“Look. I’m not one of them George Wallace folks. I think Negroes have a place. I do. At work, in schools, all the same rights as whites. But you people need to work on your vocabulary. You hear yourself? You keep repeating the same words. I fought right next to a Negro in Korea who ended up court-martialed for something he didn’t do, because when the judge wanted his story he couldn’t say anything but yes, sir and no, sir. That’s why we’ve got so many of your kind in jail. I don’t mean anything personal by it. I heard they’re closing down Alcatraz next month and there’s hardly a Negro in there, and those are the worst criminals this country’s got. That’s a credit to your race. You ought to be proud.”
The hell is he talking about? Alcatraz? These janitors must think he’s a nitwit. The second he’s gone, this restroom is going to explode with their laughter. Sweat pours down his face. The chamber is closing in on him, and it must be three hundred degrees. He nods, sees the bag of hard candy, swipes it, fishes inside. He didn’t wash his hands first. Janitors, of all people, will notice that. Disgusting, disgusting. He shoves a green ball into his mouth. Gives the staring women one last look.
“Either of you ladies care for a candy?”
But the green ball is like a horse’s bit. He can’t make out a word of his own question. Oh, they’ll laugh, all right. Fucking janitors. Fucking everyone. He’ll need to be tougher on the scientists, not flub it like he flubbed this. Occam’s no different than the Josefina. He’ll make sure everyone understands that it’s Strickland in charge. Not David Fleming, the Pentagon’s flunky. Not Dr. Bob Hoffstetler, the benign biologist. He turns on his heel. It’s slick. He hopes it’s soapy water, not urine. He bites down on the candy so he won’t hear his own wet footsteps and grabs the Howdy-do off the sink. The bulb of blood, it probably falls. And the janitors will wipe it away. But they’ll remember it. Remember him. Disgusting, disgusting.
15
STRICKLAND’S OFFER OF candy only adds a sick sweetness to the revolting scene. Elisa lost her taste for candy at the age when most children would murder for it. Even the sugary pies Giles forces upon her at Dixie Doug’s scrape at her throat. She recalls the origin of her distaste from a cringer’s perspective, gawking up at adult gorgons every bit as inscrutable as Strickland. In the eyes of these early caretakers, Elisa wasn’t handicapped; she was stupid and recalcitrant. The orphanage had the darling name of the Baltimore Home for Wee Wanderers, but those who lived there slashed it to “Home,” ironic given the attributes that storybooks always associated with home. Security. Safety. Comfort. Joy. Swing sets. Sandboxes. Hugs.
The older kids could show you outbuildings where you could find equipment stenciled with Home’s prior title: the Fenzler School for the Feeble-Minded and Idiotic. By the time of Elisa’s arrival, children whose files would have once encumbered them as mongoloids, lunatics, or defectives were gathered under the wings of retarded, slow, or derelict. Unlike the Jewish and Catholic orphanages down the block, Home’s mission was to keep you alive, if barely, so that when you hit the street at eighteen, you could find a menial job serving your superiors.
Home’s children might have united, just as Occam’s janitors might have united. Instead, the paucity of food and affection circulated cruelty like a cough, and each child knew her or his rivals’ pressure points. You were sentenced to Home because your folks landed in the poorhouse? You’re Breadless Betty. Your parents are dead? You’re Graveyard Gilbert. You’re an immigrant? You’re Red Rosa, Harold the Hun. Elisa never knew the real names of some children until the day they were pushed out the door.
Elisa’s own nickname was “Mum,” though housemothers knew her better as “22.” Numbers tidied matters in the untidy world of unwanted children, and each child had one. Every item assigned to you had your number on it, making it easy to ascribe fault when something of yours manifested where it didn’t belong. Ostracized children like Mum were luckless. Adversaries had only to wad her blanket under their coat, toss it outside in the mud, and watch as the “22” on the tag was identified and Mum was assigned her discipline.
Punishment could be delegated to any housemother, but the Matron herself often liked to dole it out. She didn’t own Home, but it was all she had. As early as age three, Elisa intuited that the Matron saw Home’s unruly brood as reflections of her unstable mind, and to keep the children in order was to keep herself sane. It didn’t work. She’d laugh hard enough to make the littlest ones cry, then break into raging sobs that would further alarm them. She carried a sapling switch for the backs of legs and arms, a ruler for knuckles, and a bottle of castor oil for forced swallowing.
Treacherously, the Matron also carried candy. Because she depended so much on the feedback of pleading and sniffling, she smited silent Mum above all others. An incorrigible little monster, she called her. Secretive, up to something. Even worse were the opposite days when the Matron, her gray hair ribboned into obscene pigtails, cornered Elisa to ask if she wanted to play dollies. Elisa would go through the motions, terrified as the Matron asked if any bad little girls were wetting their beds. That’s when the candy came out. It was okay to tell her secrets, the Matron said. Just point out the kids, so I can fix them. It felt to Elisa like a trap. It was a trap. Same as Mr. Strickland, crinkling his cellophane bag. One way or the other, offered sweets, all of them, were poison.
Elisa got older. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. She sat alone at soda fountains, apart from the other girls, and listened to them talk about drinking alcohol; her glass of water tasted like soap. She heard them talk about dance classes; she had to freeze her hands on her ice-cream bowl so she wouldn’t pound her fists. She heard them talk about kissing. One girl said, “He makes me feel like somebody,” and Elisa dwelled upon it for months. What would feeling like somebody feel like? To suddenly exist not only in your world, but someone else’s as well?
One of the places to which she trailed other girls was the Arcade Cinema Marquee. She’d never been inside a theater. She bought a ticket and waited to be asked to leave. She spent five minutes choosing a seat, as if it might determine her whole life’s path. Maybe it did: The movie was The Yearling, and though she and Giles would poke fun at its schmaltz years later on television, it was the religious experience she’d never had inside a pew. Here was a place where fantasy overwhelmed real life, where it was too dark to see scars and silence wasn’t only accepted but enforced by flashlight-armed ushers. For two hours and eight minutes, she was whole.
Her second film was called The Postman Always Rings Twice, and it was a fleshly, fervid froth of sex and violence, a nihilism for which nothing in Home’s library, nothing adults had told her, nothing girls gossiped about had prepared her. World War II was only lately finished, and Baltimore’s streets bustled with clean-cut soldiers, and she looked differently at them on the way home, and they, she thought, looked differently at her. Her interactions, however, were failures. Young men had little patience for flirtations made from fingers.
By her own estimate, she sneaked into the Arcade roughly one hundred and fifty times over her last three years at Home. This was before the theater’s downturn; before plaster began dropping from the ceiling; before Mr. Arzounian started running films 24-7 in desperation. It was her education—her real education. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman gasping for air inside each other in Notorious. Olivia de Havilland writhing away from the madwomen of The Snake Pit. Montgomery Clift wandering through curtains of dust in Red River. Elisa was finally nabbed by an usher while slinking into Sorry, Wrong Number, but by then it didn’t matter. She was a fortnight from what Home had deemed as her eighteenth birthday. She’d be booted out and forced to find a place, and a way, to live. Terrifying but also sensationaclass="underline" She could buy her own tickets, look for people to gasp against, or writhe from, or just wander among.