My voice sounded the way it had when the Berensons had come to the door, bright as tinsel. “Where will we put this bird feeder? By the front door? Or maybe by the bedroom window? Then we can wake up and watch the birds. We’ll have to buy seed. Wild-bird seed.” Were they really wild? Were they? Or was it just a word they put on the package without really thinking about it? My voice grew small. “Have you?” I watched him out of the comer of my eye. “With Jan?” He nodded yes, but he didn’t say it. I thought, “Coward! Coward!” but I didn’t say anything either. I dusted at myself, but hopelessly, cat hairs all over my skirt.
We got married when that song came out. I don’t know the name of it. The one that said, “...and two cats in the yard.” Simon and Garfunkel? Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young? And then I thought, they split up. All of them, they split up. I took a glug of sherry. Not a sip, a glug. “We’ll have to keep the cats in the house after we put the feeder up. Because the cats will kill the birds,” yank their wings off and shred their feathers and bite out their bright round eyes.
“I meant it,” I said, standing, “about putting up this tree.”
“I’ll test the lights,” Alan said, and I smiled. We had those real old sets that used to belong to my parents, the kind where all of the bulbs in the string went off when even one bulb was bad.
“I’ll make us a surprise,” I said, “for our last Christmas,” and I ducked into the kitchen. I put water in the pot, the big pot that I use for soup. I could hear Alan humming in the other room. I put cinnamon in the pot, and nutmeg, and whatever other sweet spice came to hand. I’m good with seasonings. I put the pot over the fire so that the water would heat and the sweet smell of Christmas would fill the house. Then I got the instant Nestea and some orange juice.
Alan hummed away. He had done it, he had told me, so of course he felt relieved. “Hey,” he called from in there, “sure smells good.”
“You bet,” I said. I thought about what all my friends in school had said. About how I was so lucky. So very lucky. And I stirred.
When it started simmering, I sat down at the little kitchen counter that served as my desk.
Alan looked at the pot when I carried it in. He had a bulb in his hand and light cords at his feet. I checked to make sure that, yes, he had the plug in place, and then I heaved the pot in his direction and saw its contents, sweet with sugar and tea and spices, slap his trousers and the cords and the bulb and his hands. I watched Alan jolt and shake and jolt and shake and hold out his hairy hand toward me. I didn’t move, I didn’t even back away, I just stood there until it was time to call the Berensons.
In a way, it was a shame to call them. It was so late. I knew Jan Berenson had already changed for bed. I could see her in front of her vanity mirror, her hair crackling with static electricity, lifting up and trying to stick to the brush. That’s the trouble with hair like that. You have to do so much to it.
She would say, “Would you get that, Lester?” when she heard the phone, because Lester would be up. Probably packing for a flight. I heard her say that once, that Lester was always packing for a flight.
Lester would keep repeating what I said, filling in the spaces because I would only use separate words like tea, and tripped, and lights, and then maybe almost a sentence, like, Alan tangled up, and lights, again.
But then Alan came into the room and stood in front of my typewriter, blocking the light. “You know, Elaine, maybe this is it. Maybe this is the reason.” I didn’t look up and he went on. “I talk to you about something as important as this, and what do you do? You type. I mean, look at you. You don’t even remember anything, not even the tea.”
I looked up now. I smiled. I was even, relatively speaking, content. “Shhh,” I said, “shhh, it’s Christmas.”
To Florida
Robert Sampson
“To Florida,” Robert Sampson says, “is the story of a man headed straight to hell who refuses every opportunity to change his course.” This is Robert Sampson’s second appearance in NBM; his “Rain in Pinton County” appeared in number 5. “From the Dark Side,” the third volume in Sampson’s study of the pulp, is scheduled for publication in December 1986. It deals with series detectives from 1905 to 1930.
Music blared as a ton of pink rocks flattened the orange bear. He sat up bonelessly, rubbing mauve stars from his head, and marched off the television screen, aggressive and undaunted.
Teller, not watching the bear’s problem, started recounting the money. His fingers danced through the stack of twenties like hunger in motion, like a love song, caressing.
A purple boxing glove belted the bear across a yellow room. Laughter screamed.
Teller glanced up, then down. His face was insolently wary, the face of a kid grown up to find out it was all a lie. He wore heavy sideburns, very black, and a lot of undisciplined mustache. He was on the short side of thirty, and looked soiled and a little crazy.
The apartment door bumped open. A girl’s voice said apologetically, “Whoops, slipped, I guess.” She backed into the room, angular and ugly, almost twenty. She wore blue jeans and a dirty pink sweatshirt. A big gray yam purse, striped blue-yellow-green, had slipped to the crook of her arm. She clutched two sacks of groceries.
“Jerry, can you grab a sack?”
“Dump ’em on the table.”
“They’re slipping.” She sidled crabwise across the room, showing too many teeth in a mouth like a frog’s. She thumped the sacks on a green painted table holding an air conditioner and the remains of last night’s Kwik-Karry Chicken. The window behind the table puffed cold air at her.
Jerry said to his hands, “You know what? I’m fixing to take me down to good old Florida and have a time.” He stroked the money. “I’m gonna drink me some beer and soak up some of that sun.”
“Yea, Florida,” she said. And speaking saw the money in his hands. All the expression flattened out of her face. “Is that yours?”
“Mine.” Their eyes met. “What you think, Sue Ann? Want to run down to Florida?”
She eyed the money, wary, surprised. “You got enough maybe we could give Mr. Davidson some? For the rent. He keeps calling.”
“He gave me this.” His quick fingers doubled over the bills, thrust them into the pocket of his shirt.
“He didn’t.”
“Go look in the kitchen and see. But don’t squeal, now. Don’t you squeal.”
“He wants we should pay him something.”
“Look there in the kitchen.”
She looked into the kitchen and her shoulders lifted slowly and slowly settled.
“Is he dead?”
“Naw.”
“I mean, really, is he dead?”
“I told you no. I just tapped him. Not even hard.”
“His one eye’s open.”
“So he sleeps with one eye open.”
She swung around to look at him. Apprehension twisted in her face like a snake in a bottle. “If you hurt him, we better not let anybody know.”
“We’re gonna be gone. I got his car keys. I’m cuttin’ out.” He waited for her enthusiasm and his face hardened when it did not come. “I figured you were so hot to run down to Florida.”
“To Florida. Well, I guess... sure...”
He heaved up from the recliner, boot heels cracking on the uncarpeted floor. “You get yourself together.” He grinned, watching her mind stumble after his words. “I want to go get me some of that good beer.”