Kirstin Allio: Clothed, Female Figure: Stories

Old ladies let their cats out in the “garden” and a single slender tree dropped thorns on the concrete. If I couldn’t sleep I went to the window and watched the neighbor with the chronically overstuffed mailbox smoking in an undershirt in the first gray light of morning.

I discovered a bar on a side street with a row of tired awnings. The drinks were three dollars, which fit my budget. I couldn’t find a name anywhere, a dreamlike aspect that appealed to me. My calm increased until I could measure the exact tick, tock of my heartbeat.

Sometimes I watched the door for hours, until the dulled metal seemed to rub off like a silver lottery card you scratch with a penny. My mother drank California wine at noon and again in the evening. I squinted down the bar to count ice cubes in sweaty cocktails. I remembered how the floor of her little pickup truck rolled with empty bottles.

My mother was sunk in a clearing called Crepe Myrtle. The road became dirt, then two mud tracks, a path, a set of footprints, until it untwisted in the cemetery. My mother’s ankles, in contrast to Hillary Rice’s, had been starchy and tuberous as Jerusalem artichokes. The skin on her throat folded four ways like an envelope. The McNamaras wrote me a letter saying that for twenty years they had urged her to wear sunblock. And P.S., skin cancer has a heritability rate of X percent, Rosemary. I left my mother’s wide-brimmed straw hat with the blue jay feather in a carefully cultivated pink quince thicket.

The first time I addressed my employer by her name, she let out a strangled chirp and jumped back like a titmouse.

I was quiet for several weeks afterward.

But I began to notice that I wasn’t getting anywhere. The sorting became resorting, reshuffling. It’s called a circular reference, when the numbers get tangled and loop. A human error the formula can’t account for. Numbers don’t behave like that on their own. My mother had laughed when I told her the things I learned in accounting. The nurse, alarmed, retreated, and the doctor reading charts by the window began to fidget with his earlobe. My mother’s laugh was too loud for someone who was dying.

“Sotheby’s, ’91,” Hillary Rice pointed. “Over here. And here,” she jabbed, “Christie’s. Parlor furnishings.” Sometimes a catalog demanded membership to two, or more, categories, and my employer flipped her stiff green hair between adjacent piles before she signaled. None were discarded.

“1999 will look so quaint in a few months,” remarked my employer.

My mother was in charge of forty acres. No mule. I trailed behind her. When I was old enough to go to school the McNamaras arranged for the bus to come out to their property. I guess they were glad to get something for their taxes. When the emptied bus returned me to the dungeon-like entrance, I punched in the code on the alarm pad and watched the gate slowly stretch open. There was my mother surveying the pithy stalks of hydrangeas, pushing mulch over peonies.

Blooms browned and wilted and dropped to become compost for the very plant they came from. Winter turned mulch into a new layer of skin, a matted web through which the anemones poked up albino feelers. My mother raised her own vegetables, too, before she got sick, and sold them in town off her truck in the summer.

I thought of the nurse who had shown me how to rub my mother’s purple feet for circulation.

“But you never get ahead in gardening,” the nurse was saying.

We each held a foot so dense with blood it felt boneless. The nurse had demonstrated how to go around the ankle in a figure eight. My mother made an unfamiliar noise in her throat and I wondered if she could hear us. There were layers of voices in the hospital. My mother trying to clear her throat was the sound of a caveman. A static-filled page emanated from the ceiling and the nurse fled us. My mother looked a hundred. A dark, twisted-up root with the little root hairs still clinging.

Once, the McNamaras sent flowers. Not flowers from the garden, but chilled carnations the color of antacid tablets. I grabbed them out of the vitamin-enriched water and stuffed them in “biohazard.” My mother made the noise again and her eyes tensed like she was passing a very bright sun in another solar system.

Hillary Rice began to talk in short yaps directed at some point on the blank wall behind me. “I’ll be staying here this weekend.” The dog had stopped going to her when she talked. He licked my calf contentedly. “You’ll have to get the upholstered dining sets out of the bedroom.” She did not mean real furniture. I suddenly realized I had never wondered where she slept during the week, and whether she took the dog with her.

When I came in on Monday the apartment smelled of cucumber bath wash and sweet, beige face powder. There were no food smells. I couldn’t imagine Hillary cooking. Instead of chiseled pumps she wore tasseled slippers. I heard the icemaker in the kitchen bang out another glass worth.

Now I was fairly certain my work sorting catalogs had no cumulative intent, so I began to clock in at the bar on a daily basis. I sat on a stool, a neighborhood regular (the college kids sprawled in booths; I became old for my age at my mother’s passing), and the bartender exchanged my melted drink for a new one without asking. I admired his mental calculations, the column of subtraction from a twenty slapped down on the bar by a peremptory patron. The couple next to me had come in with a bunch of Easter lilies from a bodega wrapped in white paper, and the bartender gave them a beer pitcher with water. The fragrance of the big, white flowers overpowered the bar smell of smoke and vinegar. I thought of telling my mother that every night they trucked flowers in through the tunnels.

Stepping into the dim of the bar was like entering winter. There was no work in winter. When my mother had carted away the Christmas wreaths and laurel roping we were free till March. My mother went to my teachers in her heavy boots, broad, chapped cheeks, and handed them the note that either I or Setta McNamara had written. Please give Rosemary the lessons she’ll be missing.

There was something fierce and forceful in my mother’s shyness — as I innocently named it — so that the schoolgirls with whom I missed forming friendships avoided me in the warm weather also.

I learned that regulars called the bar The Sign because there was none. But inside, the walls were plastered with bizarre and truncated language. I had to shut my eyes against the Lysol-slick graffiti in the bathroom. New York City slang was no different from the slang on the inside of the stalls at gas stations, rest stops anywhere across America. My mother used to come in with me and block the door with no lock, lopsided hinges. We never mentioned the women at the mirrors, patting on makeup, plumping a hairdo. She treated my long hair like a plant. Watering and dead-heading but never styling.

The bartender’s name was Joe and he gave me a Greek coffee boiled in a copper pot. It was so thick and sweet it cut through the drinking. I noticed he bit his nails to the quick at the old-fashioned register. Once I tried to talk, offering up my employer, the overwarm, custardy smell of her dog. I offered up my mother, who had been fifty years old when she had me. She was raped in her own vegetable garden in the late fall, pulling out bean vines and the leftover tangles of tomatoes.

One hell-hot day toward September I felt Hillary Rice’s gaze upon me. My movements down among the piles became haphazard, so that I had to stop and acknowledge her. She chinked her nails against the chlorine-colored Pernod and water.

Up to now she had voiced no complaints about my work. It crossed my mind she might have finally detected my heart wasn’t in it.

“We can thank Setta McNamara,” she said slyly.