The Enlightened Woman of 28A

God, those days—I had nothing to do in the afternoons so I always went over to Francie’s apartment—she was enlightened, you know, and plus she had theseamazing Saltines.

The walls in that place looked like spread batter, like the whole place was a cake about to be baked, oozing nowhere.  She had this plaid couch, facing the little TV table, across from the kitchenette and the window, that she always sat on.  I’d come in and say “How's things, Francie?” and she’d say “What things” and I’d know that meant it was time to hit the fridge.

And God, did she have a fridge.  I tell you, the woman was a genius.

Ham: they don't even allow ham to be sliced this thin, legally, and yet it was.  Smoked and cured.  Wrapped in waxed paper, dripping pounds of it.  And a fresh loaf of multi-grain, ready to be sliced, spread with Hellman’s Real Mayonnaise, laced with butter lettuce.  And she just sat there on the couch.  I’d make three sandwiches like this, sometimes spreading them with that certain dijon which is so rustic it appears to be entirely seed.  If you wanted cheese on it, she had smoked gouda, marble jack, gruyere aged past ninety days, provolone, romano, feta with vegetables crumpled into it.  Soft uncured farmer’s cheese: you could taste the land.  And then almond-swirl ice cream with three glasses of milk the whole time.  And these little tiny pickles, and tiny little corns, that you could sometimes smuggle into the sandwiches along with some Eagle Nest pot-boiled potato shards.

“Francie, with this sandwich, I throw myself at your feet.  Francie, I am at your feet.” She had her hair up in a little black bun.  “Francie, look at where I am.”

“Where are you?” she’d say, and you know she was right, and I’d say “I know.  I know.  Do you want some water?” and she’d nod, and in twenty seconds there’d be a plastic pitcher, clean as crystal, overflowing with the kind of water that tastes like candy.  The pipes in the place were blessed, and she chugged the whole thing down, and never wiped the little dribble on her chin.

But at the same time, where were we?  When it came to my spells, my little moods, the woman had the patience of a saint.

Clarity, as I recall, generally suffered on Thursdays:

Francie’s wearing these brown corduroy slacks which are our favorite, and it’s been kind of overcast all day, and I’m standing in the kitchenette perplexing over this can of Meeter’s Kraut Juice, packaged in Milwaukee.  “Francie, where do you find this stuff?  Did you know they package this in Milwaukee?”

“No,” she says, and plus I can’t figure out what to do with the stuff so I find one of those tiny forks and open a tin of pickled herring tidbits in pure sour cream, and start hacking up an egg loaf.

“Nor did you know,” said I, “that these whole sacks of yellow samp corn were packaged in Bedford by the Lisbon Sausage Company.”

Who could tolerate this?

And she just stares at me, and didn’t know this, and no one needs to say anything: fat purple onions, robust sacks of cabbage, chives and dill, sorrel by the case, all stacked in the corner, holding the room down with their patient and seedling gravity.  Saving us from floating off to pumpkin-land, or God-knows-what.

I’m sitting by the window, waiting on a dish of cherrywood smoked mussels with salt and cottonseed oil, and it is overcast, like the sky has a gray lid, like we’re all on the inside of a watery can of tiny whole polar shrimp, waiting to be sprung open, smelling like the sea, like fog, like old metal.

The sky is gray, and the sidewalk’s gray, and the insurance building across the street is just kind of there; the Schorr building, no relation to Schorr’s new half-sours, but who would have noticed?  A little bit of trash blows by the curb, someone comes and scoops all the mail out of a blue box and puts it in a big cloth sack.  A nervous young man in a black beret wraps one arm stiffly around a tall, middle-aged, grief-stricken woman munching fries (vinegared, no doubt) from a paper cone.  The young man hails a cab and the couple disappears.

And just as I’m beginning to feel like even the walls in this place have turned gray as a fisherman’s fingers, the first waft of the cherrywoods seeps through the room, and there’s this girl on the sidewalk trailing behind her mother, because her mother’s in a hurry; and the mother’s got her right hand stretched out behind her, pulling this girl along the sidewalk, and the girl’s got a pink ice-cream cone in her right hand, and she’s kind of trying to get a lick and stumble along at the same time, and her hair, blonde hair, is blowing in her face and kind of getting in her mouth and in the ice-cream.  And just as I was thinking that the sidewalk was so flat, that everything was like paper, that you could have dropped these gigantic eggplants out the window just to see if they would thud on the pavement, just to see if there was pavement (and then go dice an elephant garlic while popping “premium” yogurt-raisins like—well, like garlic)—just as I was thinking this, suddenly there’s this bright pink blob right in the middle of the city!  This bubblegum cake-splash, right on the sidewalk, sending out little sugary pseudopods toward the cracks and crevices of our city, and not a single person around as far as I could see.

“Francie you gotta see this.”

