Here They Come Read online

  And then she rides him, her legs wrapped around his waist while she hits him all over—at his head, into his eyes and then he starts to yell that she’s blinding him, and “Ahhh,” he yells, and “Ow” and our mother still hits him and I wish the dog were here, because if she were she would bark and bite at either of them and somehow make them stop, but the dog is out with Jody and it’s just me and Louisa and Louisa isn’t doing anything, she’s just watching, and so I go and I pull our mother off our father’s back. I grab her hair and pull it with all my weight. She lets go of our father and falls to the floor and she’s hurt, grabbing a bruised elbow and crying with her eyes closed.

  Our father is leaving now with the bowl under his arm. He is walking backwards out the door, maybe not wanting to leave his back exposed to her. When I was very small I would tiptoe to the edge of their bed, his face close to hers, and wonder if they were dreaming the same dream. Then he would roll over, or she would cough, and I would walk backwards, the way he is doing now, only tiptoeing. I left because I didn’t want to wake them. I didn’t want them to stop having the same dream.

  In his bicycle basket on his handlebars he keeps a hammer for banging on trunks of taxis that cut him off as he rides. He has learned how to weave through the traffic and run the red lights when the taxis realize what happened and start chasing after him. He wears rubberbands around one ankle, to keep the flare of his pants from getting caught in the chain. When he is tired he holds onto the bumpers of buses to catch a faster ride. Is his slut in the kitchen when he comes home? She is snipping parsley with scissors, neat little cuts whose repetitive sounds are pleasant to his ear. He stands behind her, wanting to encircle her waist, but she turns to face him, the scissors’ tips held close to his neck still stuck with leaves from the parsley. “Oh, Jesus,” he says. He moves away her hand holding the scissors.

  “Snapper,” she says, pointing to the broiler that’s on with the tips of the scissors.

  He moves to the living room, sits in a chair. He touches the skin around his eyes and then closes them, lightly touching the lids.

  “All the ride uptown I saw stars,” he says.

  “Lemon?” she asks, her hand held over the snapper she’s pulled from the broiler and put onto plates, ready to squeeze a lemon wedge.

  “Tea bags, won’t that bring the swelling down?” he says. She squeezes the lemon anyway over his fish.

  After they’ve eaten, he lies on their bed, his hands resting on his chest, his thumbs hooked under his armpits and he looks at the ceiling.

  “Christ almighty,” he says.

  His slut takes the keys off the mantel, says she’s going out for a walk.

  “It’s turning cold,” he says, before she closes the door.

  Summer’s at an end now. At night a hurricane hits and the wind is so strong it ripples the skylight glass. We watch from our beds, not able to hear each other talk because the sound is so loud. We play hurricane roulette and try to see who can run to the bathroom and back before the next flash of lightning. I run and I trip and fall and lose and the whole house and all of us in it are lit up white by the lightning and I see my sisters laughing at me with their heads thrown back in their beds, their mouths wide open, the ridged roofs white like ribs, like carcasses standing in sand bleached by sun.

  Our mother’s neck is falling. She firms it with slaps. One after another right under her chin.

  “Merde, in France, well you know, in France, never, never this,” she says.

  She is chapped at the ear tips. Hung skin on her lips, raspy at the elbows, and low in the mouth when she yells “Count me in” across the house. We are up all night with Atlantic Avenue and Park Place and the lost silver car and terrier dog replaced with bottle caps and garbage twist ties fashioned into lumps that won’t blow off the board. Cheating is rampant. Hands passing hidden orange 500s under the tabletop and stolen hotels plunked on property never fully paid for. The game is not the game, but the cheating of it all. We play until night bleeds out dawn, until our mother’s eyeliner has crusted and balled in her tear ducts she’s so tired. “Good morning,” we say and go to sleep. Our brother is sponging his robe, wiping out spots from sipping hot chocolate whose froth slid and soaked the dragon’s scaly tail. “Water stains too,” we tell him from under our covers deep in our beds.

