Snap

  SNAP

  Abby Frucht

  Dzanc Books

  1334 Woodbourne Street

  Westland, MI 48186

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 1988 Snap by Abby Frucht

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  The lyrics on page 289 are by Robert Creeley, “A1r. “Cat Bird Singing’” ‘” from For Love Poems 1950-1960. Copyright© 1962 by Robert Creeley. Reprinted with the permission of Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  Published 2012 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-936873-55-5

  eBook Cover Designed by Steven Seighman

  Published in the United States of America

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Thanks to Michael

  I

  PIECES OF CAKE

  1

  CLOSE TO NINETY DEGREES, today is typical of June in St. Louis. Like a flat, wide gray ribbon limp in the heat, the Mississippi River slips steamily past, so the tourists, sipping milkshakes at the dockside McDonald’s, swear, wipe the sweat from their eyes and wonder aloud why they came. If after lunch they gather in the park beneath the arch and shake their heads or sway on the balls of their feet, then the arch will seem to waver and to undulate above them, a hazily glinting mirage.

  In Forest Park, even the willows are wilting; they look thirsty, impatient and sad. A bicyclist, following the sidewalk along Skinker Boulevard on the western perimeter of the park, stops, jumps down from the seat and, balancing the bike between her knees, removes the elastic from her wrist and pulls the hair from her face, so she can see again. Skinker is a beautiful street, an avenue really, lovely and wide, flanked by tall, ancient plane trees with a breezy green aura of peace. To the east is the golf course at Forest Park, to the west a historic row of churches and temples with curved, sunstruck marble steps.

  It was alongside one of these marble façades, just the other day, that a man exposed himself to her. Linell didn’t know what he was doing, at first. She was walking at the time, part of her exercise routine. The man was lounging on the steps against a column, an old man dressed in baggy, tangerine-colored trousers and a white T-shirt. He had a face like boiled pudding. He said hello in a Mickey Mouse voice and wiggled his penis. Linell saw only a piece of flaccid rubber and watched uninterestedly as it flopped back and forth in his lap, until she knew. Then she turned away and kept on walking, neither slowing down nor speeding up, because the creep was too limp and pitiful to be worth altering the pace that she had set for herself, a steady clip of a walk designed to firm up her calf muscles.

  However, she was shocked, not by the man so much as by her own reaction. For a brief, absurd moment she felt flattered.

  How long had it been, since a man had even looked her way?

  But he is gone now, thank goodness; they must have taken him away. Linell climbs back up on the bike and resumes pedaling, turning into the woods where the bike route begins, seven miles of paved trail circling the park. In Linel’s mind the trail passes through five distinct zones, first winding through the woods beyond the art museum; then speeding along the embankment paralleling Highway 40 and dipping into a graceful arc along a chain of oblong willow ponds only to straighten out again along Lindell Boulevard, with its sweeping lawns and fancy houses. Then the trail swings left on a steep upward climb among golfing greens toward the museum, behind which the woods begin all over again, a dense stand of oak and hickory with an odd, decaying smell. The smell makes Linell uneasy, so here she pedals warily, looking for trouble. She sees a man’s sock snagged on a branch and wonders how such a thing could be. Then she comes to a road that cuts a brief dark slope through the trees, and crosses over it holding her breath. A car is parked on the hill, and three men stand around it conversing. Drug deals take place on this road, and homosexual assignations, so there is always a car parked and men in patent leather shoes, who ignore her, thank God.

  Then into the woods again. The heat enters in flickering sunlit shapes, like isolated flames. Humidity makes Linel’s hair frizz, and she hates it most for that reason. Also, she is likely to break out in pimples, and she feels one now, a red dot of pain on the inside of her lower lip. She teases it with her tongue. Tomorrow the thing will erupt, and Linell will have to fight herself not to play with it. She is thirty-one years old, and this very same pimple has been plaguing her since adolescence like a hated relative for whom she feels, in spite of everything, helpless affection.

