Black Tickets (18 page)

Sue lived in a three-story army barracks. Each room had an iron bunk on one wall, a single cot on the other, and a dresser in the aisle. They stood on their beds to dress. A red storm fence around the perimeter was strung with barbed wire to protect everyone. Each morning the walks were littered with insects swarmed in sick off Lake Erie. One day they carried a girl out of the barracks wrapped in an army blanket. They found her in the showers. Sue saw her rounded buttocks sag the olive wool. Inside there she was sticky. They said she was from Sioux City. Birthmark on her face with tiny dents like a seeded strawberry. Sue had seen her running the dime movies in the Penny Arcade, Theda Bara with a gold fan and shadow eyes.

Sue got off work and drifted down the midway in a wet heat, past the American-flag petunia gardens. Screamers rammed circles in the Whirl-A-Gig cars, pasted in stand-up Roll-A-Turn cages by their own gravity. They whistled and moved in droves behind raw hot dogs. At night she lay in the top bunk naked with the lights off. Fan on full aimed at her crotch while janitors lounged in front of the garages watching the rows of windows. Rod Stewart, scratchy and loud, combed his hair in a thousand ways and came out looking just the same.

T
HE SEWING
woman lived across the tracks, down past Arey’s Feed Store. Row of skinny houses on a mud alley. Her rooms smelled of salted grease and old newspaper. Behind the ironing board she was thin, scooping up papers that shuffled open in her hands. Her eyebrows were arched sharp and painted on.

She made cheerleading suits for ten-year-olds. Threading the machine, she clicked her red nails on the needle and pulled my shirt over my head. In the other room the kids watched
Queen for a Day
. She bent over me. I saw each eyelash painted black and hard and separate. Honey, she said. Turn around this way. And on the wall there was a postcard of orange trees in Florida. A man in a straw hat reached up with his hand all curled. Beautiful Bounty said the card in wavy red letters.

I got part of it made up, she said, fitting the red vest. You
girls are bout the same size as mine All you girls are bout the same. She pursed her red lips and pinched the cloth together. Tell me somethin Honey. How’d I manage all these kids an no man. On television there was loud applause for the queen, whose roses were sharp and real. Her machine buzzed like an animal beside the round clock. She frowned as she pressed the button with her foot, then furled the red cloth out and pulled me to her. Her pointed white face was smudged around the eyes. I watched the pale strand of scalp in her hair. There, she said.

When I left she tucked the money in her sweater. She had pins between her teeth and lipstick gone grainy in the cracks of her mouth. I had a red swing skirt and a bumpy A on my chest. Lord, she said. You do look pretty.

T
HE SCHOOL
opened iron gates to show its clowns and jugglers. Crowds came to watch the mutes, the senseless ones. Those lawns and high walls were not so fearsome in summer, and flags rippled from posts striped with crepe paper by the deaf. Molly’s father stood beside her holding Callie. Molly watched Laura; Laura was her mother. The crowd pressed up and Laura danced, with her light hair blowing wild about her face and the filmy dress moving to show her legs. The focus of her blind eyes didn’t change even in leaping; in those controlled jumps which could not keep her arms from rising, as though the feeling of air made her want to enter it. Afterward she stood very still. The dress blew about her thighs. Men in the back of the crowd began to hoot. But the rain came on. A wind blew up and knocked over one of the stands. The flimsy stand broke and let fly two hundred balloons; people scrambled and fell on each
other to catch them. Molly saw the colors twisting. Her father stood beside her but he could not see, ever. Laura stood there listening. And the balloons went up.

The town slept and remembered wars. Especially in heat, it slept. The river shrunk in its deep bed; clay along the dried banks grew giant cracks. Every day was very long and it was 1948. Molly thought it would always be this way. Spenser, South Carolina, had two factories, a lumber mill and a training parlor for beauticians. There were three grade schools, a grammar school, a high school and a business college. And there was the School for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind where Molly’s father taught. Everywhere there were heavy trees hung with ivy that threw their long shadows out even on the hottest days. Molly and her mother took Callie to the park. In summer they bought Sno-Kones from a man with one eye and a red-striped coat. His name was Barney and Molly asked him where his eye was.