“I know,” says Francie. “I do.”

I tell you, on a day like this, on any day: does it get this good?

And then we both dug in: fresh hot-cross buns: you could have shot somebody.

Why me?

I come to the door and like a mystery the door opens.  Not even two, and there’s fifteen-bean soup with the Hurst’s chicken seasoning packet already on the stove, but still. Sometimes I wonder, How long?  What happens when the day comes when the door doesn’t open?

“What,” says Francie.

And then it’s just me, alone with the garbage disposal, and all I can think about are the chunks of tuna and albacore and crabmeat, how they all start out in salt water, and get transferred to fresh water, but end up ground in the squat belly of this thing under the sink along with what? mounds of marinated mushrooms, scoopsful of sour cream macaroni.  Vats of soft-spread, gallons of Pepsi, a seemingly perpetual flow of T. Marizetti’s original slaw dressing.  All mashed into a morbid, wasteful paste reeking of pickled onions, Danish ham, and hot lupini beans that are no longer beans of any sort, seeping in a chunky trickle of loss through black, hidden pipes.

I think: What do other people eat?

This is how we’d do it: take a pan, throw in some of Antonio’s hot finger-peppers, dripping and golden like the Fingers of God, and not only those—sweet wonder-peppers, hot cherry-peppers, fried peppers with onions, beets like golfballs: we threw in everything.

Do you know, on afternoons like this, what white clam-sauce can do?

And once that got simmering, in went the nuggets.  In those days they came in star-shapes, shapes like little O’s—I cried.

Then the whole apartment filled with this cloud, vapors of peppers and nuggets rose in a sweet warm sentimental fog, around the sofa.

It was like we were lost.

“Francie, remember the old days?”

“Whose?”

“Precisely, my sugar-coated moth.  People who I used to be—and I know I was them.  I’m sure of it.  It can’t be helped.  Then there’s the folks I'll be in maybe three days, or on the first of April, or even five months from now.  I can see ‘em, the knuckleheads.  But who can they see?  Who can they remember?”

“Those things are all burning,” says France.

“You’re completely correct,” hurrying over to the frothing, misting pan, “on this occasion.” I turn off the heat and strain the whole mess over a bed of arugula.  “What can you do but eat?  How else would we even have a chance?  I’ll shed no tears this Tuesday, my prickly-pear.  Let us mark this moment, Francie, with the opening of a baklava ensemble.  Let us love it and expect nothing inside of it, even if there is baklava, and kiss it goodbye.” I was setting up a tray with cakes, parfaits with nuts of all types, macaroons, sprinkled cheesecakes, cupcakes so small you could pop two in your mouth at once and your head would glow.  “We shall kiss it goodbye Francie, and we can always have lobster sauce tomorrow.”

“We’re out of lobster sauce.”

“Tomorrow, Francie.  We’re always out of lobster sauce tomorrow.”

And I think I had her there, I have to admit.

So that was how the afternoons went by, you know: the kiddies drop their ice cream and someone comes and cleans it up or the rain washes it into the gutter where it mixes with other ice-cream; those little elliptical cheese-wrappers pile up in the wastebasket; the sun plops like a hot peach into a sea of green jello; the moon waxes like a pearl in its chilly oyster.

Then one Monday around four I’m trying the knob, a red mesh bag of baby asparagus tips dangling from the other hand, and it’s locked.

Which doesn’t make any sense.

So I knock on the door, just under the little plaque that reads “28A,” and stand in the hallway—and nothing happens.  I knock some more, and wait for five minutes, and the carpet is such a dark red that it soaks up all the ceiling light and the hallway becomes a deep, tired dusk, and in my socks I trod back downstairs and sit in a chair by my own window and wait.

Later on I go back up and try again.  Imagine me, standing in the hallway, for a very long time, with only this door.  Because that’s what I remember.  And nothing.  I tried a bunch of times. 

Each morning I woke up on a bed, my bed, and looked around the room, and went to the window to open the blinds.  I looked down at the world and saw a blackbird standing in the middle of the street, eating at a small dead thing.  Not so much as hopping out of the way for traffic.  Cocking one eye up from the meal at the Cadillacs which nearly flattened it: one eye on the meat, and one on the cars.  Risking death for his dinner: what a hungry, arrogant bird!

Times were bad.  I’d stand at the refrigerator, open it, look in, and close it, but nothing was different.  (Save a package of popcorn with herb garlic butter, which I burnt.)  Two mornings later I found fudge frosted Toastettes in the oven and they weren’t even cooked or anything.  I was tormented by a phantom odor of anise.

I listened at the door of 28A.  I listened until it seemed I heard the rustle of a page, the pit-pat of strange bootheels on the kitchen linoleum.  I conceived a strange pair of legs, shuffling about in the silent preparations of a clandestine meal.  At night, on the edge of sleep, I thought I detected vague unhomelike smells, the fumes of weird half-baked foods, seeping down through the walls into my bedroom. 