  Rounding a bend in the trees, Linell brakes suddenly for a young couple sharing a pair of binoculars, passing it between them as they part to let her through.

  In the splayed, shaggy branches of a hickory sits a small, plain bird. A warbler, she supposes, female, because females are the ugly ones. Linell had been surprised to learn, while reading the feature section in the Sunday Post-Dispatch a short time ago, that warblers come in more than one color, shape and size; she had thought a warbler was a warbler, with a little dot of yellow on the wing, a brush stroke of olive on the tail, some black and white for emphasis. Of course, the bird-watching couple must know all the names of all the various warblers likely to visit the Forest Park woods; probably at night they curl naked on pastel sheets, their pale limbs encircling an Audubon guide which they flip through in search of the birds they’d sighted that afternoon.

  Even during her brief, failed marriage, Linell was insanely jealous of lovers. The jealousy brought with it an odd twinge of nostalgia, which confused her every time. How can a person get nostalgic for something she’s never had?

  Linell optimistically supposes: Surely I was in love once, in another life, and I will be in love again, in another life.

  As if to make it happen sooner, she stands on the pedals and pumps hard as ever, out of the woods into white sunlight, sweating like a pig beneath her new pink warm-ups.

  Linell means to have sweated off, by the end of the month, thirty-five pounds. She pumps harder, racing along on the trail as it mimics the highway, the rushing cars just yards away from her on the other side of a chain-link fence. It is always at this junction, leaving the wooded zone for the speedy promise of the highway, that she feels most spirited, shot through with adrenalin and exhilaration. Here she zips between twin boulders past a blur of constant traffic, not seeing the boy when he jumps out from behind and throws himself into her bike so that it skids and falls on top of her on the warm, moist grass.

  “You shit!” she screams, but the boy yanks the bike from her legs and jumps onto its seat and races off, faster than she could ever hope to follow.

  “You shit!” she screams a second time, louder than before, and then cries for a minute, although she knows she’s not hurt, not really, just stunned, the knees of her sweat pants smeared with grass stain and dirt. Her blood throbs audibly; she can hear it slowing.

  But how expert he was, Linell thinks, suddenly thankful that the boy had not actually harmed her. At the speed she was going, he could have broken her leg or killed her. Really, she ought to feel sympathy for a person who needs a thrill so badly that just stealing is enough to maintain his spirit. Perhaps Linell ought to steal something, too. For most regrettable is this perceptible loss of spirit, chipped away by not-loving and by not-being-loved. She is thirty-one, not terribly old, when you think about it. Possibly, only a third of her life has passed her by.

  But it’s true he could have broken my neck, Linell thinks, still sitting on the grass above the highway.

  And then: But he didn’t. I’m still alive. I’m
barely bruised. I’m okay. I’m not dead, like Gracie Mack.

  Gracie Mack lived in the house across the street from Linel’s and died suddenly a few months ago. Now Gracie s son, Ruby, is cleaning out the house to prepare it for sale. Linell knows this because Ruby introduced himself to her at his mother’s funeral last March, requesting that she keep an eye on the house until he had a chance to come out and take care of things himself. He had asked her to see that the pipes didn’t freeze and that the windows weren’t smashed. All she had to do was take a quick look around every week, check the thermostat and turn the water on and off in all the sinks. Ruby gave her the key and offered to pay her.

  Linell refused the money, of course. She had liked Gracie. Who hadn’t? Gracie was a somewhat crazy lady. Also, Gracie s son was very nice-looking, fuzzy and gentle in a way that Gracie wasn’t, almost shy. His wife, who had stood beside him at the funeral, and had pulled Gracie’s house key from her jacket pocket when Ruby couldn’t find it in his own, apparently has not accompanied him this time.

  Entering the woods on foot, Linell finds a large hickory branch from which she peels some already frayed streamers of bark, crumbling the fibers before letting them fall. The stick is straight save for one kink at its end where the bough seems to have knotted around itself. It is this warty, swollen protuberance that attracted Linell in the first place. She holds the stick firmly by its smooth, perfect end, the bulbous knot smacking the ground as she walks. If anyone comes near her, she’ll make him see stars, all right.

