Licorice Read online

  “I’ve seen you around,” she said, exhaling smoke.

  People were always “seeing me around.”

  “I’m a mailman,” I answered, nodding encouragingly.

  “Yes,” said Danka, “but that’s not what I mean….”

  I waited. She was older than I. My mother’s generation. Maybe she would say, You are the daughter I have never had, in her faint European accent.

  Instead, she started talking about the play.

  “I have never understood the ridiculous notion that their backs shouldn’t face the audience,” Danka said finally. “As if they think we’d be insulted, when really what’s insulting is when they must constantly stare out over our heads as if they don’t even know we’re here. Also, the set is many inconsistencies. They should never have – what? – fields of sunflowers and neon lights simultaneously.”

  “That’s the point,” I said.

  Smoke in my eyes.

  “Why didn’t you tell me I was still wearing my apron?” said an elderly man just then. He had slipped up beside us and put an arm around Danka’s waist. A paisley apron lay draped over his forearm.

  “Because your fly is down,” said Danka, who reached over and zipped it.

  The patio lights blinked on and off, and people began filing back to their seats. We passed a table of Pepperidge Farm cookies, a quarter a piece, and glasses of wine for a dollar. Danka picked out three Lidos when no one was looking, and passed them around.

  Later, after the show, Danka caught up with me and laced her fingers through mine, palms touching, square dance style. Her husband had just finished at the drinking fountain, and as he approached, made swipes at his mustache with the end of a rolled-up program. Drops of water flew around.

  “I think you would understand if I wanted to tell you about some of my troubles,” she said calmly, as if I were about to be hypnotized.

  So we made our date for coffee. The cafeteria was two stories high and the unwashed windows, multipaned with a yellowish cast, arched all the way to the ceiling. The hinged arches were open, and threw beams of daylight down into the room. One shone on our table, too bright to look at. Instead we looked at each other somewhat testily, I thought. Danka resembled an aunt of mine, who wore skirts so tight she could hardly walk. But Danka was earthy in spite of the elegant clogs, and had beautiful deep crows feet on silken skin, like the soft tucks sewn into Gail’s lingerie. Silver hairs made a shimmer on top of the black, and when she lifted her cup I noticed her ring, two gold snakes intertwined.

  “Nice ring,” I began.

  “Shall I call you Elizabeth?” she asked.

  “Liz, please.”

  “Oh.”

  She was disappointed. For a moment she busied herself with her jacket, purse, and coffee.

  “Where are you from?” I asked.

  “Austria.”

  “My parents had a housemaid from Austria,” I said. “When I was growing up. She taught me to sing Edelweiss, and then brought me one pressed in waxed paper, but I peeled the waxed paper away.”

  “You were a sensitive child.”

  I faltered. I had lost the edelweiss. I had put it in a book, and had given the book to the library along with some others. Some other child must have come upon it and not known what it was; a circle of tiny rabbit ears, perhaps, of creamy, aged velvet that turned to dust when it was touched.

  “I was the teacher’s pet,” I told her. “I once went to a friend’s birthday bowling party instead of with my sister to Shea Stadium to see the Beatles first U.S. concert. I’ve never forgiven myself. That concert was history.”

  “History isn’t so good.”

  We were silent, we drank our coffee, we felt the big room shrink around us while the janitor piled chairs upon the tables. The librarians filed out, replaced by a tall mathematician eating pears and cottage cheese while flipping through the pages of a textbook. Outside, swallows rustled the tendrils of ivy.

  “How I love October,” Danka said with provocation.

  “This is November.”

  “I know. I hate November. You have your Thanksgiving.”

  “What’s wrong with Thanksgiving?”

  “Nothing. You Americans think nothing happens in November but Thanksgiving.”

  “What happens in November?”

  “Happened.”

  “What happened in November?”

  “I don’t know if I should tell you,” said Danka.

  A twist of her head, a little shrug like the shrug of a child. Danka squinted hard, opened her purse, withdrew a silk scarf which she wrapped around her neck and knotted deftly and precisely as if preparing to leave the table. The scarf was a wisp of black smoke.

