Fragile (3 page)

“Hang on a sec!” The stairs are still narrow and steep. At the landing you can go either way, towards the front or the back, but on Elmer's side you can only go one way through the living room and she's ringing again. “Hold on!” She's not patient, young and wanting her man. The children are standing behind her, their faces hiding and cut into slats by the venetian blinds, jiggle the lock and the door opens with a catch. She steps through the doorway and into the dank living room, not what she would consider impoverished but slightly musty somehow, the furniture must be fifty years old most of it, antiques in all likelihood. Maybe some of it is worth something, if the old lady ever had the inclination to sell. A flattened recliner floats in the middle of the room aimed at the television, flanked by a teetering oval end table draped by a lace doily stained with yellow arcs, empty cans of diet soda, and a half-eaten bag of corn chips. Holly envisions the hours the old lady must spend slouched in the tan nappy chair soaking up afternoon soap operas, her body sinking into the plush overstuffed fabric, slowly
becoming one with it—as soft and pliable as it is. But Amelia it seems has dressed up for this occasion. Her hair is of course looking much better since this afternoon, trimmed and a better fit for her head, a long head with cheeks that have become jowly over the years, loose flesh hanging and drooping a bit as you would expect, the cheeks spotted with bright patches of rouge Amelia has applied. Her eyebrows have been tended to carefully, plucked and primed to a fine cambering line over each glimmering eye. She has on what Holly would consider to be nothing less than a pant suit constructed from acres of pastel blue synthetic fabric, a relic from the seventies or early eighties—what a woman from that prehistoric age would wear for a day at the office, clearly dragged out of the closet as a means of putting on her best for Holly and the girls.

Holly extends her hand tentatively, and for the second time this day Amelia takes it. They don't shake in the direct one-to-one grasp of two businessmen. Instead, it is more a brief holding of hands, the way women do. The grip from Amelia is taut, more full of feeling for her, but the bones are still there, still swimming it seems beneath the thin mottled skin she felt before, blue veins surging in gnarled meandering channels across the top of the hand. Holly lets go first, but she tries to convey through her touch a multiplicity of meanings: how much this help means to her, how grateful she is and also how hard it is to leave her girls here.

“Come inside girls,” Amelia says, reaching to the bureau that crouches along the wall by the door. “I have a treat for each of you.”

Startled and enticed by the prospect of what the old lady hides in her hands, Jenny and Zoe move towards her with furtive shy steps, their heads downturned but peering at the two arms hiding something behind her broad backside.

“Pick one,” she says, challenging. “Go ahead.” Jenny, being the oldest, after a tick of hesitation, steps forward and points to Amelia's left arm. It comes out from behind her and the hand opens to reveal a pale blue ball the size of a large marble, speckled with pinpricks and swirls of white, a miniature model of an earth-like planet. Jenny stares at it, not quite knowing what to do.

“Now you. You must be Zoe. The youngest.”

She nods her head almost imperceptibly and points to the other arm, as if she still has a choice in the matter. The right hand appears and releases another swirling blue marble, nearly identical to the first. Both girls are surprised by getting the same thing—they thought the act of choosing a hand meant there would be two different gifts. They look towards their mother as if to inquire whether this is all quite right. Holly smiles to reassure them.

“They're jawbreakers, special candy,” Amelia says. “You don't eat them—they're too hard to chew. But if you suck on them for a long time, they change colors and taste different too.”

Holly peeks beyond the exaggerated shoulders of Amelia's suit jacket towards the dining room.

“Is there a phone … I can use?”

Jenny has popped the blue ball into her mouth, her cheek bulging from the effort to contain and control it. She bites down once, testing, and her teeth crack against the unyielding rock in her mouth.

“Don't bite,” Amelia says, heading for the dining room. “They'll break your teeth.” She points at a beige desk phone complete with a cord and a rotary dial, almost as old as the furniture. Holly picks up the handset and begins to dial, plugging her finger in the notch for the first number and pulling it around to the dull tusk of metal that stops her. The dial tone hums and then is interrupted by a series of clicks that signifies the number going through.

It takes a while to dial this way, but it still works. Rick comes to the phone after one of the cooks tracks him down. Busy kitchen noise, people talking, pots and pans clattering in the background. His voice is strained.

