The French Revolution (5 page)

When Esmerelda tried to slip into the house with her children, her key no longer fit in the lock. She hammered the anchor-shaped knocker until lights came on upstairs.

“Yes?” The door cracked open four links on the chain. Fanny Van Twinkle peered out in a zebra-striped bathrobe, a triple martini in hand. She was of average height, a few extra pounds in the trunk but certainly not fat, with wavy gray hair recuperating from a lifetime of homemade perms. Her onion-shaped face contained even brown eyes flecked pink from gin, a drooping nose, medium-sized ears like apple slices, vampire lipstick wound sloppily around her mouth. Her fine lips parted and she started to cough, a broken carburetor firing up.

“Hey, Ma,” Esmerelda said. “Door’s busted.”

“I changed the locks. An unbalanced African American man recently assaulted me in the living room. He tried to hug me and called me Ma. It was very upsetting.” Fanny pointed to the two blanketed lumps under Esmerelda’s forearm, alternately crying and snoring. “What have you got there?”

“Babies. My kids, technically. Just bringing them on home.”

“Your kids. Technically.” Fanny knocked back half her martini in a soundless pour. “Thank you for the update. Heaven forbid I was not still your landlord—I never would have been informed.”

“It’s not that, Ma. They were a surprise, to me even.”

“And the father?”

Esmerelda sighed. “Can I come in first?”

“No.” Fanny pulled her bathrobe tight and smiled.

“What the hell’s wrong with you? These are your grandchildren.”

Fanny wrinkled her heavy nose at this, her daughter’s endless entitlement, the ache that never ceased. “I gave birth to one child already, and you are still here. I have paid my dues, and for what? Ignorance, disdain, all of the above. If your father were here to see this—humph! You may stay, but those mystery children are not welcome in my home.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Have I ever kidded you once in my life?”

There was no one to call but Jasper. “Here,” Esmerelda said, “you started this mess. Take ’em off my hands until I can figure something out.”

“But Ezzie, they need their mama.”

“Lots of kids go a day or two without their mom. They’ll live.”

“Girl,” he whispered, “they gotta suck on your titties to eat!”

“Dang it,” Esmerelda admitted. “You’ve got a point.”

Jasper telephoned his mother, and an hour later all three generations were strapped in the minivan and speeding north along the Great Highway, past the gas station birthplace and the pounding Pacific and up the fog-snuffed hills into the Presidio, Jasper’s apartment on Stillwell Road.

They pulled into a cramped parking lot and parked next to a stairwell. A hard buzz ran through Esmerelda, and she began rapaciously picking a zit on her forearm. “There an elevator?” she asked.

“Nope. But it’s just the second floor.”

Esmerelda shook her head rapidly and forced a few beats of laughter. “Been half a decade since I’ve gone up that many steps. Not gonna work, toots; sorry.”

Jasper touched her shoulder and angled his head like he’d seen successful football coaches do in the movies. “Babe, give it a shot. I’m gonna be here with you, no problem. We’ll find a way.”

“No problem? You try walking up a staircase with this kind of luggage and we’ll see how you do.”

“Do the man a favor and at least try. He wants to help you.” Karen Winslow nodded from the driver’s seat.

“Ya, and I am here too.” Sven Johanssen, longshoreman and Jasper’s roommate, skipped down the stairs. He was svelte, with an angular Nordic face and shaggy white-blond hair, and spoke with a heavy Swedish accent. He stank of pickled seafood. “We help you up.”

“Forget it, it’s not happening. Mechanically, can’t be done.”

“What else are we gonna do?” Jasper asked.

Esmerelda’s face flushed, and she swung her arms like battle-axes. “I don’t know, but you better think of something!”

Karen turned off the radio and Jasper sat down on the staircase, watching as Esmerelda calmed, brushed perspiration off her cheeks, and sucked down a bottle of water. She licked her thumb and rubbed out stains on her muumuu, swatted microscopic insects, helped herself to ginger cookies from her great wool bag. Jasper, Sven, and Karen exchanged incredulous glances as she killed ten minutes wiping clean the magnetic strips on her credit cards before taking a short nap. The evening turned chilly; the babies rustled in their car seats. Unaccustomed to such prolonged silence, they started to cry.