  “I was in Skarzysko.”

  “I know,” I said at once, surprised that what I’d said was the absolute truth. In fact I’d never heard of Skarzysko before but I knew at once it was a camp and that Danka had been in it. “There was no other explanation,” I explained later on to Daniel.

  “Explanation for what?” said Daniel.

  “For Danka.”

  “I had a feeling you knew,” Danka said, and played with the ends of the scarf. “So. What do you think.”

  “I think….” I paused. “I always see that time period in black and white, like photos, old film clips, you know? But it seems to me it must have happened in black and white. The Great Depression too. Not even the apples were red. No color would seem to make sense. I don’t know. All the faces were gray, the sky was gray, the fields, everything.”

  A question, really.

  “But, you know, that’s absolutely true, it was gray, Lizzie, yellowish gray, and that’s what saved my life, if you have to know the story. On the day – but maybe I shouldn’t tell you. No. I will tell you. I will.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said.

  Shocked, Danka glared at me and got up and left. Stalked out. I was too ashamed to follow. But in a minute I rose and went to look for her; in the lady’s room, in the hallway, outside the front doors, in the stairwell, around the cluster of green vinyl couches, upstairs in the study lounge, in another bathroom and then out a window with a view from the fire escape down onto the courtyard and sidewalks. Wind blew in small spirals in the chilly, bright air. There was a goldfish pond out there that been drained for repairs, and some boys were skateboarding in it, up and around its concrete banks and then down into the middle where some wet leaves lay. Danka wasn’t anywhere. I went back downstairs and into the cafeteria for my sweater. There was Danka sitting in the same seat, looking at me.

  “I can’t tell just anybody,” she said when I got close, “because they won’t believe me, not quite, they never believe it to the extent that is necessary, simply because they don’t want to. They don’t want to know. Someone once said to me, ‘But what is so terrible about turnip soup?’ But it wasn’t turnip soup, it was liquid filth with turnip peels floating on top of it, and besides we had to use the same bowls we used at night in the bunk, when they wouldn’t let us go to the outhouse. Where were you just now?”

  “I was looking for you.”

  “What you said about the black and white, it really was that way although you didn’t quite believe it when you said it, did you? You thought you were being poetic. I knew from the moment I saw you at the theater that you were innocent enough to believe anything, no matter how true it may be. Understand? I was seven. My aunt had to pretend that I was hers, because my mother wasn’t anywhere, we didn’t know where she was, or any of the others, but that was the first scary moment for me, when my aunt grabbed me and said, ‘This one’s mine.’ Because I wasn’t. You know? It was very confusing. Not that I objected to my aunt. I had always liked her. But suddenly everything was topsy-turvy. We weren’t allowed in the barracks during the day, so on that first day we sat in the mud where it was chilly. Our heads were shaved and we wore our striped pajamas. We hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours and when we did it was that soup with the turnips floating in it that tasted like
ashes. Someone spilled hers on the mud and three skeletons appeared out of nowhere and licked the soup off the ground. There was a lot of lice and we were all covered with it. After several weeks I caught some illness and became feverish, although my aunt tried to hide this terrible fact. But I was very, very pale, and one day during selection-my aunt was working on the day shift in the munitions factory at the camp-I was picked to be transferred. My aunt returned to the barracks at nightfall and was told what had happened. She had become friendly-well, that is an odd term under the circumstances but it was true—with one of the guards at the place where they took sick people to be shipped off to be killed. This guard had been a prostitute before working in the camp. She had a daughter of her own. But she wasn’t going to get me out of there, oh no, but she was kind enough to let my aunt go inside to say goodbye to me. But my aunt brought a bowl of water, and a comb she had borrowed from another inmate, and while she was visiting with me, in the few minutes that the guard had given us, she washed my face and combed my hair and even gave me a clean shirt to wear. I don’t know where she got that. But the really important thing-she had a little slip of red paper she had taken from the munitions factory, and she dipped it in the water and rubbed the dye onto my cheeks and lips until I looked healthy. Then you should have seen me. That was probably the loveliest I have ever been, my aunt has told me, and I believe her. I was lovelier then, than on my wedding day. All the people all around were yellow gray, like parchment, they were drying up, shriveling, dying. And I was looking like a rose in a field of dust. So I was saved, they didn’t put me on the trucks after all. Do you believe all of that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t. Not a bit. It’s my aunt’s favorite story. My aunt was plump-that is, before the camps and after. Not like my mother, who was fashionably slender, slinky, even. I’ve turned out to be more like my aunt. Isn’t that interesting?”