  “Really?” he says. “Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck,” he says. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he wants to know. He comes at us with water, throwing it on us from a bowl left in the sink. The bowl once had something in it like milk, held curdled bits in its curved sides that now lace through our hair like unmelting snow from some Hollywood holiday set.

  In the morning kids in front of school are burning required reading in a bonfire right in the middle of the street. I see Catcher in the Rye go up in flames. I would go grab it, but they’re all the cool kids who smoke and cut Hygiene and still get good grades, so I don’t go near them. They are smarter than I am and have vision and reasons for doing things I may never understand. If Vietnam were now they’d protest it and I’d probably think the fucking Communists should be shot down. I’d find reasons to agree with our government because it would be easier. I don’t want to be hit with a club and tear-gassed and trucked off to jail.

  After school I go over to Rena’s and Hells Angels are riding their motorcycles through her loft. Bonnie’s boyfriend cuts hair in a salon and after work he brings his friends over to Rena’s and they do drugs at the long kitchen counter sitting on stools and then move back to their bikes, gunning their engines, turning fast turns on one back wheel that burns rubber and smokes up the air.

  Rena’s got a beagle named Muy Hombre and he walks himself around the neighborhood and when he comes back he scratches at the downstairs door so that we let him in. Often he comes back with dirty fur as if he’d been crawling through tunnels but Rena says it’s from the bums on his route who all know his name and call to him and pet him with their filthy hands.

  Rena’s building is three lofts all connected by trap doors. She lives in the bottom, her grandfather lives in the middle, and her aunt on the top. We go through the trap doors and visit them and leave the Hells Angels behind. We open the trap door and go up the ladder and we hear Mozart on her grandfather’s stereo and he’s painting with oils on a canvas. Rena says not to talk to him while he’s painting so we just pet his Persian named Monet and then head up to her aunt’s. She’s got crystals in her windows and a pet skunk named Toro who lives under the couch. Toro’s scent glands were cut out, but not all the way, and so the place still smells like skunk, but we hardly see Toro and only hear him at night with the lights off when he runs back and forth in the loft for what Rena’s aunt calls his midnight stroll.

  We sleep at Rena’s aunt’s loft because Bonnie and her boyfriend and the rest of the Hells Angels are still zooming around Rena’s loft on their bikes. In the night I wake up to Toro nestling and rooting in my hair and I pick him up and throw him across the room but he just comes back and at school all the next day I stink like skunk and I just want to go home and wash.

  It’s blood day and during Wood I see out the room’s windows and into the windows of the nurse’s office where the tough lesbian gym teacher, Miss Tord, who we call Miss Turd, is about to give blood. When the nurse sticks in the needle, Miss Turd faints and I yell and point to show all the other kids, and the sawing and hammering stops and we’re all laughing and watching the nurse slapping Miss Turd’s face. Mr. Lenin, who’s got a forest of black hair up his nostrils, comes over to tell us to get back to our projects, but when he sees Miss Turd facedown on the nurse’s desk, he says, “Oh, eet’s Miss Turd,” and watches too while he picks at his nose.

  I’m making a box, but Mr. Lenin has to do everything for me because I don’t like holding the wood and pushing it through so close to the blade of the circular saw. Mr. Lenin tells me I have to sand and glue, but I don’t do that well either and when you pull out the drawer to the box the sides are slanted like a parallelogram and not a
rectangle.

  “You must do it again,” Mr. Lenin says, but I say I won’t and he says I’ll fail and I say I don’t care and I don’t know what good is a box if I have nothing to put in it and he tells me I can put a paper and a pens in it and I tell him I don’t need a place for a paper and a pens and Mr. Lenin walks away from me and I think it’s because of the stink of Toro in my hair.

  “Merde,” my mother says when she gets back from work that night, “lucky none of you were on that boat,” she says, speaking of a ferry where a man plunged a samurai sword into passengers’ bellies. She always thinks we are where a disaster is, even plane crashes when none of us have ever flown. On our street a bus once caught the legs of an old woman and rolled over her skull. My mother was convinced it was one of us and up above from our window my sisters and I could see our mother pushing her way through the crowd, hitting at onlookers’ shoulders to make room for her so she could get down low and see.

