Amber Sparks - The Unfinished World - And Other Stories

She feels at home beyond the skies. She lied and said she came here to be close to God, but she feels further away from Him than ever. God was everywhere in the fields and farms of her childhood; God was on everybody’s lips and in their books and on their walls. God was the fire and the twisted face and the crippled-up preacher. God rose from the steam off the fields, crystallized in the oil puddles at the service station, was the cold stones in the neighbor’s pond after his boy died of polio. God was the iron lung around those family farms, squeezing, squeezing, and everybody dying inside.

She feels happiest near the deep green shadows pooled in the corners of the station, listening to the low hum against the endless silence of the stars. This feels safer than God. It feels honest. It feels removed from any human notion of heaven.

One night, she is scrubbing at a smudge on a window when the bearded Russian comes floating around the corner, pajama bottoms trailing and sleep-crusted eyes nearly shut. She pushes up, clings to the ceiling, breath held. But the Russian doesn’t even look her way; he glides past her to the wide wall of windows and puts his face to the glass like a child. Gde vy , he murmurs, and she doesn’t know what the words mean, but she understands. The pastor once said death was the gift of a wise god — and she wondered whether he really believed that. To her death seems the opposite of wisdom, the opposite of mystery, the opposite of being out here in this vast wondrous place. Death is the opposite of lonely, and lonely is the only thing the janitor owns. It is the only thing that’s hers. And that makes loneliness beautiful, out here among the cold and bright beginnings.

One month before the jazz babies were born, their father sacrificed himself on the altar of the god Mammon; that is to say, he finally overworked himself into a heart attack in the accounting offices of the J&J Department Stores Incorporated. The jazz babies’ mother never liked to talk about it. Mention of the incident gave her a tremendous attack of nerves, accompanied by a terrific headache. Ever since the father’s death (and probably before), she had become the sort of person who avoided telephone calls and rung doorbells in case they preceded bad news.

One day before the jazz babies were born, Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes was dancing the premiere performance of The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. This was across the Atlantic, it’s true, but the babies’ mother swore the ripples from the cataclysmic concert rocketed her into early labor and doomed her twins to a life of aggressively modern behavior and a love of dangerous music.

One hour before the jazz babies were born, Al Jolson was recording “You Made Me Love You,” for wax cylinder, a song the twins’ mother would sing to them often in the next year, while dreaming of the menswear salesman with whom she went dancing on Saturdays (after a respectable period of mourning). Fifteen years later, the jazz babies (so-called, self-named) are over the moon about Al Jolson tying the knot with Ruby Keeler. The twins have a dance act, and both hope they look like Ruby while soft-shoeing it on the front porch of their mother’s and the menswear salesman’s new bungalow.

The twins are blond with big heads, skinny bodies dangling below like strings under balloons. They are that mysterious age, not nymphets but not quite children; the age when awkward figures leave open the question of what they will develop into in a few short years. They lack grace but have a kind of buoyancy. It worries their mother, as does everything else under the sun, from animal attacks to the Oriental influence to modern bathing costumes.

It has been in all the papers, the menswear salesman tells the mother. Grown women wearing bathing costumes in the middle of the park, the palazzo, the promenade; gathering en masse in bathing costumes and eating pizza. Lips smacking, thighs jiggling, arm fat flapping — the salesman shudders and stops, unable to go on. The jazz babies’ mother does not own a bathing suit, and in church the next Sunday she prays, in her nervous, insincere way, for the souls of the sinners that do. She also prays for her first husband in heaven, for the neighbors’ yappy dog to drop dead, and for a new wireless set.

The jazz babies’ parents forbid them to continue their dancing on the porch. Once it was adorable, a sweet novelty to watch the two little girls, indistinguishable but for a small splotch of birthmark on the left heel of the eldest twin, hoofing it to the sounds of Hoagy Carmichael, Fats Waller, and Jelly Roll Morton. Their big finish had always been “Hard-Hearted Hannah (The Vamp of Savannah),” though the only reason they got away with it was that their mother, unfamiliar with Theda Bara, thought the lyrics were about chastity.

Now, however, they are attracting a different kind of crowd: leering men, drawn to the gangly girls’ early puberty and no longer quite innocent hip flares and flashes of skin. They went from the Charleston to the Black Bottom to the Lindy Hop — this last one, with its obscene shimmies and twists, giving their mother and the menswear salesman fits. Now when they shake what god gave them while Dolly Kay belts out “She’s a gal who loves to see men suffer,” the whole scene takes on a distinctly unwholesome tone. Grown men begin hanging around the bungalow after dark, watching the girls catch fireflies. They follow the girls to school, offer to carry their books, make marriage proposals behind hedges. It is as if these men — most of them well past forty and fathers themselves — can sense a sort of dormant, smoldering sexuality and want to be first on the scene when it bursts into full bloom. After the babies’ mother catches two men climbing through the bathroom window to wait for the inevitable, she quickly and hysterically puts a stop to the whole thing.

No more Lindy Hop, no more jazz, she tells them. No more vulgar public displays. If you want to dance you can take ballet lessons like every other nice little girl.

We’re not nice little girls, says jazz baby number one. Her name is Patience, but everyone calls her Patty. She’s the twin with the birthmark, just a minute older than her sibling.

That’s right, Mother, says jazz baby number two. Her name is Charity, but everybody calls her Cat. She, born second, always agrees with her elder sibling. We aren’t nice and we aren’t little girls, either.

I don’t care what you are, says the menswear salesman, I’m not having the pair of you prancing around like showgirls. I paid for this place by the sweat of my brow and by god, I won’t have you girls turning it into a house of sin. The menswear salesman, like many middle-class men of his age, is always talking about his house: the work he’s done on his house, how much he paid for his house, and the sweat and tears and blood that flooded the purchase and upkeep of his house. The twins like to mock these bourgeois concerns. They are bright girls, emerging razor sharp through the fuzzy haze of puberty, and not the sort to forgive sentimentality. They are hard-hearted Hannahs, Cat and Patty. They are emblems of this new age, tricksters unable to be tricked. And as they go into temporary retreat after the belt and the broom are threatened, they start making plans to kill their parents.

They change their imaginary stage name, from the Blue Falls County Jazz Babies to the Lizzie Borden Jazz Babies. They wonder how much an ax weighs and if they are strong enough to wield one. Separately? Together? They draw detailed pictures and check out all the books about Lizzie they can find in the library. They discuss ways to blame a killing on intruders. They discuss ways they could charm the police. They play their records on the gramophone, over and over, and dance the Lindy in the sad solitude of their bungalow bedroom. “To tease them and thrill them, to torture and kill them, is her delight, they say. .” They study hard and get good grades, to deflect suspicion. They take ballet lessons.