“Yes,” Holly says. “I think it'll be okay.” She turns her back and faces away from Amelia, who has drifted towards the living room and is talking to the girls. “A nice old lady.” Holly listens out of her other ear to catch what Amelia and the girls are saying. “The neighborhood? Not so great. There are Mexicans next door.” But she tells him what he wants to hear. “No—it's okay. Really. I'll be there soon,” knowing full well that he doesn't get off until midnight, if then.

Holly looks around the dining room, her mind's eye scanning it as she listens to Rick complain about work, neither one of these inputs fully registering. A table and four chairs. Old as the furniture in the front room. Rick saying the bastard was
supposed to come in so I don't have to close. A hulking breakfront that looks handmade—a real antique maybe—with a display of silver-framed photographs on the lower shelves. And on top of the breakfront a fine porcelain vase, more of a pitcher really, now that she looks, a vessel meant for carrying liquids, the only lovely thing she's seen in this house, the modulation of its curves evoking nothing more than the dip of a woman's waist as the line goes dead—he's gone to school, a bright young man they all said, you'll be a famous architect Tris, designing grand buildings like the Lyceum Theater. The girls are playing with the animal cards, the game I gave them, Flinch or Pit. The oldest lays a card down and the other puts down three, they don't even know how to play. We could've had girls like this, two lovely girls, I would have given you children like when we played house together. I was always the mother and you were the father and Elmer was the child and Louise would never play, off doing something else, too grown up for us. She was always better, and we always thought she would tell me your phone number so I can have it, just in case.” In case, Holly thinks. In case something happens to the girls. Amelia writes the number with a blue pencil that says G
RAIN
D
EALERS
M
UTUAL
A
SSURANCE
along one side of it, in tiny white block letters. And just as Holly is gathering the nerve to take her leave, one last look at the girls before saying goodbye, she's startled by a black moth that flutters into her frame of vision and brushes against her face. She jerks her head back, flinching, as her hand
comes up involuntarily trying to sweep it away. “Jesus!” she says, swiping at it again, and the moth dances away, fluttering towards the ceiling, dancing around the crenellated light fixture that holds the two bare bulbs in place.

“Must have come in with you and the girls,” Amelia says. “Here, before you go. Let me show you my garden.”

Holly tries to gather herself after her brush with the black moth, which flutters and dips its way around the light. Her heart is still racing from being startled.

“Oh,” she says, not knowing what to say. She doesn't really want to see any garden. Rick is waiting for her, her need for him bearing down on them, pressing out across the miles. “Sure. I bet it's a wonderful garden.”

“It is,” Amelia says, holding out her hand for the girls to follow. “It certainly is.”

The lots in this workingman's slum are long and narrow like the houses they contain. The sidewalks from the back doors at each side of the double angle towards each other, forming a Y, the resulting single sidewalk heading towards the garage and alley at the far end of the yard. A towering oak tree shades the Mexicans' portion of the yard, its shadow cutting across from Amelia's side where a round bed of flowers nestles underneath the thick trunk. The girls take off towards the bird bath, and before Holly can stop them start splashing their hands in the water held by the shallow plaster dish.

“It's okay,” Amelia says. “I change it every day.”

There's a bird feeder on a metal pole nearby and a long narrow flower bed flanking the fence on the Mexicans' side, forming
a river of color to separate Amelia's domain from the ragged and trash-strewn lot of the house next door. The August evening is beginning to settle in, the insistent dry chirring of the cicadas swells to a crescendo, gathering itself then quickly dying away, the leaves of the trees swaying in the first cool breeze that signals a hint of autumn coming. Holly watches as a starling lands on the lip of the birdbath, peers at its reflection in the water for a moment, then, with a casual flip of its wings, darts away.

“The neighbors are good people, the Salgados. They let me keep my beds after Elmer passed away.” She must mean the Mexicans in the other half of the double. Amelia is walking towards the long phalanx of flowers along the far side of the yard, pointing to one of the splotches of color there. “My asters,” she says. “Just starting to come in. Early this year. Black-eyed Susans and phlox. Cone flowers and snap dragons. Lord, how I love my snap dragons.”

