Wallflowers (23 page)

“Hey, mister, got a cig?” she says, and his pale stare locks with hers.

“Oh, Addie. No.”

Those cryogenic eyes red rimmed now. Veins sucking the whites, suction cup safety harnesses to keep the balls in their sockets. She finds her feet below her, clutches the chair arm, struggles toward up. Clenches thighs for momentum, but falls back into the cushion.

“Auntie, are you okay?”

The girl with ginger hair sprints from the doorway. She wears a white shirtwaister and tennis shoes—can’t be over eighteen.

“It’s Addie,” says Adele as she glances at the man. “Just weak on my feet.”

“Do you need to use the bathroom?” The girl beside her now, clutching her elbows, hoisting her up.

“I beg your pardon,” says Adele as she palms the hem of her nightie. She squeezes between girl and recliner, and every second coagulates as she lurches for the door. “Just powdering my nose,” she adds. Rehab pun to save face.

=

Her tongue steeped in lime Jell-O. Grand window-side vista confined to a dreary tree and bargain-bin pond; DIY-Susie-Homemaker, no doubt: connect part X (the pump) to part Y (the hose) into part Z (a hole). The tube in the centre of the pond bubbles off and on, then off for good. The windowpanes are smeared with cleaning streaks and nose prints, and superimposed over that is the reflection of an old man’s face. The corners of his mouth are stained red. Adele glances right. “They got you with cherry?”

=

Swell party last night. Three too many Singapore Slings, but what’s a Sunday without a migraine? The fossil beside her awake but with eyes closed, tucked inside a flannel housecoat, in slippers a dog wouldn’t chew, his calves blanched and reflecting the sunlight that pours from the window. Too old to bother drying out, but to each his own.

“Tabitha Tate’s a veritable gargoyle,” she says. “But she throws the most sensational parties. Frankie Carle stroking those keys, “Little Jack Frost Get Lost,” and I won second in the Charleston contest. First place was sure as rain mine, but Emmie found Stell Gray and the Louisiana judge dancing the back-seat mambo before third round, so she was a sure win. And that man from Atlantic City, Mr. Roger Foss, his toes butter at first, but by nine a regular Gene Kelly. His eyes positively cerulean. By one the rains started, and you know L.A., a month’s downpour in a single day. I told Mr. Foss that nothing invigorates me like a Los Angeles monsoon, so by 1:15 we were lindy-hopping the puddles up Wilshire. We found the finest pools at the bases of driveways, and it became a game—the
stompeur
of the highest vertical splash earned a wish, but neither of us consented to spell our wishes aloud, so when I broke the eleven–eleven tie at 2:30, I asked for a cuppa joe at Ruby’s.”

Adele glances again at the old man, him sitting stone still, eyelids squeezed shut as if intent on pretending to sleep.

“And that’s where we stayed till five,” she says. “Ruby’s Diner.” Her retinas pound, so she rests her eyes on the window. Last night a few too many Singapore Slings.

=

Smoking a Winston with an orderly on the balcony. Nowadays most girls buy Slims, but it’s real class to smoke men’s cigs like a lady. First rule’s to keep your fingers on the filter to make the cigarettes look longer. Always draw the filter to the centre of your lips, never the sides, and be certain to frame your cheek with a skyward-pointed forearm. A lady never lights her own cigarette, and a proper gentleman won’t need a reminder.

“You’re withering your lungs.”

The red-headed girl slides the door closed with her hip. She must be a nurse. Each day the bags under her eyes look a little more like plums.

“Darling, I hope they pay you overtime,” says Adele.

The girl steadies her gaze on the balcony rails.

Adele stares at the orderly. “Well, aren’t you going to offer her a cigarette?”

=

Nineteen fifty-nine and six weeks after her mastectomy, Adele lay in bed and examined the wallpaper, the violet yellowing on patches afflicted by sun. Beside her on the nightstand: a bouquet of ginger lilies
From Donnie with Love, you’re still tops kid, XOXO
. The lilies two weeks old and overwatered, petals furling, rusting, limp. Roger had entered with his tray, set it on the dresser, opened the blinds. She told him the sun was pulverizing her wallpaper, but he continued to crank the string, said she needed the vitamin D. He brought the tray to her lap—poached eggs on toast, sliced orange, four Demerol, and a copita of sherry. She slid her palm under the plate and flung it at the wall. The plate sank to the floor unbroken, the anticlimax unbearable, yolks cracked though, sunny-side smears dribbling down sunbathed wallpaper, the toast butter-side down on the hardwood. Roger peeled the plate from the floor. His patience rancorous. She gathered the pills, laid them one by one on her tongue, ants on a log till she tasted the sour, then washed them back with the sherry.

