‘A little bit of what, Zosh?’
‘A little bit of beer, a little bit of fun,’ she told him in her thin sing-song. ‘A little bit of anythin’, a little bit of love.’
‘What kind of beer you like best, Zosh?’ Trying to get her back on the rails.
‘“What kind? What kind?”’ she mocked him, her voice ringing as brainlessly as a ninety-eight-cent alarm clock in an unrented room running down to a whimper. ‘It’s been so long since I had a beer I just don’t know what kind I like no more.’
With yesterday’s empties crouching behind her chair.
‘I don’t know, Frankie,’ she complained with a distress like a tired child’s. ‘How many kinds are there? I don’t even know what kinds there are any more.’
‘There’s Budweiser,’ he told her indulgently, as if enumerating distant relatives, ‘then there’s Schlitz, and Blatz, and Pabst and Chevalier-
‘Drink Chevalier
The beer that’s clear-’
he hummed a radio commercial that sometimes softened her. Yet himself remained tense with the sense of being cornered by more than a secondhand wheelchair.
‘Any kind wit’ foam on, that’s the kind I like’ – her voice was happy at last, running over with imagined foam, drooling over her tongue in her haste to tell all about it. ‘Any godamned kind wit’ lots of godamned foam – warm beer, cold beer, hot beer, winter beer – I like beer.’
‘I like beer too, Zosh,’ he assured her. She ignored his assent.
‘I like beer. I just like it. Warm beer, cold beer, old beer, winter beer, big beers, bock beers ’n them little old teensy Goebbels’ beers – I like beer, Frankie hon.’
‘I know, Zosh-’
‘I like the Great Lakes too – you know why?’ Cause the navy’s there. Godamnit, I like the navy, any navy, the Irish navy, the Mexican navy, I even like the Dago navy. I like beer, I like the navy, sunk navies ’n floatin’ navies – I like them movie actors too. Give me them movie actors – godamnit, you don’t know how I like anythin’.’ Her voice trailed off. ‘I like dancin’ too, Frankie hon.’
‘Should I go down ’n get a half gallon?’ Anything to get out of this corner.
‘You can run down ’n get me a godamned dawg like you promised, you promised, you promised’ – abruptly she realized that he’d deliberately sidetracked her desire for a dog.
‘I spent thirty-four months havin’ green-ass corporals chew me up,’ he told her with a bitter wisdom: ‘“Dress up that salute, Private, no pass for you, Private, get the dust off that carbine, Private – pick up that butt you just stepped over, Private’ – you think I come home to hear you quackin’? If I don’t talk you get mad ’n if I say somethin’ you tear my head off.’ He leaned his back against the sink, looking puffy-eyed, and heard his own voice pleading: ‘I don’t know if I’m comin’ ’r goin’ no more, Zosh.’
‘You look to me more like you’re goin’.’ She eyed him steadily, inching up till the wheels pushed the toes of his heavy army shoes back a fraction of an inch. ‘You know what the ruination of the world is?’ And answered herself: ‘Stubbornness. You know what’s wrong wit’ you? You’re a stubborn t’ing. It’s why you’re the ruination of me. It’s why it’s all your fault.’
‘You don’t know anythin’ about dogs,’ he defended himself.
‘I know about dawgs, you don’t know about dawgs.’
‘He’d run away,’ he told her, his eyes half closed against her.
‘I’d keep him tied. The dawg’d be tied all the time.’
‘What you want a dog to be tight all the time for? Don’t you think dogs like to sober up once in a while too?’
It didn’t work. She thought it over one long moment and her mind ricocheted again: ‘Honey, you know about the girl wit’ the strorberry on her behind? Whenever she ate strorberries it got real red.’
No, he had heard about the girl with the blossoming butt.
‘But that ain’t nuttin’,’ she assured him. ‘On Saloon Street was a little kiddie-kid, her old lady got scared by a rat so bad
she slipped her wig ’n you know how that kid come out? She had a birt’mark shapen like a rat right across her teeny face wit’ the tail curlin’ up onto the cheek, hair’n all.’
Then saw he was just sitting there listening to nothing but the ceaseless traffic’s murmur and nudged the cup off the wheelchair’s arm; he started as it shattered on the floor. She nudged the saucer after the cup.
‘What you breakin’ the dishes for?’
‘’Cause I feel like it.’
‘Okay,’ he agreed amiably, ‘I feel like it too,’ and shoved a soup bowl off the sink.
She reversed the wheels swiftly, turned and raced to the cabinet in the corner as pale as the pillow behind her head. ‘You like to break t’ings?’ she asked so softly he scarcely heard – and yanked the soiled newspaper out from under the stacked plates, bringing the whole shelf of them down with an explosive clatter and in a very frenzy of vengefulness wheeled the chair back, then swiftly forward over the remains of her best china, crushing fragments into further fragments.
Frankie grabbed his cap. He needed air. He needed sleep. He needed a good stiff drink. He needed anything, anything at all for just one short hour of peace.
‘You ’n your godamned dog,’ he paused to tell her in the doorway. ‘You ’n your godamned dishes. You and your godamned chair – what you need is a good Polish beatin’.’ The door slammed behind him, then banged ajar with the impact and stood swinging a little in the gray, indifferent air.
‘You’re mad ’cause I like beer too!’ she shouted after him.
‘Up your dirty skirt!’ he called back over his shoulder, almost tripping over the loose tread halfway down.
Again it had been all his fault, she realized: even the dog on the landing below began yapping up at him. And on top of everything else calling her dirty names – nothing could make up for a man calling his wife dirty names any more than broken china could be mended to look like new.
It struck her abruptly that her dishes were broken. There at her feet her own dear sweet dead mother’s very best dishes broken just because that Frankie Majcinek had turned out so mean – blaming her now for being a cripple, breaking up the house to show how he felt just as if it hadn’t been him who’d put her in the chair in the first place.
Yet her eyes took a sort of dry satisfaction at sight of the littered chards of crockery: she wouldn’t pick up a single piece. Let it be like this when that henna-headed Violet Koskozka, always saying Frankie was too easygoing, came in. Let her see for herself what he really was like when you had to live with him. Let them all see what she had to put up with, chair or no chair. Let them all get a good look at what a temper that Polak had.
Not one of them must so much as pick up a single piece. Let it all lay and every time he came home he’d have to look at what he’d done until he’d finally understand that this was just what he’d done to one poor girl’s heart: ten thousand fragments never to be repaired. Till at last, on some sad day he’d always remember, he’d have to pick up every last fragment on his knees and every one like a jagged edge in his heart. He’d come begging her forgiveness in that sweet hour. ‘It’s too late, Frankie,’ she’d tell him. ‘You come to your senses too late.
‘After all,’ she reasoned primly, ‘if he’d wheeled me a little like he should I wouldn’t of shoved the cup in the first place. If it wasn’t for him I’d be out dancin’ by St Wenceslaus tonight.’