Mary longed to wriggle away.
At her door she thanked him. “You don’t want me to come upstairs with you?” Two asked. “I haven’t seen you in so long.” He stepped back, away from her.
“I’m so tired,” said Mary. “I’m sorry.” The Hamilton Pork men stood around, waiting for another delivery and grinning. Two gave her back her suitcase and said, “See ya,” a small mat of Dixie cup and gum stuck to one shoe.
Mary went upstairs to listen to the messages on her machine. There was a message from an old school friend, a wrong number, a strange girl’s voice saying, “Who are you? What is your name?” and the quick, harried voice of Number One. “I’ve forgotten when you were coming home. Is it today?” Then another wrong number. “Who are you? What is your name?” Then Number One’s voice again: “I guess it’s not today, either.”
She lay down to rest and didn’t unpack her bag. When the phone rang, she leaped up, and the leap knocked her purse and several books off the bed.
“It’s you,” said Boy Number One.
“Yes,” said Mary. She felt a small, short blizzard come to her eyes and then go.
“Mary, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said, and tried to swallow. When tenderness ended, there was a lull before the hate, and things could spill out into it. There was always so much to keep back, so much scratching behind the face. You tried to shoo things away, a broomed woman with a porch to protect.
“Did you have a good trip?”
“Fine. I was hoping you might be there to meet me.”
“I lost your postcard and forgot what—”
“That’s OK. My brother picked me up instead. I see what my life is: I tell my brother when I’m going to be home, and I tell you when I’m going to be home. Who’s there to greet me? My brother. We’re not even that close, as siblings go.”
One sighed. “What happened was your brother and I flipped a coin and he lost. I thought he was a very good sport about it, though.” The line fell still. “I didn’t know you had a brother,” said One.
Mary lay back on her bed, cradled the phone close. “How does the campaign look?” she asked.
“Money’s still coming in, and the party’s pleased with the radio spots. I’ve grown weary of it all. Maybe you could help me. What does the word constituent mean? They keep talking about constituents.” She was supposed to laugh.
“Yes, well, Canada was a vision,” said Mary. “All modern and clean and prosperous. At least it looked that way. There’s something terribly wrong with Cleveland.”
“Cleveland doesn’t have the right people in Washington. Canada does.” Number One was for the redistribution of wealth. He was for cutting defense spending. He was for the U.S. out of Latin America. He’d been to Hollywood benefits. But he’d never once given a coin to a beggar. Number Two did that.
“Charity that crude dehumanizes,” said Number One.
“Get yourself a cola, my man,” said Number Two.
“I have to come pick up my paycheck,” said Mary.
“Sandy should have it,” said One. “I may not be able to see you, Mary. That’s partly why I’m calling. I’m terribly busy.”
“Fund-raisers?” She wrapped the phone cord around one leg, which she had lifted into the air for exercise.
“That and the boys. My wife says they’re suffering a bit, acting out the rottenness in our marriage.”
“And here I thought you and she were doing that,” said Mary. “Now everybody’s getting into the act.”
“You don’t know what it’s like to have two boys,” he said. “You just don’t know.”
MARY STRETCHED OUT on her stomach, alone in bed. A dismantled Number Three, huge, torn raggedly at the seams, terrorized the city. The phone rang endlessly. Mary’s machine picked it up. Hello? Hello?
“I know you’re there. Will you please pick up the phone?”
“I know you’re there. Will you please pick up the phone?”
“I know you’re there. I know you’re there with someone.”
There was a slight choking sound. Later there were calls where nobody said anything at all.
In the morning he called again, and she answered. “Hello?”
“You slept with someone last night, didn’t you?” said Two.
There was a long silence. “I wasn’t going to,” Mary said finally, “but I kept getting these creepy calls, and I got scared and didn’t want to be alone.”
“Oh, God,” he whispered, a curse or was it love, before the phone crashed, then hummed, the last verse of something long.
IN THE PARK a young woman of about twenty was swirling about, dancing to some tape-recorded arias and Gregorian chants. A small crowd had gathered. Mary watched briefly: This was what happened to you when you were from Youngstown and had been dreamy and unpopular in high school. You grew up and did these sorts of dances.
Mary sat down at a bench some distance away. The little girl who had twice spat on her walked by slowly, appraising. Mary looked up. “Don’t spit on me,” she said. Her life had come to this: pleading not to be spat on. Was it any better than some flay-limbed dance to boom box Monteverdi? It had its moments.
Not of dignity, exactly, but of something.
“I’m not going to spit on you,” sneered the girl.
“Good,” said Mary.
The girl sat down at the far end of the bench. Mary kept reading her book but could feel the girl’s eyes, a stare scraping along the edge of her, until she finally had to turn and say, “What?”
“Just looking,” said the girl. “Not spitting.”
Mary closed her book. “Are you waiting for someone?”
“Yup,” said the girl. “I’m waiting for all my boyfriends to come over and give me a kiss.” She closed her eyes and smacked her lips in the air.
“Oh,” said Mary, and opened her book again. The sun was beating down on the survivor. Blisters and sores. Poultices of algae paste. The water tight as glass and the wind, blue-faced, holding its breath. How did one get here? How did one’s eye-patched, rot-toothed life lead one along so cruelly, like a trick, to the middle of the sea?
AT HOME the phone rang, but Mary let the machine pick it up. It was nobody. The machine clicked and went through its business, rewound. Beneath her the hooks and pulleys across the meat store ceiling rattled and bumped. In a dream the phone rang again and she picked it up. It was somebody she knew only vaguely. A neighbor of Boy Number Two. “I have some bad news,” he said in the dream.
IN THE PARK the little girl sat closer, like a small animal — a squirrel, a munk, investigating. She pointed and said, “I live that way; is that the way you live?”
“Don’t you have to be in school?” asked Mary. She let her book fall to her lap, but she kept a finger in the page and her dark glasses on.
The girl sighed. “School,” she said, and she flubbed her lips in a horse snort. “I told you. I’m waiting for my boyfriends.”
“But you’re always waiting for them,” said Mary. “And they never get here.”
“They’re unreliable.” The girl spat, but away from Mary, more in the direction of the music institute. “They’re dead.”
Mary stood up, closed her book, started walking. “One in the sky, one in the ground,” the girl called, running after Mary. “Hey, do you live this way? I thought so.” She followed behind Mary in a kind of traipse, block after block. When they got as far as the Hamilton Pork Company, Mary stopped. She clutched her stomach and turned to look at the girl, who had pulled up alongside her, perspiring slightly. It was way too warm for fall. The girl stared at the meat displayed in the windows, the phallic harangue of sausages, marbled, desiccated, strung up as for a carnival.