  In Ruby’s naptime dream, the bathroom in his mother’s house is not his mother’s bathroom. It is a fantasy enclosure done in floor-to-ceiling black onyx tiles, the floor itself a glossy sea of identical quarter-inch parts like the squares of a mosaic, a popular style these days among wealthy renovators.

  Ruby is barefoot; the tiles are smooth as mirrors. He fills a glass with tap water, waits for the bubbles to dissipate, drinks and spits. The sink is pale orange marble sculpted like a clam shell; the regurgitated water funnels through the scalloped bowl in numerous small rivers that swirl round the drain at the bottom.

  In the dream, Ruby is thirsty. How long has it been since he has had a glass of water, a glass of anything, for that matter? His tongue is thick, his gums cottony, the roof of his mouth burns like dry ice. Why not a drink, then? The thought comes to him as suddenly and unexpectedly as it has a hundred times before; each time he lifts the glass from the edge of the sink, depresses the faucet lever, holds the empty glass beneath until it fills with liquid, drinks and spits. Each time the hope is new, and so is the despair. Salt water. When he holds up the glass, he sees thousands of grains of salt that will never dissolve. They are snowflakes in a wind, whirling round the surface of a small oval pond. Ruby approaches the pond, kneels on the frozen, moss-carpeted bank, cups his hands and immerses them in the cold, still water.

  And drinks.

  And spits.

  More salt.

  But does he want to wake up yet? No. Dreams are pleasurable, no matter what their message. He enjoys the horror of the cruel-innocent oval pond, and of his thirst, and his search for water, and the harsh, stinging taste of the salt. In dreams, Ruby knows, we punish ourselves in advance for our inevitable petty crimes. Once awake, having suffered, there is nothing to do but carry them out.

  Flipping onto his belly, he slides his hands underneath and explores the furred underside of his testicles. Aware that this action has nothing to do with his dream, he is certain as well that the dreaming itself will continue, one way or another. His penis gets hard; he thinks of Ida, who will suck him off but at the last possible second stop and take him apologetically into her hands, pulling him on top of her so he comes all over her belly. She can’t stand the taste; it’s too salty, she complains, and makes a salty face. They both laugh when she makes the face, but all the same it’s an awkward moment, the one awkward moment that they persist in sharing, like embarrassed adolescents. Ruby is hurt, and Ida knows it, but neither one of them will admit it. She used to swallow him, gagging. Stupidly he had mistaken her choked sounds for pleasurable ones. Once she said, when they were finished, “Well, that didn’t work.”

  “What didn’t work?” Ruby asked, in his blurred, after-sex voice. Still, his mind was keen. He remembers rearranging his body so that he held its weight away from her and stared intently down into her face, and then ducked to kiss her ear.

  “Audrey said if a man eats a lot of sweets before you do it it tastes better,” Ida said. “It doesn’t.”

  “How would Audrey know, anyway?”

  Ida shrugged. Before bed, Ruby had eaten a plate of brownies and ice cream, the chocolate taste of which still lingered in his mouth, in a gluey way.