My eye? he said. Wouldn’t surprise me none if somebody had my eye in a box this minute.

He laughed loudly. Molly knew he could see. His one eye wasn’t still like her mother’s eyes, but darted back and forth like the head of a quirky bird. Molly was only glad nobody had her mother’s eyes in a box, but was suddenly afraid and clutched at her.

Mr. Parsons, Laura said. You’ve frightened her.

But he had seen it already with his one eye and was bending over Molly. Why Honey, he said. Don’t you worry. Ain’t nobody going to touch them jewels of your Mama’s. Why if they got close, their hands would turn to ice like this here.

And Molly watched him dip the crushed white into paper cones with painted clowns and balloons on them like
at the fair. Then he poured blue syrup over for blueberry and red for strawberry. Callie was sitting in his stroller watching with his big eyes that caught and held but were focused far away like Mama’s. He watched Barney hold the long colored bottle up high and squirt the bright blue far down as it faded into the ice. Molly watched the color go. Her mother’s eyes were pale like ice, that cool blue smoke of hard ice. Barney would give them the cones and they’d go over on the grass and eat them, Callie falling and pushing his fat hands. The paper cones got melty and the balloons would bleed.

Molly asked her mother, These clowns can’t hear what we say, can they?

She said, Molly, all clowns aren’t deaf.

They’d walk back later, having stayed by the duck pond for hours because Callie loved to be near the water. Laura would walk down to the edge of the pond. She made a sound so much like the low murmurings of the ducks that they’d get confused and swim close. Callie would sit absolutely still. Molly put him in the stroller to leave and he’d turn his head to hear the ducks until she’d pushed him to the top of the hill. Molly told him the ducks were still there, they were always there. Her mother’s stick reached out in front, thin whisk back and forth. Laura felt for the curbs and stones and she pushed the stroller one-handed. Molly walked holding to the other side. Near dusk; how the heavy dark-leaved trees hung over them and the stroller’s wheels creaked uneven on brick sidewalks up Spenser Hill. They would talk, walking till they got to the house. Molly knew her father had lemonade in the tall glass pitcher on the blue table. Her mother would say, Randal, you’re home so soon? and he’d answer, No, Laura, you’re late. Oh Randal, not again, and she would touch him like she did, her pale hands behind his head.

Once when they were downtown, Laura spoke to Molly and she didn’t answer. Standing by the stroller as always, Molly didn’t answer and waited to see what would happen. Laura felt with her hand but Molly knelt below it, hearing the edge in her mother’s voice and ashamed now but afraid. Laura said, Molly? in different directions and screamed finally, Molly! Albers, from the bookstore, was behind them.

He said to her quietly, Mrs. Collier, here’s Molly.

Molly, don’t joke with me, she said. And as soon as he had passed, she leaned close, murmuring. But it wasn’t a joke, was it.

At night Molly’s father came to talk to her. Callie was asleep in the other bed, his thumb jammed in his mouth. Muted light from the streetlamp swam through the windows. She could see the tiny frenzied swarming of insects in ellipses around the yellow globe. Light fell blue on Callie’s face; his cheeks were gone in the shadows. That night all her father said to her was, Molly, no one can always take care of you.

Then he told the story of the dancing princess who lifted up her bed at night to go down the silver steps.

But what did she do down there?

She danced, he said, like your mother at the fair. And wore out all her slippers.

Up and down the block they heard footsteps on the sidewalks. Still it was not night. Doors shut their private sounds. Cars purred a muffled chugging as they slowed for the turn, then growled deep as they picked up speed. Her father told the story all the way through, and by the end Molly wasn’t listening anymore; only watched his big shape and his hands in the air that fell and stayed in her hair. His lips moved in his still face, and the dark came.

