S
ix-thirty A.M., and a drunken hand (my hand) under instructions from a drunken brain (my brain) crabbed over to the phone next to the bed, lunged for the receiver, which it flipped off the hook, and then felt for the last automatic-dial button, marked BOBBY D., which the drunken index finger (mine) then pressed. As the phone rang, the hand lifted the receiver from the floor, while the drunken brain thought of Caroline Crowley, the most beautiful woman I had never fucked, while the ears, not drunk, waited for Bob Dealy, the overnight guy on the city desk, a man so cadaverous that he looked like he drank gasoline and ate what the cat sicked upâwhich perhaps was to be expected if you spent each night for twenty years sitting in a newsroom listening to the police radio, making calls to the precincts, reading a dozen papers from around the country, eating doughnuts and, with them, no small amount of newsprint.
“Desk, Dealy.”
“What you got, Bobby?”
“Aah, Porter, we have a collision between a taxi and a philosopher on lower Broadway. We got the recurrent gentleman with no name supine in an alley in the one-oh-four, and aah, in the seven-oh, we got two young pharmaceutical executives of the Nubian persuasian shot in the head. But it didn't bother them much. In Brooklyn we got somebody who robbed a bank with a jack-hammerâtore out the night-deposit
box. In Midtown we got two philosophers who tried to ride a fire truck that was making a run. We alsoâhold onâ”
Now the drunken brain discerned other voices. Lisa and the kids were downstairs. Spoon and bowl. All kids love cereal. Love her. Good with the kids. Looks good enough, swims a mile every other day, could screw me dead anytime she wants. Loves it from behind. Why? The action goes in farther, among other reasons.
Loves it.
Don't throw the eggie! Mommy, I can't eat my cereal. Sweetie, just eat it. But
Tommy
didn't eat his cereal. He's eating eggs, sweetie. She'd nursed the kids so long they ruined her tits. Sucked them
off,
basically. Wan juicee. Want some juice? Juicee! Wan juicee, Mama. Eat your cereal, Sally.
“Yeah, Porter, also we got a diving championâ”
I opened my eyes. “What bridge?”
“You sound funny. You sick?”
“Nah. What bridge?”
“Brooklyn.”
“Anything?”
“Construction guy,” Bobby wheezed. “Broke his leg at work, couldn't buy the groceries no more, girlfriend went shopping elsewhere. Guy died of a broken heart before he hit the water. When they pulled him out he was still wearing his hat.”
“Come on.”
“Hey, I'm not lying.”
“Guy jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge and his hat stays on?”
“I'm telling you, the police said his hat was still on.”
“Come on, Bobby.”
“Hey, call them yourself.”
“If it was a
hat,
it must have been a football helmet.”
“No, it was a Yankees cap.”
“He had duct tape keeping that hat on!”
“No.”
“Then it was fucking glued on his head, Bobby!”
“No.”
“All right. You saving me a good one?”
“Matter of fact, Iâwait, sorry againâhold on.”
I closed my eyes, listened to the chaos downstairs. You want more Cheerios on it? Juicee! Juicee! Yes, Tommy. Here. Eat the eggie. Na! Mommy cooked them for you. My wife was a fucking saint. I was lucky to be married to her. Man sees a peach-colored gown, gets an erection. Who cares if her husband got run over by a bulldozer? Fuck me. I was a cur with a hard-on. Lift up your head, I thought, see how it feels. Head just not right. Should drink more often, get used to it. I'd given some kind of cheesy speech. She'd seen right through it. Pick
up
the cereal, sweetie, please sit up,
please,
Sally, sit up this minute. I can't. Sit up, you're spilling your cereal all
over
theâI said SIT UP! All right, that's
it,
young lady, get down, now! Are we protecting your virtue or mine? Wan eggie! You just
threw
your eggie! Too coal! Too cold? Ya. I'll heat it up. Mommy, when people die, do their bodies get all rotten? Who told you that? Lucy Meyer. Lucy Meyer said that? Wan eggie! Yes, Tommy. Sweetie, when people die, they still have a spirit. What is spirit? It's, uhâhere, sweetie. Too ha! It's
not
too hot! What is a spirit, Mommy? Blow on it, sweetie. Too ha! Just blow on it. Bwow? No column was due today, I'd just make some calls, mess around in the office, pay bills. Get
up,
you fucker.