  Dreaming, Ruby fills another glass of water, then wakes before he lifts it to his mouth. He is out of bed already, in his mother’s bathroom, the bathroom that is not the bathroom in his dream. This one is tiled only halfway up, with celery-colored plastic squares, some of which have come loose and now sit in a stack on the floor, to be reapplied with Liquid Nails. Above the level of the tiles, the wallpaper is peeling, and below it the floor is corroded. Earlier today Ruby passed ten minutes contemplating the broken hinges of the medicine cabinet, before realizing how silly it was to consider a cure for the little cabinet when the whole house might collapse on top of it. It is the house of a happy loner, the house of a person who talks to herself while propping beams with broomsticks and wrapping frayed electric wires with double-sided sticky tape. How can she have let it get like this? Worse still, how can he have allowed her to allow this to happen? Of course, how could he have stopped her, fifteen hundred miles away in his own fastidiously restored colonial, whose sole imperfection is a dent in the wainscoting in the dining room, caused a century ago when a Founding Father rose too hurriedly from the dinner table? How could he have saved her, in any case, from her very nature? Here, everything is haphazard, as if repair required only charming ingenuity and prudence. The roof, the foundation, the ceilings, the floors, all need something done to them, but what? Ruby has yet to determine if the damage is structural or merely cosmetic. He recalls his mother’s eyeglasses, their snapped bridge fused by a Band-aid. Months passed; the lenses held together. Was that structural, then, or cosmetic? Ruby doesn’t know. But for God’s sake, there aren’t even enough light bulbs to go around, a fact that makes Ruby smile, knowing very well his mother’s thrifty solution to the problem. Instead of buying new ones, she would simply carry the few existing bulbs from room to room and lamp to lamp, screwing and unscrewing them whenever necessary.

  He found a working lamp in his mother’s study. Removing his T-shirt, he covered his hand when he unscrewed the bulb and held it to the window; sure enough, there it was, a dim milky nimbus of his mother’s fingerprints.

  Ruby’s mother had suffered from a hyperactive thyroid gland and its classic symptoms: weight loss, hyperactivity, forgetfulness, sleeplessness, breathlessness, anxiety, carelessness, tremors and a propensity to engage in senseless discord whatever the topic at hand.

  Ruby, as a child, had only to remark that it was raining outside in order to elicit such a response.

  “No, it isn’t,” she would declare, without a glance at the window. “It can’t possibly be.”

  “Then I’ll go out and play.”

  “And get soaked? Stay inside and help me bake some cookies.”

  Then off she’d run, bing, bing, bing, leaving Ruby to mess with a bowlful of flour and brown sugar while she involved herself in something entirely new. Like the time she played hostess to a witch and the witch’s husband. The witch was guest lecturer for one of Washington University’s extracurricular courses in which Ruby’s mother forever enrolled. The witch was terribly fat, not like a witch at all, round as a hot-air balloon and dressed only in a giant leotard draped with a gauzy negligee. As far as Ruby could gather, the witch’s sole contribution to the Paganism course had been to oversee the construction, on the wide stretch of lawn fronting B
rookings Hall, of a Maypole of crepe paper streamers, around which she’d danced embarrassingly while everyone snickered.

  “And it wasn’t even May Day,” Ruby’s mother later said. “She sat in my house and gloated all night while her tiny husband waited on her hand and foot. Her name was Marybell. Marybell, my ass. Feel my heart! It’s beating in my stomach.”

  Ruby lifted his hand familiarly to his mother’s flat stomach and felt her heart throbbing madly inside as if it had slipped from her rib cage.

  “It’s the thyroid,” she announced.

  However, she accepted no treatment at all, because the prospect of a cure frightened her. She enjoyed being hyperthyroid. She liked running for the phone the second it rang, so that she would be out of breath upon answering it, and she liked her impulsive frantic errands, and she liked the way her hair looked when she neglected to braid it.

  She was not fond of Ida and called her Ima by mistake.

  “I don’t want to visit your mother anymore,” Ida had said last winter. “You can go without me.”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “She wouldn’t miss me, and I just don’t see the point of hanging around there. She makes me nervous. I don’t like myself, really, when she’s around.”

  “Neither do I, sort of,” Ruby said. “But what difference does it make? She’s my mother, for better or worse.”

  “For worse,” they both said.

  “Jinx,” said Ida. This meant that Ida had laid a jinx on him and that he was forbidden to speak until she lifted it. It was a game Ruby had played as a child but had since forgotten. He loved the way Ida refreshed him and made him feel playful. He shut his mouth and assumed the sullen expression appropriate to a little boy who has been jinxed. In the silence that followed, the telephone rang. Ida picked it up and said hello.

  “Yes, but he can’t talk now,” she said.

  Ruby snorted and lunged for the phone.