“Well, you went and upset my grandkids. No surprise really. Heck, I’d cry if I were them.” Karen Winslow lowered herself from the driver’s seat, appearing somewhat shorter on foot than in previous encounters, Esmerelda observed, just a little. “Their mom’s a wimp.”

“Their mom has a weight problem,” Esmerelda clarified. “It’s a long story.”

“Wimp, coward, whatever. Esmerelda, you don’t even try.”

A terrible rumble rose within Esmerelda’s muumuu, somewhere between her stomach and her larynx and her butt, a sound Jasper had heard only once before, at the CopySmart flagship store when Esmerelda threw a shit-fit over a bounced check. He grabbed Sven by his rugby jersey and dragged him behind a support pillar.

“Don’t even try? I’m tired, for Chrissakes! Flattened! With these kids I never asked for!” The growl transmuted from potential to kinetic energy: her blubbery arms pushing her out of the van, slippered feet crunching gravel, tugboat body steaming forward. “What the hell do I have to prove?”

“Go for it, girl!” Karen Winslow called.

She didn’t feel the first five stairs. With momentum on her side, the next five weren’t bad either. Eleven and twelve were doable; she plowed through thirteen; fourteen was a real bitch. Fifteen: asphyxiation at hand, vision blurring, hundreds of pounds caving in on her lungs. She didn’t remember sixteen at all, and woke up drenched in sweat and leaning against the wall on a landing from heaven.

“Halfway there, sugar.” Jasper’s Miss Piggy voice oinked in her ear. “I’m with you all the way.”

“Need a snack,” she gulped. “Something to get my blood moving. Check my bag.”

Jasper fetched two chocolate bars, several pizza crusts, and a six-pack of apple juice. “OK,” she said a minute later, dropping the last juice box over the railing. “Let’s get this crap over with.”

Two hours and eleven minutes later, Esmerelda collapsed on the apartment floor.

“Yeah! Yeah!” Jasper tried to execute a celebratory multistage handshake, but Esmerelda was unresponsive.

“I really didn’t tink dat would work,” Sven acknowledged. “But she did it. Good for you, gurl.”

Esmerelda coughed feebly. A line of saliva flew across her face and landed on her eyelash.

“Don’t die yet, hon. These guys want some dinner.” Karen Winslow knelt beside her and passed over the children.

Away from the hospital’s flickering fluorescent panels, the shadows of the Winslow minivan, the honest light of incandescence fell on them. It was Esmerelda’s first good look, and she found everything about them disturbingly fragile. The girl was sleeping, soundless, a cool caramel customer, diaphanous cotton candy hair, milk chocolate pieces for fingers and toes. Beside her the boy yowled in a half dream, delivering sobbing diatribes to legions of infant Jacobin comrades.

“Marat, Marat,” Esmerelda cooed. “Settle down, love. Two days in and the world’s rattled you already.” Her index finger wiped the rugged splotch of black hair over his brow, glanced his nose, raked up his drool. Suddenly he chomped down on her pinky.

“Hot damn!” Esmerelda exclaimed, pulling her digit from his slimy toothless hole. “What was that for?”

“He’s hungry, dear,” Karen said. “Give him a boob and he’ll calm.”

“Give him a boob? I can’t even move.” But before she could muster up the energy to complain about the throbbing in her temples and the dryness of her throat, Jasper and Sven were hauling her across the apartment and shouldering her up onto the mustard-colored couch. Karen arranged the newborns on Esmerelda’s tummy and seconds later the boy was inside her muumuu, nuzzling her nipple. She fell back against the sofa, her body unplugged and eyes rolled shut, Marat’s suckling sounds bleeding to white in her cumulus mounds of unconsciousness.

In the late French revolution, we observed the extremes indulged by both parties chiefly concerned in revolution—the wealthy and the poor! The rich, who, in derision, called their humble fellow-citizens by the contemptuous term of
sans-culottes
, provoked a reacting injustice from the populace, who, as a dreadful return for only a slight, rendered the innocent term of
aristocrate
a signal for plunder or slaughter!

