David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

She says the call on the phone from her daughter-under-law Bonnie Tagus today that has her in her condition had also to do with half a Xeroxed letter from Lenny, her son and pride, a half a letter which Mrs. Tagus received in her postal box, also today, but before the call on the phone from Bonnie Tagus. It all comes in a rush. The half a letter from Lenny she says was a Xerox (not even personal?). He had mailed several Xerox copies of the letter, by Express Mail. A rush job. " 'An outpouring' he says," Mrs. Tagus says, " 'to all friends and family.' " Illuminating all issues for everybody. She looks at me at the kettle on the stove which only one big burner still has gas. Did I, Mr. Labov, also get such a first half of a letter? But I get my mail once a week only, on Tuesday (today is almost Friday, by the clock), on account of my box here at my building has been broken into, and I feel it is insecure, and my check for Social Security from the government comes by mail, so I have a secure box I got at the Post Office but the Post Office is half an hour by El or seven dollars by taxicab and let's not even discuss bus routes and in this weather who needs the more than once a week bother? So it could be in my box. Mrs. Tagus has confidence in the security of her postal box here in the building, which she and Arnold Tagus first moved in starting with the weekend they electrocuted the Rosenbergs because of Nixon.

I put some more hot and dark freshened tea before Mrs. Tagus, in a specially gotten mug, from the Mug House in Marshall Fields, with a lid on it, to keep the heat in the tea, which I got with emergencies like this one maybe in the back of my mind. The night years ago when Mikey Tagus swallowed his tongue in high school football, cup after cup Arnold and Greta drank out of some emergency mugs, with lids, that I'd brought, at the Emergency Room. We all sat close with tea and prayed with worry. That night was the first time Mrs. Tagus's stomach made like a fist. And she is making with the fist with her hand in the air again, and in the fist are crinkled paper pages, from a letter, smeared like Xeroxes get when wet, from Lenny. She rocks in my kitchen chair and looks across the alley at the fire escape which is the view, speaking.

LEN'S HALF AN OPEN LETTER SENT TO "THAT COMMUNITY OF MY FAMILY AND INTIMATE FRIENDS — LETTER APPROPRIATELY CONCEIVED ALSO AS AN INFORMATIONAL SATELLITE, A PROBE LAUNCHED INTO THE EMOTIONAL CONSTELLATION SURROUNDING AND INFORMING THIS CORRESPONDENT'S PERSONAL ORBIT — EXCLUDING THE PARTIES BONNIE FLUTTERMAN TAGUS AND MICHAEL

ARNOLD TAGUS — REGARDING THIS CORRESPONDENT AND THE ABOVE TWO EXCLUDED PARTIES"

21-2

Beloved fathers and teachers, Please know that the party Leonard Shlomith Tagus, Gent., Ph.D., author of Motion in Poetry: The Theme of Momentum in Weimar Republic Verse, a monograph from which royalties in excess of three figures are forecast to accrue in fiscal 1985, Northwestern University's lone blade-burnished Teutonist, student, teacher, son, father, brother; that wiliest of connubial mariners, that L. S. Tagus, having for nine years navigated successfully between the Scylla and Charybdis of Inclination and Opportunity, has, as of today, 21 February 1985, committed adultery, on four occasions, with one Carlìna Rentaria-Cruz, former significant other of my brother, Michael Arnold Tagus; that the party anticipates further episodes of such adultery; and that such past and highly probable future episodes will be brought to the attention of the party's wife, Ms. Bonnie Flutterman Tagus, between 1:00 and 2:00 pm (lunch) this date.

Know further that it is neither the desire & intention of L. Tagus, nor the project of an openly probing letter, either: (a) to excuse those libidinal/genital activities on the part of this party likely to excite disfavor or — ease within his intimate constellation; or: (b) to explain same, since the explanation of any transgression inevitably metastasizes into excuse (see (a)); but rather merely: (c) to inform those parties on whom my existence and the behavior that defines same can be expected to have an effect of the events outlined above and discussed, as usual, below; and: (d) to describe, probably via the time-tested heuristic pentad, the W's of why those events have taken and do and will take place; and: (e) to project the foreseeable consequences of such activities for this correspondent, for those other parties (B.F.T., M.A.T.) directly affected by his choices, and for those other other parties whose psychic fortunes are, to whatever extent, bound up with our own.

(a) and (b) conceded, then, and (c) killed in the telling:

Cinnamon girl. Full-lipped, candy-skinned, brandy-haired South-American-type girl. A type: a girl the color of dirty light, eyes a well-boiled white and hair like liquor, scintillant and smoky; precisely pointed breasts that shimmy when her chest caves in, when her chest caves in and hand flutters worried about the breastbone, from the laughter. Which is constant. This is a merry girl. Laughs at any stimuli not macabre or political, avoid abortion controversy; but otherwise a weather without change, a thing that carries her from place to place rather than obversely, a laugh of the piercing sort that resembles a possessed state, helpless, crumpled in around her perception of anomaly or embarrassment, harmless harm to anyone in a world that is only a violent cartoon, wet eyes darting around for assistance, some invitation to gravity, the detu-mescence of a nipple scraped in shimmy by cotton, some distraction to let her decontort. A merriment that is almost on the edge of pain.

And I watched her crumple, eyes the color of cream squeezed tight, over a tall and sonorous Graphix water-pipe, at the apartment of Mikey Tagus; and a wax-deaf man in a city of sirens heard one siren's fatal call; and the malignant, long-slalomed rocks mated with a crunch through the dry eggshell prow of my careful character. Carlina Rentaria-Cruz, secretarial aide at North Side offices of Chicago Park District. Twenty, lovely, light and dark, hair sticky with gin, our lady of wet rings on album covers, Spanish lilt, pointed boots, a dairy sheen to redly white skin, lips that gleam, shine a light — shine without aid of tongue — they manufacture their own moisture.

Contrast — please, neither offense nor explanation intended — contrast a wide-bottomed, solid, pale-as-all-indoors woman of thirty-four. Known in milliscopic detail. Large squash-shaped mole on left arm sports a banner of black hair. Nipples like pencil erasers, hard and corrective against wide shallow breasts whose broad curves I know like the Lake's own tired sweep. A woman ever armed with hemorrhoid pillow in one of only two stages of inflation, an obscene pink doughnut of hardened plastic, cushioning with her own dioxides the woman's legacy from the long and labored birth of Saul Tagus. A woman whose lips are chronically dry (bad sebum flow) and collect a white paste at the corners. Whose posture, I confess, has always been a little too good for my complete peace of mind. And whose quiet static laughter is always appropriate, conscious, complicated by an automatic and sophisticated concern for the special sensitivities of everyone present.

Viz. Bonnie laughs only with; Carlina was so conceived and constituted as to laugh only at.

E.g. Representative Laughter-Scenario: B. F. Tagus: Envision dinner party — B. F. Tagus filling her self-imposed quota of one family anecdote that will 'tickle' our guests: "And Joshua gets his piece of pie from the waiter, and his eyes are getting bigger and bigger' (uncanny imitation here) 'he looks at it, and he says to me, he whispers when the waiter's left he says Momma, why Momma there's ice cream on this pie, and I say but Joshua, the waiter asked you if you wanted your pie a la mode honey and you said yes; and Joshua looks at me he's about to cry almost the poor love and he says A la mode? Momma I thought he said pie all alone. Is… what… he… thought… he…" (hand to mouth, eyes frighteningly wide, unaffected, shoulders moving up and down in sync, laughter full of love, good will, etc.).