  “What happened to her?”

  “My mother?”

  “Your aunt.”

  “Why don’t you ask me about my mother? Everybody is always afraid to ask me that.”

  “What happened to your mother?”

  “I already told you: nobody knows. She died, that means. My aunt lives in New York. She was recently widowed. We lie to each other whenever we can. My mother has never been heard of, or anyone else. When I married William I thought I would get away from it all and that is the problem. I have. Too completely. You might ask, ‘So what is the harm in forgetting such a place?’ But it was my childhood. How can you ask me to forget it? How can you expect me to wonder around believing that I never came from anywhere. How can you expect–”

  “But I don’t–”

  “How can you live in this town? It’s so smug. I no longer trust it. It’s the calm before the storm. It’s like living in an egg about to crack, and then it doesn’t. It never does crack, it just sits here in peace. It’s enough to make you scream.”

  “I have my life,” I said. “I like this town.” I was feeling defensive. Unworthy. What could be said? Then the janitor approached with his army of chairs close behind. He winked at me flirtatiously as he hefted another one onto a table.

  “It’s getting late,” I said. “You said ‘wonder around’. It’s not ‘wonder’, it’s ‘wander’. Wonder is thinking. Wander is walking.”

  “I suppose you have to wonder home and cook dinner,” Danka said.

  “We make sandwiches,” I said. “Or spaghetti or tacos. That’s not really cooking, it’s just doing things.”

  “But you do them together.”

  “Most of the time. How about you?”

  “William is a fastidious cook.”

  How sad I felt for her, all at once. I pictured him wearing the paisley apron, circling the kitchen with his spoon in his hand, reciting the names of fresh herbs.

  “Is THIS a Dove Bar night?” I ask Danka when we’ve been moving for a while.

  “Dove Bar? Oh. Those big ice creams. No. Why do you. why would we…”

  “That’s what we ate last time. In the parking lot. Remember?”

  “That? That’s all over with. Nothing’s going to happen with him. I have not even run into Startup in ages. Why would you suppose we were going there again? Don’t you suppose if anything were developing I would at least have mentioned him? Besides, I don’t even know his name, and besides I have a feeling he stays occasionally in Bloomingham of all places in the whole wide world. I don’t think I’ve given you any cause to think–”

  “I just thought we were heading sort of in that direction, Danka. That’s all.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t kill us to see if his lights are on.”

  We slowly enter the alley leading into the parking lot. Danka switches off the headlights, scooting forward on her seat. Her chin is inches from the top of the steering wheel.

  “Ooomph,” she says, and swings left to avoid ramming into a tree. “I cannot understand why they have trees in a parking lot, for goodness sake.”

  “Probably the same reason they have his house in the parking lot.”

  “But we don’t know if it’s his house. We have no way of knowing unless you knock on the door. There might even be a woman in there with him, for all we know.”

  “Or a man.”

  “No. Not a man. If you had seen him even once you would know that. It’s the way he looks at me. I can’t see the house anywhere.”

  “Over there.” I point.

  “But the lights aren’t on. That bastard. I’ll be damned if we hang around here. He is probably watching. Don’t you think? Can you see him in the window?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that tops it.”