  There’s no money for the rent so we sell the piano for less than half its worth. Later that night we miss the cats walking across the keys, waking us up to sometimes a lighthearted tink-tinking and other times a low and sinister roll from the darker range.

  “Not my parents’ piano!” my father yells the next day when he comes over to collect more of his things and then he yells “Jesus Christ” in front of the space where the piano used to be. Now there is floorboard that is shiny and looks new because it’s never been stepped on. I wonder if he can see himself yelling in the reflection of the shiny board, the way I can see him. His face is turning purple and the spots on his head are white compared to the rest. There’s a bulging vein in his neck that makes me stand back from him and go out the door for fear I’ll get sprayed when it bursts with a jet of his hundred-proof blood.

  Jody lets her mice climb her head and shoulders and holds out her arms so the mice can climb out to the ends of her fingers. She closes her eyes and smiles.

  “They tickle,” she says. “Want to try?”

  “Fuck no, get those mice away,” I say.

  She hums when she cleans their cage. She tosses the dirty wood shavings out the window.

  “For the wild mice,” she says. She coughs while she cleans, sending up the shavings from their cage.

  “You’ll infect them,” Louisa says. “They’ll die. You’ve given them mouse bronchitis, all right in humans but deadly in mice.”

  The phone rings. It’s Ma Mère, very drunk. She’s talking French to us, but our mother is not around to pass the phone to.

  “We don’t understand French,” we say and we hang up the phone. She calls back again, this time we yell it, “We don’t understand French!” and then we slam the phone down. When the phone rings a third time we don’t bother even saying hello, we just start yelling, “We don’t understand French.”

  We’re not sure if our brother’s stopped trying to kill himself. He still wears his blue silk robe opened at the chest all day long. He still goes out at night with his guitars and comes back late. My mother still clears a path for him and it seems as if she takes longer to do it now. Pushing all the chairs to the farthest they can go against the walls, even sweeping now as if afraid he might trip on a hairball and that might send him off running to get the gun and aim it at his head.

  He wears his Chinese blue silk dragon robe to the deli next door. He buys a bran muffin and hot coffee that he pours from the self-serve counter and drinks while standing there and then fills up his cup again.

  “Kung fu, grasshopper?” the deli man says and then holds out my brother’s nickel change in the palm of his hand. My brother doesn’t grab the coin from the deli man’s hand, instead he pops a fist up under the back of the guy’s hand and the nickel flies up and my brother catches his change.

  Jesús isn’t around so we have to walk up five flights of stairs. At each landing my brother stops and drinks more coffee and bites into his muffin. At the last landing he sits down and says he thinks he’ll finish it there. He asks me if I think someone threw me down all those flights of stairs would I die or would I just be crippled and have to have my piss and shit collect in some plastic bag.

  Upstairs our mother says, “Merde, all of you get out of this goddamned house,” and she asks for her purse and we get it for her and she opens her wallet, but there’s no money in there, so she digs at the bottom of her purse for coins and then empties her purse onto the floor. Little bits of tobacco from broken cigarettes float through the air. She sifts through it and finds some silver and she asks for our hands and she puts it in our palms, along with the bits of tobacco stuck to the coins. She waves us away and tells us to go buy ice cream in the park and to go play and have some fun. But we don’t leave. We’ve got work to do. Her artist friends have arrived. They’ve volunteered their driving and their cars and they line their cars with plastic drop cloths already splattered with dried paint. In the cars, we push our garbage bags far back into the ledges by the rear windows, so that from the outside the garbage looks so uncomfortable crammed up against the glass, and all the tops of the bags cinched with red ties look like puckered mouths pressed there and when the cars drive off me and my sisters feel the need to wave, saying so long to months of tuna cans we ate out of and milk cartons we drank from, months of cat litter we scooped, months of brittle ends trimmed from our long hair, months of nail clippings, months of overdue notices from the library, cut-off notices from the gas and electric, late notices and skip notices from school we never showed our mother, rotten things too, the potatoes sprouting white gnarled roots, the green mold curd in a cottage cheese container, mouse-bitten bread wrappers, the doodles done while talking on the phone, the phone itself, slammed too many times on Ma Mère, on our father, the blue, yellow, and red wires piggytail curled sticking out from the unscrewed mouthpiece as if all the exclamations and curses screamed over the line had broken the phone and snapped the wires.

