Today, the two of us were walking home. We had been out from sunup taking in his wheat. The scythes, we left in a shack by the field. Our feet were bare. The heat, even now, at twilight, was incredible. We were starved and thirsty when we reached the final slope and the bell tower in town came into view, far off. Then we were hopping downhill, along the path, going faster, then faster.
Then we were running, both of us. The stones pricked my feet but it didn’t matter, we were running. When at the foot of the hill we hit the main road, we were at a sprint, the both of us, shoulder-to-shoulder. It was impossible to go any faster. But then I did.
I pulled away, breathing in the dust. I was young and fast. I was alone in front. My determined feet were small and weightless. The ground gave out under me.
13
Mrs. Marini and Patrizia drove downtown to pick up Lina at the train station on New Year’s Eve. They walked across Public Square and into Erie Station Tower and rode the elevator to the secondary basement, where toilet paper and butterscotch candy were stuck to the concrete and everywhere they looked, colored people of every age and tint crowded the platform, making them both anxious to get out of there. The block signals down the track turned green, and a locomotive arrived from Youngstown with what seemed to be actual blood and animal parts on the cowcatcher. Another train pulled in, from Baltimore, and an aged colored woman stepped into the gangway, holding her hat to her head. Then she seemed to see it was not the way out, went back inside the car, and emerged a minute later at the side door, goggling at the throng on the platform, tremulously touching her hat as though to reassure herself it was still there, until another old colored woman called to her and rushed to her and took her bag. A tall white woman, biting her lip, wearing a blue coat with a mink-neck collar, was engrossed in a movie magazine, on the back cover of which a grinning, mustachioed Western actor testified that Luckies Taste Better. Somebody tried to sell them a chocolate bar. What appeared to be a perfectly good man’s boot stood upright, shiny, in a rubbish can.
Earlier that day. Mrs. Marini paid the undertaker and bought herself a Danish pastry at Rocco’s on the way home. Once inside, she kept her long johns on and wore a stocking hat in place of her hair. She couldn’t remember a chill that had lingered so long and defied so many means of throwing it off. She made herself wear a shawl — and she despised shawls. The urge to wear a shawl is the body’s advice that you had better get your paperwork in order and unhide the petty cash so your heirs won’t miss it. She drank half a gallon of steaming water with lemon, but it passed through her too quickly to do its work.
She wrapped an afghan over the shawl. (Abjection; serfdom.) She exercised by pacing from the kitchen to the parlor to the bedroom to the parlor to the pantry, up the stairs, down the stairs, down again into the cellar to shovel more coal into the furnace. Back upstairs. (Her hip! Suffering!) Her face was gray and her fingers were blue. She was determined not to let a certain party see her like this.
She positioned a chair over the register in the kitchen floor. She opened the dictionary on the credenza. She rubber-banded the crossword to the cutting board in her lap. The pen was in hand. The clock said 10:17. She gave herself twenty minutes.
Work fast. Scan for capital letters in the middle of clues, indicating facts, indicating only one possible answer. Capital of Yemen. Dog of Thin Man. Joseph of Gori. No loafing now—Sanaa, Asta, Stalin—or you missed the point.
An enchanted moment came, an erotic flash, at fourteen across: eight letters; second-to-last letter an a; the clue, Baloney.
She was a naked woman reaching into a tree, plucking a plum from the branch.
Claptrap.
She had trouble with thirteen down: ten letters, An image that bleeds through. She had nti in the middle. Last letter, o. What were they talking about? Then pe at the beginning. Was it pentimento? She consulted the dictionary. She had not known it counted as an English word.
On filling in the last letter, with two minutes to spare, she felt the familiar triumph. She had defeated the puzzle writer. But triumph was succeeded immediately by hopelessness. She often felt this when the puzzle was done. The paint repented and gave up the image it was hiding. The crossword faded, and underneath was the day’s agenda. None of this was helping her color.
She needed a plan.
It came to her.
She would stew herself. She left her hat on the hair of one of the plaster heads in the lavatory downstairs. She took a detective novel with her to the bath and sunk into the tub. She refreshed the water every ten minutes, draining a little and refilling, reading the book cover to cover, until she could have peeled her toenails out of their slots. Sweat stung her eyes.
She tossed the book onto the toilet seat and pulled herself to a standing position with the rails Vincenzo had, to her zealous and futile protestations, bolted into the tile. Microscopic machinists had tunneled into the flesh of her leg, filed the ball and socket of her hip to a glassy finish, and painted them with Vaseline. She could’ve run a marathon, but she had more pressing business. Her wristwatch on the toilet seat said it was 3:03. She toweled off the mirror and observed her moist, bald head. Her victory over the cold was absolute. She could’ve fried an egg in her palm, but she had business.
She dried herself. She had to get a move on. Patrizia and Ciccio were due any minute to pick her up and go to the station.
She pinned her wig, an extravagant black pouf, to what was left of her hair. She had the smallest possible moment of regret while putting in her earrings. What with so many years of metal dragging at her earlobes, the holes weren’t piercings anymore, they were dragged-down gashes in the cartilage. Had she known she would live this long, she would’ve waited to pierce her ears until she was fifty. But, then, if she’d waited to pierce her ears, Nico would never have had occasion to buy her all these earrings to begin with.
Very good. Her hair was on straight, her taupe rayon stockings were clipped up, her color was high. The image in the mirror showed its teeth. She saw a spark at the edge of her mind. It was an idea, at first distant and indistinct, and it was shooting toward her like an arrow in a dream. It was a hideous idea, but she was not culpable for having conceived it, because it had attacked her from the outside. She hadn’t thought it up, it had thought itself onto her; however, she could not help but recognize that it was indisputably true. The idea was that she would outlive them all.
Her purse was black. Her dress, of course, was black; all of her dresses were black. The open-toed mules she picked from the closet — she was impervious to cold now, she wanted to look harumscarum and regal at the same time, the queen of Hell — were black. She hadn’t set foot outside of her house in any other color since 1915. She hadn’t set eyes on Lina, her lamb, her little lover Lina, since 1946. She painted her face up strikingly. She sharpened her cheek-bones into scimitars. She didn’t want to look good. She wasn’t vain, merely. She wanted to look terrifying. She practiced the countenance with which she would greet Lina on the platform. Was she more frightening with her arms folded or at her sides? The sneer, she found, was less effective than closing the lips tight and dilating the nostrils. Don’t show the teeth until you are moving in for the kill.