Molly, Molly, he thought as she sank in her rocking sleep. He was himself a light sleeper, waking from dreams several times a night to hear the house settle around him. It made him wonder that his daughter should draw shut like Lazarus, and no sound would wake her until she swam up alone from where she had been. He wondered how she dreamed. He sat on her bed with his hand in her hair trying to hear her dreams.

When Randal first began teaching Braille, the young wife of one of his students asked him how a blind person dreams. Randal told her that the sounds and voices have their own shapes and varied thicknesses. Almost like colors, infinite shades of silver. Randal realized then that his sight in dreams was that of his childhood; blurred moving shapes with a light or emptiness behind them. In dreams he could still almost see the fingers on a hand, the beautiful separated films that moved differently and by themselves.

When he was seven he’d had measles and diphtheria. His burning eyes were bandaged. He saw nothing. He practiced remembering how the fingers looked, how they moved in and out and touched and laced their translucence into a ball. When the bandages came away, it was all black. Slowly there was lighter gray, and lighter. In a year he could watch the glimmered blur of bodies running (the violent smacking bat, boys’ voices in sweet rising fold Get him out! Get him out! feet thudding close and gone), but not again the lovely fingers. The lovely—

Randal? Laura’s quiet voice was by the door. What are you doing in there so long?

I thought you were asleep, he said. He knew she saw no
shapes. Just the black. When they married, her aunt in Washington said now she would never get well (Married to a blind man my God. I did what I could she wants to ruin her life I wash my hands of it).

You know I can’t sleep until you come to bed, said Laura. She heard sadness in his voice, more slow distance than pain, as if he struggled patiently in a closet. She never questioned his sadness. She heard his broad hands smooth Molly’s bedclothes and then the lifting of his weight as the bed shifted its layers.

He straightened and walked to her. She leaned against him heavily, felt him solid under the robe. Smelling him, she pressed her face where the cloth opened on his chest; touched her mouth to the skin and the fine hair. When she was sixteen, he had taught her to read with her fingers and make love. He had given something up to her and she kept it for him.

I’ve made some tea, it’ll help you sleep, she said. Did you talk to Molly?

I didn’t, much. I don’t think she’ll do it again.

Randal felt Laura’s small hard shoulders. It seemed to him that she was made of light, that she would float out of his heaviness on the earth, in this town and this house. He felt her pull away.

I forgot the spoons, she said. She went to the kitchen. He heard her long thin feet on the bare floor, the opening drawers, the inanimate silver talking its clatter. In their room the windows were open. The lace curtains dipped in and out, catching on the rosebushes. She had turned down the bed on his side. He knew she had lain there beside the neat triangle of sheet, waiting for him.

Randal, she said, did I tell you they’re building a merry-go-round in the park? With a calliope and horses ordered
from New York. Mr. Parsons told us about it. Won’t Molly love it.

Laura handed him the steaming cup and her hand brushing his was cool next to the heat.

When she was sleeping and he woke at night, there was nothing. There was the house aching. There was the street and the plants moving by the window. At night the magnolias drifted their fleshy scent; he lay and sweat. He felt his son sleep blond and floating in another room that was gone that was oh far gone. His son drifted, a son asleep, born in a worsening trouble. He heard Molly weeping into her hands, Molly a grown woman and her heavy black hair in her face. He pulled Laura close to him and her scent washed over him like slow water. He held her sleeping body and was alone until the panic passed.

It was raining. He gradually heard and lay listening (his feet on cold steps and the milk wagon creaking, early morning, wheel’s groan, hooves on wet stones and yes the musky steaming smell, Randal get back inside You’ll catch your death No you can’t touch, but he pulled and ran, the man bundled him, lifted him, And the horse, big, its long hard velvet head). Laura moved breathless and naked to shut the windows.