John Hawkes - Second Skin

Family and friends, then, gathering week after dreary week for the Sabbath, meeting together on the dangerous day of the Lord, pursuing our black entanglement, waiting around for something — the first snow? first love? the first outbreak of violence? — and saying grace, watching the slow winter death of the oak tree, feeling wave after wave of the cold Atlantic breaching our trackless black inhospitable shores. And then another Sunday rolling around and the sexton rushing to the Lutheran church to ring the bells — always excited, always in a hurry, can’t wait to get his hands on the rope — and once again the frenzied sexton nearly hanging himself from the bellpull and another Sunday ringing and pealing and chiming on the frosty air.

So the gray days died away and the hours of my lonely and sleepless nights increased, each hour deeper and darker and colder than the one before and with only the dummy — mockery of myself — to keep me company, to follow me through the cold night watch. Luckily I found an old brass bed warmer in the closet behind the trunks and every night I filled it with the last coals of the fire and carried it first to Cassandra’s room, devoted fifteen minutes to warming Cassandra’s bed, and then carried it across the hall — hot libation, hot offering to myself — and shoved it between the covers where it spent the night. And I would lie there in the darkness and everywhere, except in my feet, suffer the bruising effects of the flat frozen pillow and the cold mattress, and clutching my hands together and waiting, knowing that even the coals would cool, would remember one of Jomo’s phrases spoken when he thought I couldn’t hear — blue tit — and in the darkness would begin to say the phrase aloud — blue tit — aware that in some mysterious way it referred to the cold, referred to the way I felt, seemed to give actual substance, body, to the dark color and falling temperature of all my lonely and sleepless nights. Then I would dream with Jomo’s incantation still on my lips. And I would dream of Tremlow leading the mutiny, of Gertrude’s grave, of Fernandez mutilated in the flophouse, and I would awaken to the sound of the wind and the sight of my white spoiled uniform flapping and moaning on the dressmaker’s dummy. Blue tit. And at dawn a hard tissue-thin sheet of ice in the bottom of the basin, big block of ice in the pitcher, frozen splinters like carpet tacks when I stumbled to the bathroom to empty the bed warmer down the john. Standing in that bathroom, shivering, blinking, bed warmer hanging cold and heavy from my hand, I would always lean close to the bathroom mirror and read the message printed in ornate green type on a little square of wrinkled and yellowed paper which was pasted to the glass. Always read it and, no matter how cold I was, how tired, I would begin to smile.

Wake with a Loving Thought.

Work with a Happy Thought.

Sleep with a Gentle Thought.

I would begin to smile, begin to whistle. Because it tickled my fancy, that prayer, that message for the new day, and because it was a talisman against the horrors of blue tit and saved me, at least for a while, from the thought of the black brassiere.

So the changes of those cold days. Until the local children became glum Christmas sprites and the first snow fell at last-sudden soaring of asthma powder stench, dirty little volcanoes smoldering in every room — and the night of the local high school dance loomed out of the fresh wet snow and I, I too, was swept along into the glaring bathos of that high school dance. Kissing in the coatroom. Big business out back in the car. Little bright noses in the snow. Jomo’s hook in action. Beginning of our festive end.

“Ready, Skip? Ready yet, Candy? They’ll be here any sec. …”

Even in the cold and echoing bathroom — lead pipe, cracked linoleum, slabs of yellow marble — and even with the cold water running in the tap and the snow piling against the window and the old brown varnished door closed as far as it would go, still I could hear her calling to us from the parlor, hear the sound of her tread in the parlor. But though her voice rose up to us crisp and clear and bold — a snappy voice, a hailing voice, deeply resonant, pathetically excited — and though I resented being rushed and would never forgive her for daring to invent and use those perky names, especially for shouting up that cheap term of endearment for Cassandra when I, her father, had always yearned hopelessly for just this privilege, nonetheless it was Saturday night and the first snow was falling and I too was getting ready, after all, for the high school dance. So I could not really begrudge Miranda her excitement or her impatience. I too felt a curious need to hurry after all. And perhaps down there in the parlor — kicking the log, sloshing unsteady portions of whiskey into her glass, then striding to the window and trying to see out through the darkness and heavy snow — perhaps in some perverse way she was thinking of Don, though her chest was clear and though from time to time I could hear her laughing to herself down there.

Laughing while I was making irritable impatient faces in the bathroom mirror. Giving myself a close shave for the high school dance. Trying to preserve my own exhilaration against hers. And it was pleasurable. After a particularly good stroke I would set aside the razor and fling the water about as wildly as I could and snort, grind my eyes on the ends of the towel. Then step to the window for a long look at the black night and the falling snow.

Wet hands on the flaking white sill. Sudden shock in nose, chin, cheeks, sensation of the cold glass against the whole of my inquisitive face. Kerosene stove breathing into the seat of my woolen pants, eyes all at once accustomed to the dark, when suddenly it coalesced — soap, toothpaste, warm behind, the cold wet night — and I smiled and told myself I had nothing to fear from Red and saw myself poised hand in hand with Cassandra on the edge of the floor and smiling at the awkward postures and passions of the high school young. I stared out the window, tasting the soap on my lips, watching the snow collect in the black crotch of a tree — slick runnels in the bark, puckered wounds of lopped branches crowned with snow — that grew close to the window and glistened in the beam of the bathroom light, and I felt as if I were being tickled with the point of a sharp knife. Thank God for the sound of the tap and of Cassandra’s little thin shoe spanking across the puddles of the bathroom floor. I waited, face trembling with the coldness of the night.

“Skipper. Zip me up. Please.”

“Well, Cassandra,” I said, and turned to her, held out both hands wide to her, “How sad that Gertrude can’t see you now. But your dress, Cassandra, surely it’s not a mail-order dress?”

“Miranda made it for me,” tugging lightly at a flounce, twisting the waist, “she made it as a surprise for me to wear tonight. It has a pretty bow. You’ll see. It’s not too youthful, Skipper?”

“For you?” And I laughed, dropped my arms — antipathy toward my embrace? fear for the dress? — and wiped my hands on the towel, frowned at the thought of Miranda’s midnight sewing machine, stood while with straight arm and straight Angers she followed the healing needlework on my skin, traced out the letters of her lost husband’s name — did she, could she know what she was doing? know the shame I felt for the secret I still kept from her? — then by the shoulders I turned her so I could reach the dress where it hung open down her back. “Of course it’s not too young for you, Cassandra. Hardly.”

“And we’re not making a mistake tonight? We shouldn’t just stay home and let Miranda go to the dance alone with Red and Bub and,” pausing — moment of deference — whispering the name into the little clear cup of her collar bone, “and with Jomo?”