Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

It was cool in the Lion House, acrid with the urine of tigers. Roars reverberated like the shouts of kids under a viaduct. The air hummed: flies swarming dung and raw meat. Between the guardrail and cages, zappers grilled in tzz tzzz bursts.

“Is there something sweet on the wires?” I asked my father, who was holding my hand as if we were about to cross a busy street.

“No, a light we can’t see attracts them.”

At each cage I watched, trying to glimpse the light that only flies could see, concentrating on that instant when the flies crackled into the blue sparks that jolted through electric coils into charred piles. A stunned few on their backs propelled in circles through frazzled corpses like tiny motorboats out of control.

“Let’s go,” my father said, giving my hand a tug, and we stepped out squinting into the sunlight, back on the walkways crowded with Sunday, on our way to see the giraffe, before I realized I’d missed the cats.

Shhhh … you’re tipsy, you’ll wake up the whole neighborhood.

Shhhh, yourself. And why shush me and not the nighthawks? You think if their squawking doesn’t wake people, that I’m going to? Are you implying my voice is more strident?

It’s not a fair comparison. Sleepers unconsciously accept nighthawks as part of the night, like crickets.

And we’re not like crickets?

Not to the poor sleepers. I remember as a kid waking in the middle of the night to voices laughing or arguing or sometimes singing out on the street. I’d catch snatches of conversation but never enough to figure out who they were or what they were doing up. And I’d lie there envying them having the world to themselves while everybody else slept, until from some window somebody’d yell, “Hey, shut the fuck up!”

See, thanks to us, now you know how the people on the street felt with the night all to themselves. And nobody’s even yelled shut the fuck up at us yet.

They will.

You’re starting to sound like my mother, except instead of “You’ll wake up the neighborhood,” she’d say, “You’ll wake up the dead.” Maybe because we didn’t live in a neighborhood. We lived in a ’burb. “You have to be careful,” she’d warn me, “women in our family have voices that project .”

It’s a mother’s job to make daughters self-conscious.

Actually, she was right, our voices do project. We got them from her. My mother studied voice for years before she got married. She got a scholarship to Oberlin. It’s family lore how, when she was valedictorian for her high school class in Grundy Center, Iowa, and got up to give the speech at graduation, the microphone wouldn’t work. They had graduations outside, on the football field, and where the end zone ended, farmland began. During her graduation, there was a guy plowing with his tractor, and overhead a crop duster was spraying. My mother had worked on her speech for weeks, and hated it, so she took the broken microphone as an act of God, an omen not to give the speech. Instead, she shrugged at the audience, then threw her head back and belted out an aria — in Italian. She told us that when people congratulated her afterwards, they didn’t say it was beautiful, but rather that she could be heard in the next county.

What did she sing?

“Vissi d’arte” from Tosca — I lived for art . What else? She was seventeen. When she sings in choir I can always hear her voice hovering above all the others. It used to embarrass me as a kid. She was always a little disappointed I didn’t go to Oberlin and study voice like her.

I never heard you sing.

You don’t recall it, but you did.

I did?

I sang to you in a dream — actually, a nightmare — God! I’d nearly forgotten. Remember that time in Chicago, looking for a bottle of wine at two in the morning? Everything was closed except a few package liquor stores that only sold cheap booze and finally we found a place way on the North Side.

Malek’s. On Bryn Mawr. We bought a dusty bottle of champagne.

Right. And when we drove up we thought the place had just been robbed. There were two squad cars and they had a guy across the hood of one of them.

A Hispanic kid with rolling eyes.

Uh-huh. He looked scared, and whatever they had him for didn’t have anything to do with robbing the store. But it reminded you of one time back in college when you were walking toward some L station from a girlfriend’s house and you saw the cops working over a kid and suddenly realized it was your best friend from when you were ten years old, in your old neighborhood.

Yeah. Andy Cardona. They’d caught him trying to stick up a gas station on Wilson Avenue. It was weird. They had him in cuffs and getting in the car he looked my way and recognized me, too, and grinned.

Well, about a month after that night when we found the champagne, I had this dream I never told you about: It was night and I was waiting in the car and there was a robbery. I saw two huge guys in ski masks and black leather coats run out carrying guns, and for a second I was terrified they were going to come to the car where I was waiting because I’d seen them, but they changed their minds and kept going, and then I suddenly remembered you’d gone inside to buy us a bottle. I could hear an ambulance wailing and I couldn’t seem to get out of the car. To protect me, you’d locked the doors somehow with the key. Blue dome lights from police cars and red lights from ambulances bled over the plate glass. I kept trying to see out the window, which kept fogging with my breath; I kept hoping, waiting for you to come out. The ambulance attendants ran inside. They wheeled someone out under a sheet. I couldn’t see who. I watched them drive away. And after that the liquor store sign went out. The street was empty and dark. Suddenly, the locks pinged and I could get out of the car. I looked into the window of the dark liquor store just to make sure you weren’t there. I didn’t know where I was. It was your city, not mine. So I just walked along the streets. It began to snow, but I walked all night and came to your old neighborhood. I recognized it from what you’d told me. There were the Mexican murals and gang graffiti on the walls of viaducts, there was the church with twin steeples where you’d gone to school. There were cars lined in front of the church doors. I went inside. The church was lit by candles, all these candles. Everyone was dressed in black. All the people in your family I’d heard about. I recognized them, your mother in a black veil, your father, your aunts and uncles and cousins, the ones who were priests, the ones who were war heroes or crooks or butchers or drunks, the blessed deserters, none of whom knew anything about me. You were dead but I was the ghost. They were having a funeral mass. The coffin surrounded by candles was in the middle of the aisle and I knelt in the back of the church and then I suddenly couldn’t help myself, it was as if the wind was blowing through my body and emerging changed to song. I began to sing this aria I didn’t know I knew. It was so beautiful, I remember that, but I don’t remember the melody or the language I was singing in. Not English. This tremendously sad sweet song came out of me and filled the whole church and I knew you knew it was me singing for you. Everyone turned toward where I knelt in shadow and listened. And when I was finally finished I walked back outside into the snow. There wasn’t anything left for me to do once I knew you’d heard my song.

What was it about the belly button that connected it to the Old Country?

Perhaps Busha’s concern for its cleanliness. Those winter bath nights, windows and mirrors steamed as if we were simmering soup, my hands “wrinkled as prunes,” the slippery water sloshing as I stepped from the tub into her toweling embrace.