While Roger fetched a cloth, Adele had sat at the edge of her bed, and drew circles on the floor with her pointed toe, foot cramping, then flexing, then falling still on the oak. Her waves wilted like the lilies, webbed over her shoulder blades, sticky with sweat. Gumboot summers at Grandmother’s lagoon on the Oregon coast, uprooting boulders: thumbnail-sized crabs scattering like pool balls, now in her breast, her un-breast, nerves scrambling, repairing, and searching for phantom links, for broken ends. She lifted the gown over her head. The flesh on her left pectoral folded neatly and stitched like a muted mouth. The cave of her breast cycloptic. Flat and white and gone. Roger came in a few minutes later with his cloth, lips agape at first, then clasped shut. He hadn’t seen since the bandage removal. Him beside her then, stroking her shoulder, brushing hair back, his palms warm like worn leather. Adele watched through wet lashes. His palm hovered above the hollow of her breast, then sank. Fingers a fist to fill the gorge, hermit crab to a perfect-sized shell.

=

On her lap, a chartreuse stain the shape of a tadpole. She reaches into her nightgown pocket for a handkerchief and her fist re-emerges with a tangle of hair. A whoop from her throat—first thought Señor Lemon, her brother’s pearly furred rabbit from the fifth grade, the hair in her palm just as white but too long, knotted around her fingers, looped between knuckles. A bulge in her other pocket too. Her pinky hovers at the lip, then hooks inside. More hair. Her hands spring out and the hairs cast off her palms. Strands wafting, settling inside the collar of her nightgown, on her lap, on the sea-foam carpet in between her toes. She lifts her hand to her head, scalp nude save a few curls, pinches a lock and tugs, the tuft freeing without a moment’s deliberation, now slipping through her fingers. The man in the recliner beside her watches and waits with a calm she could cling to.

Except she has garnet waves to make Rita Hayworth green, as thick and amber as treacle. Another tug, another tuft. She glances at the man. “Will you help?”

She shuffles her sit bones back and forth on the cushion until her knees point in his direction, folds collarbone to thigh, forehead to knee, her nape toward the ceiling. Her fingers roam the ridges of her skull, tugging, yanking, and his hands navigate too, palm pads warm and tugging more gently—white hairs swirling like feathers in a cockfight, like a freshly gutted pillow.

=

The room’s empty save a geriatric with eyes like her ex-husband’s. He leans against the window with a cinnamon roll, next to a newspaper and grease-glossed paper bag.

“You missed Cait,” he says, thumbs deep in bun. “She stopped at the patisserie.” Butter congealed beneath his cuticles, cinnamon in the corners of his mouth. “Cinnamon roll?”

Adele lies in one of the two twin beds. “No, thanks.”

He sets down the bun and wipes his fingers on the newspaper. President Obama—no Soviets, no Nixon—and he’s bedside now, loosening the sheets with his thumb, knee on the mattress. He deflates beside her, places his palm on her cheek, then sweeps past her ear, his skin on hers, her scalp. Phantom hairs as pathologically hopeful as phantom breasts.

“My husband and I owned a
casa
on Telegraph Hill,” she says. “Small—one thousand square feet, low ceilings. But with a kitchen skylight fifteen feet high and right in the centre of the house. Death trap for bees, the poor things. Fat with pollen and spiralling for cloud, only to hit glass and find themselves incapable of flying down. So they’d buzz up there for days.”

She rests her chin on his shoulder, then continues. “We couldn’t help,” she says. “The skylight too high and welded shut.” His palm sinks back to her cheek. His fingertips are sticky. They smell of cinnamon. His index finger traces her lip, his nail shaping letters. Words like abbreviations across her mouth, like signals from a cable under water.