I stopped opening the window.  I sat in front of the fridge in a chair, until it seemed warm, like it was unplugged, and then maybe ate some applesauce.  I went outside one time but there was nothing to see.  The bird and his dinner were gone.  I tied the blinds shut with little pieces of string. 

Looking over the newspapers in the dark, running an unsteady finger up and down certain columns, I watched for names, the name, because no one had heard anything. 

I think the electricity ran out. 

It’s a sad thing to ruin a good cup of tea.  Whoever has had the misfortune of squeezing some lemon into the cup after having already added the milk, knows this.  The uniform oak-colored tea suddenly shatters into many small particles of congealed milk, swirling and twisting in the naked, clarified liquid.  The warm, benign soup has broken up into tiny undrinkable bits.

My auntie Eunice died when I was six.  My father brought me along to sort through her house, and while we were there an old lady showed up.  She said she was an old friend of Eunice, and poked around a bit.  I guess this friend had been looking in the crisper, because she came into the living room holding a small potato in each crooked claw and said,

“Do you think it would be all right if I took these?”

O, to think of those blind, many-eyed spuds, those dirty little lurkers—

I couldn’t help myself.  I was only hungry.  There’s this little Polish diner across the street (I’d seen it out the window) so I picked up the phone and dialed and then hung up.  Then I picked up and dialed again and placed an order for delivery:

Boiled Ham w/ Swiss Cheese
Fresh Brisket
“Unbeatable” Texas Burger
Twin Burger
Special Burger
Tunafish Salad
Blintzes (1) w/sour cream
Chicken Francaise
Spinach Pie
Fish Cake
Green Salad
Cobb Salad
Dinner Roll (2)
Slaw
Tea

Twenty minutes pass, maybe as few as fifteen (Lushko’s runs a tight ship), all the while me curled up on the sofa giggling to myself, holding my ankles and twisting them so the joints pop.  So awful!  And such a bland hoax—I thought “slaw” would be a dead giveaway, but sure enough the box on the wall buzzes and my heart swells like a Japanese plum—I press the door buzzer, then wait, nerves popping and firing while someone carries the bag (or several bags) up the six flights of steps.  I repeat to myself over and over in silence, in my head: I’m not here.  There is no difference between my being or not being here, because the door is locked, and no one can ever prove anything!

The knock comes.  Rap-a-tap.  I nearly wet myself with loathing and joy.

A pause.  I repeat to myself, No difference, I'm not here, no difference, as the confused Slav knocks with mounting vigor.

There was a sour candy in my pocket, and I sucked that as I listened.

But the next morning I woke up to an odorless silence, and regretted what I had done.

They’re sick, just masochistic really, hopeful whims.  But I can’t be blamed: I was famished, undone—nearly bashed my own head in with a Bridgeford pepperoni stick.

I wander by the door on a Sunday, and pause.

The knob feels sick, like a human hand, and in that moment I feel an overwhelming sadness, like pale, unsniffed mushrooms—but it turns! and there she is, reading the Digest, curled up on the sofa like nothing ever happened and I say “Francie!  What does this mean?  You were dead—you are dead, I mean, it just doesn’t matter does it?  It’s like you were never there, you never have been and here you are!” and suddenly for some reason there are deviled eggs all over the place, I mean everywhere, tears are streaming down my cheeks like chicken broth and these eggs are just raining down from the ceiling, she’s sitting there with the things falling into her lap.  “What are you reading?” I say and she says, “I don't know.”

“Exactly!” I cry, stuffing the things into my pockets, “it’s like the passage in Isaiah where God makes him eat the scroll and he has no clue what it says but it tastes like honey, he loves every bite of it!” And she even looks up and smiles; I swear her lips were full of marshmallows, these little bits of moon and I could have died on the floor, I think I did die, in a heap of perfectly solidified yolk, whites bouncing off my thighs.

“It’s like,” I tell Francie, stuffing my cheeks, wiping the paprika from the corners of my lips with a gratified thumb, “the Land of the Rice-Eaters, you know, and all they do is eat rice, and that’s how they become enlightened, for them it’s all they have to do—”

And I swear to this day I’ve never seen her do this and probably never will again, but she looks up suddenly and smiles that moon-tooth smile, even wider, and shakes her finger at me and says “No—not all: the meaning is in the digestion!”

Those days.  What did we ever do?

“Can I ask you a question, Francie?  Where were you the whole week?  I mean where was your self, the self that I know” and she’s looking back down at theDigest.

“Toledo,” she says.

We’re ankle deep in the eggs, they just keep coming.  A soft rain pelts against the windows.  Celery fills my nostrils, we’re on a cloud.

“Goddamn Francie,” I say.  “Goddamn, this tastes good.”