He heard his father calling him from inside the shop. The last of the evening’s customers would have come and gone by now; it would be time to close up and make their own way home.
Everything in its appointed time. The gears of this world’s machinery meshed with the other’s.
He would have to eat something of what his mother put on the table, or pretend to, pushing things around on the plate with his fork, knowing all the while that he wasn’t fooling anyone. Just as he wouldn’t be fooling them later, when the summer night was finally dark, and he would walk past his mother and father in the living room, pulling on a thin sweater as he stepped toward the front door without saying a word. As though he were going to do nothing more than sit out on the stoop, to catch a cooling breeze. At his back he would be able to feel, as he did every night, his mother looking up from the sewing basket on her lap, his father’s glance over the top of the newspaper. Everybody knew—why he didn’t eat, where he was going, even when he would be back, in the cold pearl light before dawn.
He could hear his father rummaging through the cash register, scooping the coins out of the little trays, bundling up the dollar bills with a rubber band, dumping everything into the little drawstring bag that he’d carry home inside his coat. One night a week—not this night, but another—he’d sit at the bare kitchen table and sort out the bit that would be placed inside a simple white envelope, to be left on top of the shop’s counter. The widow’s husband used to come in to pick it up, with a smile and a nod and a few overly polite words that the butcher had acknowledged with a simmering anger in his eyes. Now one of the other Cracow dandies came in every week to pick up the money.
His father called his name again, louder. He drained the last weak taste of beer and pitched the empty bottle in among the waste bin’s red bones.
He pulled the apron down from the hook and walked inside with it in his hand.
“You were thinking about that silly animal, weren’t you? That toad.” She sat on the other side of the table from him, her bare elbows on the white cloth, holding a glass of wine in her hands, rubbing the corner of her brow with it. Her face was shining, the loose curls of her tied-up hair dampened against her neck and by her ears, from the steam off the pots on the stove. “That was stupid, it spoils your appetite.” The widow smiled, eyes half-lidded, as though there were some indefinable pleasure in watching him eat. “Think about things like that, a frog will grow in your belly and your eyes will bulge out. All the time.” She lowered the glass and sipped from it.
He looked up from the plate, not sure—never sure—if she was joking or not. They knew so many things, all women did; maybe that was one of them, a true thing. How would he know? Then he caught the lifting of one corner of her mouth. “Bullshit.”
“Bullshit, he says.” She gazed up at the ceiling. “I fix him dinner, he picks at it like I’m trying to poison him, then he says bullshit to me.”
Her gaze, still smiling, settled back upon him. “What would your mother say if she heard you talking like that?”
He had to wonder. Not about what his mother would say, but about the possibility of some conspiracy between her and the widow, a dealing in confidences that ran beneath the little feuds and hushed glares on the ordinary world’s surface.
“I don’t know.” No man did. He laid down his fork, a garlic clove and a bite of mutton—it hadn’t come from his father’s shop, he knew that at least—speared upon it. What they told each other, what all women shared amongst themselves, even the little girls with their jump ropes and knowing laughter. “I mean, I don’t know what she’d say.”
He looked down at the plate, at the speckled grease congealing, a scrap of bread as white as the underside of her breasts. As dark as she was, how shining black her hair and eyes . . . he’d laid his hand upon skin as pale as glass, beneath which the trembling of her veins could be seen, blue ink written on milk. He’d been rendered wordless by how that soft curve had fitted its cloudlike weight into his palm, an event foreordained by dreaming prophets.
Now he bit and chewed, laying the emptied fork back down, the motion of his jaws massaging the brain. To thoughts unbidden, still the blasphemous toad. He hadn’t even been in the church that day, but he’d heard—everyone had; they all knew—and he could imagine the woman’s cry as she’d fainted from the rail, the chalice rolling through the blood of Christ spilled upon the floor, as clearly as though he’d been in one of the pews. One of the altar boys had scooped up the toad to keep it from being trampled upon in the uproar or beaten to death with a broom-handle by the verger who saw Satan in every unusual thing. The toad was let go by the boys, with a degree of fearful reverence—it did, after all, count as some kind of miracle—in the tangled weeds behind the rectory.
Nothing that had happened had been the toad’s fault; everyone knew the ones responsible. The newcomer women had sat together, a long row of them wearing the old-fashioned black clothing in which they came to church, bits of their gold ornaments gleaming out through the stiff black lace at their wrists and throats. Through all the crying and shouting, they had passed a smile both secret and public amongst themselves. He knew that the widow-to-be had been there with her sisters and cousins, the grandmother with gold in her mouth as well, all of them; because they had known what was going to happen. All this over the altar flowers.
“Such a little thing,” she said. The widow gazed into her wineglass as though a mirror were there. “What a thing to worry about. And let it spoil your appetite.”
He swallowed, the lamb sticking in his throat for a moment. He hadn’t come here for dinner; he never had. He closed his eyes to see better, just what he was thinking of.
“You’re so stupid.” She said it with great affection, the way she might have said it to her husband when he was alive. She laid her hand on top of his beside the plate. “A toad—what’s that?”
He shook his head. That she could tell what he was thinking of, he couldn’t doubt. But never exactly; always a little shifted in focus, the circle around the bull’s-eye. He supposed that was another difference between men and women, one that made all the other differences bearable.
Not that toad, but the other. A story that was not even whispered about, but which everybody knew somehow. That the men knew something of, enough to keep their silence, and the women, even the little girls, knew everything. Because it dealt with the business of women, even more than the altar flowers had.
Eyes closed, he felt the soft weight of her hand upon his. The widow must have leaned closer to him, across the table; he could smell her scent, both her perfume of ancient roses and the other, that would taste of salt when he kissed her brow.
“You’re so pretty.”
He opened his eyes. “No, I’m not.”
“Don’t be mad. I just meant I like to look at you. That’s all.”
Her eyes were so dark, he could have fallen inside them. That was a scary enough thought—scary that he would want to—he had to turn his face away from hers.
“Why do you think about these things?” Her scolding voice touched his ear.
“If they make you feel so strange?” Then softer: “Better you should think about me.” Her fingers closed around his wrist. “Here.” She had undone the buttons of her throat. She pressed his palm against the skin; he could feel her pulse echoing among the small bones of his hand.