Here Be Dragons

LISBON

At the café on Rua Garrett, you are the woman who serves me sardines. I sit under a yolk-gold umbrella. She threads through tables pelvis first, answers queries on wine: From the Minho region, No, the colour is not green, In Portuguese we pronounce it
verde
. Like yours, her eyes are the India-ink spills labelled as islands by our forebears. And her hair. Her hair defies neatlines. Had I known this spot was so hot for tourists, for burned-cheeked Britons and McAmericans, university gals with backpacks and Birkenstocks, their boyfriends with Hacky Sacks and ponytails, had I known this I’d have ordered my fish from a hole-in-the-whitewashed-wall of Miradouro de Santa Luzia. But then I’d have missed you. Like you she wears black curls thick enough to catch bees. Faded jeans—high waist, wide hips—and a sea-green top that clings to the contours of her Northern Hemisphere. But what really grabs me, what really clutches me by the collar and flashes me back, is how she hangs behind the bar between orders. Pregnant gulps from an under-the-counter
pintada
, then back at my table, lips wet with foam. The extent of your career as a waitress may be merCator, but you punctuated your work just the same.

To my left, a Tampa Bay fan with a blond mullet pretends to be Canadian: I’m from the capital, you know, Toronto, you know. East of me, a woman from Toronto pretends to be Canadian: So the ferries to Vancouver went on strike. So why didn’t you just drive? I want to tell you and Our Lady of the Immaculate Tables that I’m not like them. I’m here on business. To ink lines on paper, call them roads, to graph cities over grids. To define place. Instead, I say, Portuguese sardines are bigger than the ones back home. Truly, its spine stretches across my plate like a rat’s tail. Our Lady of the Immaculate Tables looks beyond me and asks if I’ll order another
cerveja
.

At Ribeira Market, I buy a pear and a bag of pine nuts, then hop the number 28 tram. Lisbon, like Rome, is a city built on seven hills. But the Portuguese carved tracks into their cobblestones, fit the tracks with aluminum shoeboxes, wide windowed and painted sunny, to chug pedestrians up the narrow walled slopes. On the 28 you are the Portuguese mother of two, breastfeeding one and scolding the second for peeling gum off the seat. This time it’s the way she is not ashamed. To breastfeed, to sculpt
P
’s with spit (
P-or favor
), to wear her brows thick and a shadow above the lip. I like that you never used bleach.

Girl of the Seat Gum can’t be older than six. Her hair is tied with a dark green scarf, the boiled-spinach shade of lower elevations, and her forehead is bridged with a symmetrically pristine unibrow. I offer Girl of the Seat Gum a handful of pine nuts and she looks to her mother, who nods and switches breasts.

You who met your zenith before we had children to peel gum off seats. You who died On Business, K.I.A.: calves plush with rash and a forehead I could sauté garlic on. Pro bono land survey for the new primary school in Arusha, and we popped enough Lariam to dream Technicolor for a month. But there’s no fix for dengue, the breakbone, no Preventative Measures beyond long sleeves and repellent. You who hated repellent, the smell of science-pickled eyeballs, the way it made your fingers sticky and how you could taste it in your morning
chapatti
. K.I.A., but That Was Africa. Shit happens,
hakuna matata
. You always as crazy cool as bananas in the refrigerator. You, the centre of my celestial sphere.

The tram inches between walls with wash lines that hang skirts and neon bras like prayer flags. I disembark on Calçada do Combro and walk from here to the Miradouro de Santa Catarina. The mother and daughter get off at the same stop and walk a few paces ahead of me. Lisbon’s
miradouros
and funiculars remind me of Grouse Mountain, except these trams run on tracks, and instead of evergreens there are white box buildings, and instead of you fingering our initials into breath on the window, there’s Our Mother of the Ample Bosom forbidding her daughter to throw pine nuts at pigeons. As I near the lookout, I see an oval lawn and the statue of the Adamastor. Spirit of the Cape, Gatekeeper of the Indian Ocean, “heavy jowls, and an unkempt beard / Scowling from shrunken, hollow eyes / ... mouth coal black, teeth yellow with decay.” I taunt the Adamastor with nuts. I stretch my sardine fingers toward the stony bulges of his facial hair. I say, Come and Get Me. Four shirtless men sit on the wall that encloses the lawn, and when I turn from the monster, they’re staring and one of them hucks a can.