when i'm working at the store, Jeffrey stays at Mr. Fernandez's nursery school on Spruce Street. He is a former aging hippie who became a panhandler outside the art museum where I met him, years ago, when I was trying to get pregnant. He thought I was Tricia Nixon and vociferously demanded a quarter. When I failed to drop one into his coffee can because I was looking at a brochure on Cezanne's The Great Bathers, he started hissing things at me.
Excuse me? I said, stopping on the stairs to look at him. I was disoriented after so much post-impressionism. And then he knew, glancing up at me, that he had it all wrong. Too big, he said. Too big. I'm sorry. I thought you were Tricia Nixon. And that's when he got up and walked over to me, a dusky, swaying man, and said in a slight accent: Geeze lady, I'm really sorry. He extended his right hand and I shook it, putting away the brochure, and then we talked a bit, he about the eighteenth-century Chippendale commode in the English wing, and I about him, asking what he was doing with his life, why he was here. He merely smiled sadly, I suppose the truest sort of explanation he could muster, and said what he would really like to do is raise a family and how envious he was of me, still young and newly pregnant and—
And I said: Pregnant? What makes you say that? (Sometimes I am sensitive about my size.)
And then he became even more apologetic and said, well, that it was just a way he had, a witchiness, but not a bad witchiness, and he just knew these things.
And sure enough eight months later Batman flew out, and Mr. Fernandez, newly scrubbed and reformed, the beneficiary of ten thousand dollars from a dead Ohio cousin and of manicure advice from me, threw a giant shower and gave me a yellow horse pinata never to be whacked open but simply to hang in Jeffrey's room, a lesson in hope and greed and peaceful coexistence, and it has been there ever since. And Mr. Fernandez has successfully opened a nursery school on Spruce Street called Pinata Pre-School, and only I, not even Tom, know of his museum-step past and I have promised not to divulge it, and he has hugged me gratefully on several occasions and we have become quite close friends and he is really so good, so good with children.
amahara and i had drinks at lunch today. I guess we are on speaking terms again. We sent to La Kommissary and she told me about a guy she went out with this weekend.
He's not interested in what's inside, complains Amahara. I want a guy who wants my heart, you know? I want him to look for my heart.
You know when he's fumbling with your breasts? I flutter my eyes at Amahara. He's looking for your heart. They all do that.
What a bitter hag I have become.
Amahara grins. He's really into orange.
But what does that mean, into orange?
Like really into it. She smiles enigmatically.
The color?
Yeah. Really into it.
But what do you mean? His car? His hair? Your hair?
His life, she says dramatically. He's really into it.
Into it, I repeat dumbly, believing I am trying to understand; what is wrong with me, I thought we were on speaking terms, what are speaking terms am I on them with anyone am I from outer space, is she?
I can't believe, I say firmly, hoping it will pass, that a person could be so into it.
For damn sure, says Amahara.
I pick up the check. Amahara goes for her wallet, but I say nope, it's on me, I'm into it.
Intuit, you said, blowing out the candle. Intuition is the secret life of fat cells. And then you burrowed into me, whispering your questions.
i am becoming hugely depressed. Like last year. Just a month ago I was better, sporting a simpler, terse sort of disenchantment, a neat black vest of sadness. Elegant ironies leaped from my mouth fine as cuisses de grenouilles. Now the darkness sleeps and wakes in me daily like an Asian carnivore at the Philly zoo.
In my little white house I am in a slump. I look around. All these possessions, all these new things, are little teeth, death markers, my home one compact little memorial park remember when they used to be called cemeteries. Now even gravestones are called family monuments, like these things, monuments to the family. I stare at my gold faucets, my new chairs, my popcorn popper, and my outsized spice rack — thyme leaves, time leaves — and wonder how they got here, how I have arrived at this point of clutter. These things, things, things, my mind is shouting and I hurl appliances, earrings, wine glasses, into the kitchen trash and, gripped immediately by a zinging, many-knuckled panic, pick them out again, hurry, hurry, one by one, rinse them off, put them back away, behind their doors, watch TV, breathe, watch TV.
my face worsens, and my eye, yet Tom doesn't seem to notice. It seems my question about my ass, however, has made him a bit braver, and he suggests, gently, as we lie side by side in the dark, ever so delicately, that perhaps I should lose some — Christ in the foothills, Riva, why don't you lose some — weight.
He has another business trip to Scranton on Thursday, he says. Won't be back until late Saturday.
Scranton. History dangles in front of me, a terrible mobile. My arms cannot move. My forehead opens up like a garage door. You've got to be kidding, I gasp, panicked.
No, why? he murmurs. Shouldn't be too bad.
Oh come off it, Tom. These suburban, marital cliches. They've crawled into us like tapeworms. Put a sugar cube on the tongue, flash a light up the ass, and they poke out their tiny white heads to investigate, they're eating us Tom there's something eating us.
He snorts, smooths his baggy pajamas, closes his handsome eyes. He says he doesn't understand why it is always late at night that I grow so incomprehensible.
i grow so incomprehensible.
I am stealing more and more money. I keep it in my top drawer beneath my underwear, along with my diaphragm and my lipstick and my switchblade these are things a woman needs.
You are the man removing my bobby pins, my hair unfurling, the one who saunters in still, grinning then absconding with all of my pulses, over and over again, that long graceful stride toward a city, toward a bathroom, toward a door. I sleep alone this week, my husband gone, rolling into my own empty arms might they be yours, sleep on top of them as if to kill them, and in the morning they are dead as salamis until I massage the blood down into them again with my palm. Sweet, sweet Riva, you said to the blind white place behind my ear. Come live with me and be my lunch.
after i've picked up Jeffrey and the two of us have come home, we are alone in the kitchen and he teaches me what he has learned in his dance class.
Shooba plié, shooba plié, he chants, hanging on to the Formica edge of the counter, jiggling and squatting repeatedly in his corduroys. He always looks so awkward I'm sure he's doing something wrong.
What's a shooba? I inquire, silly me.
It's this, he says, doing lord knows what with his pelvis. Then you make a Driveway, he explains, indicating the newly created space between his turned-out feet, but you don't drive in it, he adds.
You mean, it's just for show? I ask, incredulous. My smile frustrates him.
Welp… Mommy, listen! You just do Jellyfish fingers, hang, hang, then leapareeno! and he grand jetés, or sort of, across the linoleum, whoops loudly, slides into the potato cabinet. Then he's up again, his fallen socks now bunched at his instep, and he scoots across the floor with little brush steps, singing hoo-la, hoo-la, brock-co-lee!
How did he get this far from me? So short a time and already he is off and away, inventing his own life. I want to come up behind him, cover his head with my dirty, oniony apron, suck him back up into my body I want to know his bones again, to keep him from the world.