The girls have run to a bench-like swing that hangs from an inverted U-shaped iron pole towards the rear of the yard. Together they're sitting in the swing and laughing, their legs pumping in rhythm at the back of the arc, kicking against the air to make the bench go higher with each tinkling chink of the loose end of the chain as it swings them up into the sky. Holly's mind freezes them in a slow-motion vision captured at the top of arc, a holographic moment captured and bound up into the giant ball of emotion that rests within her, the girls' laughter and the pink and white and purple of the flowers swirled together into
the knowledge that they will be safe here. Amelia will keep them safe.

“I don't know anything about gardening,” Holly confesses. “Never had time for it.” She gazes at the garden once more, her eyes trying to associate the names of the various flowers Amelia has just listed with the dazzling shapes and hues she sees before her. “Which ones are the snap dragons?” she says, knowing full well which ones. She must know in her head even though her mind won't tell her, she's just talking to fill the air with words. Her mind is somewhere else, but her head already must know that the ones with the delicate curved lips reaching out over the bright tongues inside are the snaps. They were always our favorites, and Elmer's favorites too. He gave them a special place near the back porch so he could see them from the kitchen window, so they were the first thing you saw when you stepped towards the garden. Still the first thing, because I kept it all the same for you, Tris. It's all still here just as you would remember. You'd never know a day had passed since we rode in the swingset, we kicked our legs high, just the way these girls are doing. We went higher, higher, just like these girls, and we would swing his legs off the bed after an hour and a half of watching the television sports recap and two consecutive reruns of a sitcom. He hadn't intended to lie in bed so long, but he wanted to check the pennant races and then a good episode came on when he was flipping through the channels. On the desk at the far end of the room, his cell phone plays a tune that
he downloaded only yesterday, a synthesized classical melody that sounds familiar to him but whose name he cannot remember, or, most likely, he never even knew. He checks the number before answering and sees that it is one of his customers, probably trying to reach him to ask about a problem they're having with the product he sold them. The digital readout on the phone says it's past 6:30—past 8:30 on the east coast—after hours as far as he's concerned, so he presses the I
GNORE
button and lets it roll to voice mail.

He sits for a moment at the chair by the desk and picks up one of his loafers, about to slip it on, but he decides that it's too early to go down for dinner. Within the gentle hush of the air conditioning, between the worn pile of the tan Dacron carpeting and the granulated white moonscape of the acoustic ceiling tiles, there is nothing left inside the frigid crypt-like space of this room but him and his failed ambitions. A thought invades the smooth emptiness the television has forged within his skull:
You will never make a difference.

He will never fulfill his childhood ambitions. All those things he dreamed he would do are gone; they have been worn away by years of doing what he was told he should do, by listening to the voices that told him, one by one, over and over, to do the right thing, to tow the line and do what's expected of him.

He takes a deep breath of the chilled air and leans his head back, staring at the ceiling. His life floats there above him like a sinuous, gently twisting tape measure, the years ticked off from one to sixty-five across the tapered, faintly glowing surface of this object he has unwittingly fashioned. It seems to have an
ebb and flow to it, as if it's being nudged along by a current in a stream, and he realizes that the rightmost end of the tape is narrowing to a blurred tip that must be the future: wavering, dim and indistinct, as opposed to the bright shining surface on the other end of the spectrum, where his hopes and dreams shone like the sun.

Then, from this image of despair, a vision of an expense account dinner appears, enticing him with the prospect of a beer and a steak at the hotel restaurant. This is what his life has been reduced to now: the momentary pleasures of eating, sleeping, and ingesting pre-packaged mass entertainment. Go ahead, a voice inside him says, you deserve it. You worked hard today, traveled all the way from Spokane to wherever it is you are now. The line at the airport check-in counter was long, the line at the security checkpoint even longer. They made him take out his laptop and take off his shoes. Even subjected him to the indignities of the probing metal wand and the pat-down search after his loose change triggered the x-ray alarm. The customer he met with this morning was unconvinced—no, the model 2006ZX server doesn't have the capacity we need to manage the entire food processing plant we're bringing on line in six months, and the new model 2007YZ is at least fifty thousand over the competitor's comparable. They wouldn't listen to reason, didn't try to work with him as he showed them how they could make it work with a simple upgrade to the 2006ZX. He left them the specs, promised a call back tomorrow, checked the box off his to-do list, and dropped the rental car at the airport.