Donna, Carmen, Lucille, whatever your name is, stop that goddamned racket before I go crazy.” But this was said almost under her breath. And then the sound stopped, and then there was not another sound except for the toilet flushing and someone whistling. Carmen opened her eyes and Lucille was still standing there, looking at her, unblinking, her arm extended inside the console.
Four: Saturday Morning: Every Once in a While
Carmen stared at the empty, rusting can of spaghetti she had opened for the girls at dinner last night. They were still asleep and she had sat here at the table all night, the radio playing softly until it went off the air. She had listened to the buzzing for a while and then finally snapped it off altogether.
She had felt, after Paddy coming over, that she wanted to be just with her girls after all. When she was able to get up, she found him in the living room with them, and shooed him out. They sat on the couch, backs to the room, coloring up some newspaper. She’d felt a deep anger cut into her from somewhere. She didn’t know what it was, she wanted to ignore it so it wouldn’t spoil everything.
“Why, hello, Baby!” she cried out to them, a wide smile on her still deep red-lipsticked mouth. But they did not look up and smile and answer, “Hi, Mommy!” as they ought. They flinched, but they didn’t turn or speak or look up from what they were doing. She wanted to beat them then, but in fact she didn’t often have it in her to hit the girls when she wasn’t loaded or hung over. She stood in the middle of the room, felt foolish, felt the rage begin to rise over that. She saw somebody’s slipper laying on the floor, gave it a good kick, and it swirled across the floor and under the sofa.
“What do you want, spaghetti for dinner?” she asked them, and they said “Uh-huh” nearly in unison, but she was even too tired to smack them for their manners, even though that wasn’t beating, that was being a mother.
As she pivoted toward the kitchen, the room seemed to move up and down in a wave. “Oh. No. Not again,” she thought. She let out a kind of cry and put one hand on her abdomen, and at that the girls turned to see what the matter was, and then they did come running to her. They placed their small hands on her body, patting her back and her stomach, the top of Donna’s head coming up to about her shoulder and Lucille’s resting into her breast. She reached her own arms out and around them, and held them to her, and felt good again. She threw her head back and laughed.
“Well, girls,” she’d said down into their heads in the soft and funny voice that they loved but hardly ever heard, “guess what? Mr. Morris slept here.”
“Mr. Morris slept here,” she said to herself now at the table, out loud. She picked up the spaghetti can and threw it into the sink. One of the girls rustled and turned over, and began to snore lightly the way children do.
“Every goddamned body slept here,” she said. “Everybody sleeps here.”
Part Two: Young Mr. Emerson.
Thursday Morning: She’s Like the Swallow
Young Mr. Emerson had already lived the life that everyone would be living ten years or so ahead. He had just celebrated his fiftieth birthday two days or weeks or so ago. He lived two doors down from Petie in the house his mother and father had raised him in, but now, excepting one cat, he had had the place to himself for almost four decades. Waking, he realized it was not remotely near ten, shut his eyes, determined that he would stay there in bed until he couldn’t stand it anymore, and that time had better be closer to ten than not, or somebody was going to hear about it. He had never met her but knew who Carmen was, and wondered what she might be up to. If she’s up, she ain’t been to bed yet, he thought, and then whistled lightly for the cat to jump up and lay on his chest, which it did. Carmen fell out of his mind as routinely as she seemed to enter it. She was too young to ever have been one of his regulars, when he had regulars.
He lay for what felt like all day, all the while his eyes shut tight. The kitten had apparently found something to eat, it wasn’t fussing at him to feed it. The motor of purring and its heat right under his chin weren’t annoying enough to swat it away. He settled a bit deeper into the covers, and began to think about his mother.
Young Mr. Emerson’s mother had been quite an accomplishment. She was very pretty, with soft light hair that was neither flaxen nor gold nor any kind of yellow, but also not simply brown, fawn, or any other word that he knew. His father, Big Mr. Emerson, used to sing to her, “I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair,” to which she’d reply, “Oh, Mister. My hair is not bloody brown.” When Young declared one morning, around the age of five, in the interests of emulating her and of saying something with exactly the correct intention, that he was not interested in having any bloody eggs, she turned to him and sighed, and said, “Oh, Young. I guess you had better go get the belt.”
He cried, and screamed, but she’d said nothing. She sat down opposite to him at the dining table, watching him, her elbows on the edge of the table, which he already knew one must not ever do if one were a well-mannered little boy, and pressed the tips of her fingers together below her nose, her eyebrows raised just slightly. He stopped howling, stared at her with bleak eyes, then slid down and went to get his father’s thick brown belt, the one he only wore on Saturdays when he wore his awful slacks, the ones he got drunk in once a week when he would sit out on the back steps and drink tumbler after tumbler of something brown, something that made his breath smell sharp and sour, and made him shove his mother around and kiss her for what Young knew had to be far too long.
When Young returned with the belt, his mother held it for a moment, looking at him speculatively, then dealt him one blow across the face that split his lip and cut his eyelid. She neither ministered to these wounds nor spoke of them again. From that point on, when she told him to go get the belt, she might strike him with it, or she might take it from him, in the manner of accepting a plate of food or a dishrag she’d asked for, and hold on to it, stroking it, staring into space. Young would never know which she’d do, and by the time he was seven, he didn’t feel anything about it. He knew that he must stand before her until she gave him leave to move, and this might not come for ten minutes, or half an hour, and that at the end of whatever time it had been, he was as likely to be hit as not. It was as if his presence meant nothing to her. Still, he figured out quickly that he was most in danger of the belt if he said a thing she judged he should not, and this he solved easily. He simply ceased to speak at all, other than to say, “Yes, ma’am,” or “No, ma’am,” but pronouncing each judiciously, so as not to convey the impression that he wished to be spiteful, or arrogant, or that he didn’t know who he thought he was. He was sure who he thought he was, in any event.
She had died in time for Young’s father not to have gone from being Big Emerson to Old Emerson, but she had never called him Big. Her last word in fact had been “Mister,” spoken clearly from the small hospital bed in the ward where sixteen-year-old Young had been allowed to visit her. She had not had the influenza but something else that had come on quickly, but Big insisted should be treated for at the hospital. It was judged Mrs. Emerson was not going to live, and Big declared that whether he would catch ’flu by going to the hospital or not, Young was going to be there in the room with her at the end. They stood side by side at the foot of the bed, his mother’s eyes on his father, she trying to say something, God only knew what, and all Young could think of was where he last left the big brown belt, which over the years had been kept though it had been some years since it was long enough to span his father’s waist. Then she said it, “Mister,” and she died with her eyes open, breathing out a long, slight breath.
Young’s father didn’t bother to call for a nurse or a doctor, but yanked Young by the elbow and said, “Come, boy, we’re getting out of here.” He gave Young his first hard drink then, at the first tavern they came to on Fayette Street, and they stayed a long time. They told the barman it was a family wake, and he took a drink with them in sympathy. Young had thrown up several times before Big realized he ought to get some food in the boy, but by then Young couldn’t keep anything down, and at last they staggered home to find dishes still in the sink, sheets tousled on the beds, and his mother’s pocketbook laying on the kitchen table.
Young had swayed on his feet,