—ISAAC DISRAELI,
Curiosities of Literature
, 1835

You hear them talking of nothing but cutting, chopping off heads, not enough blood is flowing.

—Parisian lemonade vendor, speaking of the sans-culottes

 

 

Nineteen ninety-one was a
war year, yellow ribbons tied to trees, flags lashed to freeway overpasses and framed in bedroom windows. Bombs and planes preempted sitcoms, followed by press conferences with stern generals in shabby briefing rooms, fireworks over the desert. A television camera fell into an Iraqi ventilation chute and went blank. Elementary school students mailed packets of Kool-Aid to soldiers stationed in Saudi Arabia; troops received standing ovations in airports.

As Operation Desert Sabre commenced, a husbandless woman went into labor at the George Washington University Medical Center, in Washington DC. Twelve hours later, as mine plows cleared a passageway between the Umm Qudayr and Al Wafrah oil fields, Marisa Taylor was still at it but screaming and pushing
optimistically. Her elaborate cursing saturated the maternity ward, demanding morphine, a lawyer, experimental medical procedures, a fucking table saw, but none of it could right the hemorrhaging, tangled umbilical cord, exhausted nurses falling asleep on the job, undercooked meals, and burned-out light bulbs that were the hallmarks of her four-and-change-day disaster. She was unfortunate to hang on as long as she did—all the way to the hundredth hour, when President Bush announced a cease-fire across the Persian Gulf—establishing a bona fide delivery record that would never be broken, obstetrics’ DiMaggio streak. It ended with somnambulant acceptance, a small shudder, the boy’s lumpy head riding down a canal of blood. Turned out there was no next of kin, Taylor was a Metrobus driver from Alabama who lived alone, fifty bucks in her retirement fund, an aunt in Birmingham who wanted no part of it, her one-night stand with a prissy Parisian diplomat wholly off the books. Weeks later, when faced with a blank line above “First Name” in the baby’s Social Security registration form, an administrator with a morbid sense of humor dubbed the boy Murphy in honor of the only law that mattered in his life so far.

Esmerelda and Jasper fell under a monsoon of changings, feedings, and cleanings, plus double forty-hour workweeks on Market Street, in clown shoes and Gargantuan, tired smiles and sluggish fingers entering data at mere mortal speeds. After dinner they slept like steel weights, Esmerelda snoozing upright on the sofa with the kids nestled on her belly, Jasper snoring like an unmufflered Harley on his single bed. Amid the decentralized family foursome, Sven Johanssen rose each morning at four o’clock, slipped into his overalls, and drank a cup of black coffee before riding his ten-speed to the wharves in Bayview. Those crystalline ten minutes in the morning were the quietest of the day: infants slumbering silently, Esmerelda completely incapacitated from her nightly staircase ascent, Jasper’s thunderous
snores waning to occasional snorts after four hours under. Oftentimes the foghorns broke the stillness when he stepped outside, though after years of the routine he no longer noticed how the alternating bass notes created the sensation of floating, the way the soft, steady moans set him at ease. He slid to work on this serene carpet, a peaceful pedal through the Presidio’s buzzing forest and past the Marina’s shuttered bistros and boutiques, gloomy downtown monoliths, a lonely strip of warehouses and gang warfare, until he arrived at the wharves and found his hungover mates cursing the weather and listening to news radio.

At five o’clock, the children’s stereo wailing began. Esmerelda pulled up her shirt and let the kids hook in, while Jasper dressed in the dark and got started on Esmerelda’s morning hotcakes. After breakfast came burping and diaper replacement, the onerous dressing process, pained pleas to the infants for silence which proved successful only on the rare mornings that Jasper dug up the wherewithal to sing lullabies in his simple Spartan voice. At six the team moved downstairs, Esmerelda more confident heading down the juggernaut than up it, the children pausing their noisemaking to observe the spectacle, Jasper spotting her all the way. They piled into the special services van, wheeled across the city, and were spat out, with walker, at their respective places of business on Market Street at ten minutes to seven.