  I go to see John who is low on hot dogs and he sends me to Gristede’s with ten dollars to buy some Hebrew Nationals. He says he hates doing it, the damn taste is not the same as Sabrett, and then he spends the afternoon watching the other hot dog men with binoculars, seeing how their business is doing compared to his own. John lifts me up and sets me on the light change box and perched there I watch the park. It’s a day when everything is clear and clean, there was a rain the night before and now the metal bench arms glisten and the leaves on the trees are bright green and the jungle gym bars shine and look cool to the touch. My horse, my stallion, has his head held high. His mane, lighter brown than his hide, seems to ripple like water going over a fall as he walks on the paths. “Look at me. Look at me,” I command silently in my head to the stallion, but he doesn’t look at me and the cop who rides him turns him around back through the crowd.

  * * *

  Outside police car sirens are wailing.

  “They’re coming for us, or just for me,” our mother tells us at home. She holds out her arms and crosses them at the wrists and closes her eyes. “Take me,” she says, “it’s got to be better than here.”

  “Take us too,” we say, and cross our wrists the way she does, waiting for the cuffs that never come. Then the siren sounds slowly fade. That night there’s a thunderstorm whose lightning bolts have come to pierce our skylight glass. We’re sure of it. We huddle by our mother.

  “You’re afraid of this? Oh, please,” she says.

  Jody wants to call Dad.

  “I’m sure he’s more afraid of this storm than you are. Go ahead, call him if you want to.” We don’t. The lights have gone off and all we can see is the lit end of our mother’s cigarette burning brighter when she inhales. It’s such a relief, the glowing red light and the sound of her breathing in and breathing out and the deep rattle we can hear within her, percolating at the bottom of her lungs.

  Rena goes to Greece and sends me postcards of the Acropolis with a big arrow she has drawn behind a pillar. She writes this is where she kissed a boy. Then there is another arrow and she writes thi
s is where Bonnie kissed a man. She phonetically writes out a Greek curse for me and I use it on my sisters and when I walk by the diner whose glass door I smashed. I use it on John to see if he knows it but he’s not listening, he’s busy cleaning the hot dog cart, dipping his apron corner into the hot hot dog water and then running the apron over the metal, over the handles, over the umbrella frill that’s dirty with grime, over the pole and the spokes on the wheels and the handle he pushes every morning when he comes to the park and every evening when he goes home.

  I grow the other tit. It too starts like a cyst, hard, and it moves like a quarter back and forth under my skin. My mother makes fun of my tits. She grabs at them and pinches them when I undress. “Bee-boop” she says when she pinches one and then the other. I hit her hands and slap them hard and push her away. I start to dress where she can’t see me, leaning over the radiator to hide myself when it’s cold, or changing in the shower stall when it’s not so cold. When I’m bored she tells me the French have a saying, she says I should go take my titties and dance. “That’s your saying?” I say.

  “That’s it,” she says.

  “Tell me more,” I say.

  “I can’t remember,” she says.

  “Yes, you can,” I say.

  “I was in love with my cousin. I would swim with my cousin in the ocean, naked of course, at night without moonlight. We would race to a buoy and then back. We swam so close side by side that sometimes we would touch. But it was dark, merde, who knew what we were touching. Something soft and fleshy, a body part we could hardly name. He was tall. My nose came right here,” and she touches me right at the arch of my ribcage. “I could fit my nose in there. He said either his ribs were made from my nose or my nose was made from his ribs because they seemed to fit so perfectly. Merde, he was a poet. He said we fit together like the world before the world was continents before the world broke up and drifted apart.”