success outfits, wet horseshoes under the arms of the high-collared blouse.
I pull open a desk drawer, turn back to my scanning.