Still
drunk. A spirit is ⦠it's your
heart,
sweetie, it's who you are. But Mommy, when you die, does your spirit fly home to God? Who told you that? I can't remember. Did Josephine tell you that? Fucking jig baby-sitter preaching voodoo Catholicism. Sweetie, do you have poopie? Nah. I think you have poop in your diapee. Make a few calls, get the mortgage check into the mail. No poo diapee! Forget the woman, who you may now remember as the most beautiful woman
you never fucked.
Let's get down, sweetie, you ate most of the eggie. No poo! I think you have poopie. Eyes blue as a mailbox. You're still drunk but I think you can ⦠get up, do it, you can do it, I can do it, I was doing it, I was sitting up, back in the game, and Bobby was back on the line: “Porter, I do got a woman shot last night on the Upper West Side in a Chinese laundry. Maybe the boyfriend.”
“What's good about it?” I asked, squinting into the sun from the window.
“Died holding her wedding dress.”
I swung my feet off the side of the bed. Uglier every year, the ingrown nails permanent. “What did she do?” I said.
“Accountant, age thirty-two.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Insurance guy, age fifty-six.”
“She went for the older guys.”
“Maybe she had a daddy thing going.”
“I can hear you eating the doughnut, Bobby.”
“Yeah.”
“You've got to start washing the ink off your hands!”
“The coffee cancels it out.”
I sighed. “They know where he is?”
“No, but they're looking.”
I stood, and heard a Froot Loop crunch under my foot.
“TV do it last night?”
“Happened too late.”
“The wedding dress, just standing there, boom?”
“Yeah. I got the wedding dress bit just for you.”
“Could be good.”
“It's good. It's the romantic angle. You always love the romantic angle.”
While I was dressing I heard Josephine come in downstairs, shake snow off her boots. She had a key to the gate in the wall. Good morning, how's my little friend? I ha eggie! He just finished his egg. Josephine is an immense black woman from Haiti. We found her one day when Lisa was seven months pregnant with Sally and had called a cleaning service. Josephine arrived, huge and deferential and embarrassed by the girlish blue uniform that she was forced to wear. She cleaned for us once a week a few times and I only caught a glimpse of her before I left for work, but she struck me immediately as exhausted and too oldâsomewhere in her late fortiesâto be cleaning houses. That second Saturday I went out and bought a new vacuum cleaner and put it upstairs in
the hall closet so that Josephine would not have to carry the heavy Electrolux upstairs. Then we asked what she was being paid from the cleaning service and it turned out that her bosses, a couple of clever professional white women in their thirties, were keeping almost half of her salary. We were paying the service ten dollars an hour and Josephine was getting $5.20 an hour,
before
taxes. So we called the service and said that we were canceling because the baby had been born. They asked whether we were dissatisfied with Josephine, and we said oh no, not at all, absolutely wonderful woman. Then we hired her for ten dollars an hour and paid her directly so that she got to keep all the money. After that she came in to help with the children and gradually became full-time, arriving at eight and leaving at five. There was a period of adjustment, for Josephine is, after all, from an island culture; on the way home from the playground, she would pluck plants growing in the park and cook them up in strange potions on the stove in the afternoons, mixing in a little of this or that from the local botanica. Many of these concoctions were later taken home and forced upon poor LaTisha, she of the hairy bottom, in an effort to correct certain sulky teenage behaviors. But sometimes Josephine left her potions in unlabeled jars in our refrigerator; they announced themselves by their greenish tinge and swirl of worrisome sediment, but one night that first summer I woke up in the middle of the night and, looking for something cold to drink, opened the refrigerator and tossed back a jar of what looked like iced tea; it went down blandly, but in ten minutes my mouth was full of saliva and I felt an odd desire to eat uncooked rice. Another time Lisa came home early and Tommy, then eleven months, had his head covered with bits of wet tissue paper. For a moment Lisa was shocked, but as Tommy seemed perfectly well, she only casually asked why, and Josephine explained that Tommy had been suffering from the hiccups and that this was the cure.