  On Main Street, she speeds up and heads out of town past the windmill to the fields where the private air strips are. The corn is flowering now; the tassels make a nimbus on the surface of the fields although the moon is just a sliver, the sky starry, indigo, and streaky from so many planes. Slash here, slash there. Far ahead is a glare, but that’s only the steel mills up by the lake. We’ll turn off the road before then if we go where I think we are going. I turn the radio on to a talk show and get homesick all at once, for a drive I took with Daniel out here last year. That was late at night, too, and the show was a matchmaking one. All the people who phoned in were sixty years old or older, widowed, wanting company. Daniel and I held hands as we listened, hoping they’d find each other. But tonight’s show is fuzzy, all the way from Chicago. I switch it off, and Danka tells me she’s considering getting a job, she’s put her résumé on file with the personnel office at the college. She’s an expert typist, she says, and adds, “It’s no wander when I have been typing all of William’s papers for him all of these years since the children left home. William doesn’t know how to type. He is worried about me getting a job. He said to me, ‘Why go to the trouble of typing for somebody else when the only difference is that they will pay you?’”

  “He makes you type all his papers for him?”

  “No, he doesn’t make me,” says Danka, stung. “I do some of the research. I make suggestions now and then. He depends on me.”

  “Sounds interesting.”

  “It isn’t. Not to me. Right now he is trying to track down a city he somehow managed to read about, the City of Repose. He can’t find it. The place does not even exist anymore. Well, no, that’s not true, but the name has changed. It’s a town eight miles north of Jerusalem of all places in the whole wide world.”

  “I thought you said he couldn’t find it.”

  “He can’t. I did. I’m afraid he’ll want to go there if he finds out where it is, and be reposeful. Do you know he wears a toga sort of thing, before bed? For a bathrobe, you know, but with pockets, for after his shower, just before he goes to-Oh my God, what is this –”

  Danka swerves to avoid a pick-up whizzing toward us in our lane, its brights on, horn blaring. We miss it by a foot, but now we’re following the left lane on a two-lane highway, a circumstance which appears not to worry D
anka at all.

  “Danka,” I mention after a while. “We’re driving the wrong way.”

  “How would you know? I haven’t told you where we are going,” Danka answers contentedly.

  “We’re going to Bloomingham, right?” I ask.

  No answer. Just a shrug, a shifting of her foot on the gas pedal, a decrease in pressure. Overhead a small airplane floats into the night, blinking red at the tips of its wings. How gently it rises, like a balloon. We haven’t crossed to the proper side of the road, but I won’t raise the issue again. Such impasses are Danka’s way of reminding me of what she told me about in the cafeteria – she has suffered in life while I haven’t, she knows about things I can hardly begin to imagine. This fact is like a thick pane of glass between us, but if we ever break through it, we’ll stop being friends. We have nothing in common. My life has been perfect and hers has been hell, and that’s why we need each other.

  Besides, I realize, leaning back in my seat, there is not a car in sight, and the road is flat and straight. To either side are black fields and scattered here and there the darkened shapes of farmhouses at peace in their circles of trees. From one tree hangs a swing mysteriously swaying, a faint tremor passing along its ropes. Two women stand nearby in nightgowns. We are coasting now, enjoying the nighttime scenery. Danka is smiling when she suddenly pulls over to the wrong shoulder, stops the car and climbs out. Up ahead, the old train trestle spans the road. To the right climbs a forested hillside broken here and there by narrow lanes, and to the left is the drop-off, a rough, graveled slope ending fifty feet down at the edge of the river. I’ve met several elderly people who were born in this town, but no one who lives here now. I think of something I once learned: if you are walking in woods and find daffodils growing, or irises, then there once was a house in that spot. Search, and you’ll find the foundation, a few crumbling slabs of limestone, a threshold, a small pile of bricks. Bloomingham is different; no daffodil, no iris, just thistle, goldenrod, black-eyed Susan. Just the rusted railway trestle with its loosened nuts and bolts, and up ahead is where the God’s eyes hang in the window. Behind them is a freezerful of ice cream novelties. That’s it. Near the store a dirt lane begins and disappears among some hickories, the shag bark rustling with the start of a breeze. How quiet it is. Danka says there are houses hidden up there but that’s not where we’re going. She takes my arm, leads me to the drop-off over the river. When we’ve followed the shoulder a while, we come to a path lined with tall brittle, flowering weeds. Their pollen tickles my nose and I sneeze.