Yes, it was all very quaint and multicultural at first, with my wife and I congratulating ourselves for “saving” Josephine, but the reality was that an oppressed, uneducated black woman arrived each day wearing sweatpants and sneakers.
And by now I was tired of seeing her. I was tired of her goodness, her uncomplaining suffering. I was tired of her
poverty.
I hated this in myself and felt guilty about it and would hide our pay stubs and bank statements and retirement-account statements and anything else that proved the financial discrepancy between Josephine and us. And she never let on that the condition of her family was akin to a rickety shack perched high above a river frothing away at its banks; she herself was dependable and clean-living (in sort of a starched Catholic way, such that I suspected she'd never been much fun, ever), but she'd had a couple of different husbands and occasionally made reference to a cousin or a nephew
who got hisself into all kind of trouble,
and then she shook her head as if someone was going to try to make her feel bad about that, too, and she just wouldn't,
she just wouldn't do it.
I'd driven her home once into the Bronxâkids on the street selling crack, big radios, the whole scene. Her husband worked for the food service in a nursing home; he was a huge man, at least six foot five, great of belly, great of blood pressure, too, and when I met him I knew he could crush me instantly, take my little white hand and break it like a handful of dry sticks. But when we shook hands he smiled deferentially and his fingers barely contracted against my own; it was not politenessârather, I was his wife's white boss and so not to be accidentally insulted or intimidated by an overly firm handshake.
Now I was standing in the bathroom, listening to Josephine get Sally ready for school. We took turns walking Sally to school. Then I heard the little feet on the stairs.
“Daddy?” Sally burst into the bathroom, holding one of her Barbies by the leg. “Why are you peeing?” she asked.
“I need to.”
“Why?”
“Why do you
think?”
“Because you just do!”
“Right.”
“Boys don't have to wipe when they pee.”
“That's true.”
She followed me into the bedroom. “Daddy?”
“Sweetie?”
“Daddy, do dead people all die lying down?”
“I don't know, Sally. That's kind of a strange question.”
“Lucy Meyer says all dead people when they die, they have their tongues sticking out”
“I don't think so.”
“Lucy Meyer told me, in school.”
“Has Lucy Meyer seen a lot of dead people?”
“Lucy says they all die with their eyes shut, and ifâand if they forget to shut them, then bugs eat the eyeballs.”
“Don't worry about it, sweetie, okay?”
Lisa called Sally downstairs, then came up, carrying the day's newspapers, which pile up one by one outside the gate each morning and get stolen if we don't retrieve them promptly.
She was dressed for work. It's always amazed me that she puts on stockings and perfume to cut people open. “I thought you might like to know that tragedy has struck Sally's class,” she said.
She handed me a notice on the school's stationery, signed by Sally's two pre-kindergarten teachers, serious young women adept at dealing not only with three- and four-year-olds, but perhaps as importantly, with their mothers and fathers.
Dear Parents:
We are writing to share some sad news with you. As you may have heard, Banana Sandwich, our class guinea pig, suffered an injury to her leg, after which her condition deteriorated. When the vet examined her, she diagnosed a neurological problem. We were informed that this damage could cause Banana to begin biting herself and others. The vet strongly suggested euthanasia, and after careful consideration, we agreed. Banana was taken to the vet's office last Thursday afternoon.
We did not share all of the details with the children.
We told them that Banana had to be taken to the vet's office because she was sick, and that she died while she was there. We will share some books on the death of a pet and talk about our questions and feelings about Banana. If you have any questions, please let us know.
Patty and Ellen