Honeydew: Stories Read online

  “Wasn’t that thing fake mink?” asked Pam anxiously.

  “It was real sable,” Donna said. “This Mimi doesn’t know about animal rights. She has no experience with people who are down and out. She has no experience with mental disorder or substance abuse.”

  No. But Donna aimed to give her guests a haven from do-gooders and mental-health busybodies—people who pushed change. When a woman lunched at the Ladle she couldn’t indulge her habit but she wasn’t badgered about renouncing it. She couldn’t slug anybody but she didn’t have to listen to antiviolence yak. She couldn’t flush socks down the toilet, but she could warn her friends about the socks’ radioactivity as long as she kept her voice reasonably low. She could be herself.

  Mimi’s closest rivals during the hiring process were a light-skinned black woman who sang in a church choir and whose grandchildren had made her wise in the ways of the street, and a social worker serving as adviser to a radical state senator. Either candidate would have been a breeze to justify to the board. But the staff sensed a streak of punitiveness in the first and a wearying righteousness in the second. Mimi wanted to make things better for people, but she seemed to have no wish to make people better. “Or she keeps that wish under her hat,” the rabbi sighed. “I do warm to that singing grandmother.” Then he agreed to hire Mimi.

  “You are very gracious,” Donna said. “Steve,” she managed to add.

  Mimi at first gave Donna no cause for regret. She was indeed a much better than fair cook. She could take a meager amount of cod donated by a fish market half an hour before it turned and make it the basis for an abundant chowder. “Toss that out,” she said to a volunteer who was refrigerating the leftover soup. “If we eat it tomorrow we’ll be dead by nightfall.” Mimi could transform a few scraps of lamb into a bountiful shepherd’s pie. “Potatoes, all you ever need is potatoes,” she explained to Donna with her gleaming smile. “I can make potatoes into a dessert. Into a shake, too, with a little whiskey. I’m part Irish, you know.”

  “The other part must have studied at the Cordon Bleu,” Donna said.

  “The other part—part of the other part—is Romany. I come from a long line of horse thieves.”

  Maybe—she was wily enough. When the board of health decreed that kitchen workers cover their hands, Mimi teased a gross of surgical gloves from a dental-supply house. When a restaurant failed in New Hampshire, she borrowed Rabbi Steve’s car and drove north and returned with hundreds of stainless place settings, purchased very cheap. She flew to every yard sale in town and bought defective board games for a quarter each. After several weeks of collecting, she persuaded a few guests to spend a rainy Friday making whole games out of parts. By the end of the day they had three sets of Monopoly, two sets of Clue, two Connect Fours, and lots of full sets of checkers. While the women were working, Mimi knocked together a Lego holdall, a knee-high case with subdivided shelves. She fenced the compartments halfway up with nylon and labeled them: TWO-BY-EIGHT; EIGHT-BY-EIGHT; FLAT PIECES, WINDOWS…

  Donna, on her way out, paused to admire this construction: what a boon to kids whose only play space was the Ladle’s small children’s room. “That barrel we kept the Legos in was driving me crazy,” Mimi said. She was kneeling on the floor, still hammering. There was sawdust on her jeans, her tee, even a few yellow grains on her translucent hair. She spat out the last nail. “The kids had to turn the barrel upside down anytime they wanted to build a tower.”

  As a reward for the afternoon’s labor Mimi took the women out for pizza and a bottle of Chianti. On Monday Donna offered reimbursement from petty cash.

  “Oh, Donna, the wine, I shouldn’t have, you don’t want the Ladle to enable anyone…”

  “It was grape juice; I have it on the best authority. Thirty-five enough?”

  “A little too much. But I know where I can get some Lego wheels.”

  Donna’s baby was due in December. By the beginning of November a sense of imminent maternity seemed to hang over the Ladle. Or was it imminent madness? More people than usual were touchy, defiant, in trouble with caseworkers, in trouble with parole officers. Several got picked up by the police because of threatening behavior. Donna knew she was partly responsible for the unraveling—she was providing one more desertion for souls who had been deserted too often.

  Miss Valentine and O-Kay were cruelly bedeviled. Unwelcome visitors inhabited Miss Valentine’s large black body. Voices told her what to do and say, even when what she did and said caused her landlady to call the police and the police to suggest that she keep a nonactionable tongue in her mouth. Miss Valentine’s children had all been taken from her except for the ones she herself had abandoned on the island where she was born. When the voices were silent Miss Valentine muttered to herself, as if keeping the conversation up.

  Pale O-Kay talked out loud to anyone who would listen. She bragged that she was in charge of innumerable children, some hers and some awarded by the state. She was the little young woman who lived in a shoe. The shoe was her old car. In fact, O-Kay’s children were illusory. She slept alone in her car. She had an unnerving tic; often her whole body shook.

  Mimi talked often with Miss Valentine and O-Kay. Donna saw their three heads bent toward one another over bowls of cooling soup. She couldn’t catch the conversation, but she could see O-Kay’s shoulder quiver and Miss Valentine’s mouth move, and she could hear Mimi’s tone of priestly softness. Had the Ladle been infiltrated by a religious in drag? That legislative aide they’d thought about hiring, for all her high-flown ideas, was at least an atheist like the rest of the staff.

  “Miss Valentine is possessed,” Mimi reported to Donna in her ordinary voice. “O-Kay is possessed too.”

  “I suppose I am possessed,” Donna said lightly. Her baby stirred.

  “Literally you are. And you’ll be delivered of a lovely infant. But Miss Valentine and O-Kay can’t rid themselves of their demons, not without help.”

  “Miss Valentine and O-Kay have gone off their medications.”

  “Not without help,” Mimi repeated with a husky intensity. “Those demons, they cling to the innards with red claws.”

  “It’s our mission to meet the women where they are—”

  Mimi’s blue gaze caught her like the beam of a lighthouse.

  “—and not to interpose our own values,” Donna finished, blinking helplessly.

  In early November, on the Friday afternoon before a long weekend, a guest’s child—the middle boy of three—staggered in with his arms around a wood and mesh cage. He had won a lottery: he got to take home the class gerbils. “Home!” his mother snorted. “We ain’t got room even for the TV—had to sell it. Your aunt is having another baby—did you forget that?” She turned to Donna. “We leave these critters here, right? And you’ll visit them on Monday,” she said to her son, who was silent. He was accustomed to disappointment, and he didn’t dare appeal to Donna, since he knew that she knew that he often left the Ladle with Legos in his pockets.

  The mother stormed off with her progeny. “All right,” Donna said to her retreating back. Donna herself could drop in on the weekend to feed the animals. The boy’s mother would probably decide to suffer them on Monday night.

  But she didn’t. She didn’t come in on Monday or Tuesday. Then one of the volunteers got word that the whole family, pregnant sister included, had left for Mississippi. Who knew where in Mississippi? And who knew where in the Boston area they had lived? It was the Ladle’s policy not to ask questions. Who knew what third grade in which school was grieving for its lost gerbils?

  At the staff meeting Mimi suggested that the gerbils be declared official mascots. Donna proposed finding them a berth elsewhere. She pointed out that deprived women first go weepy over animals and then identify with them; the Ladle would soon drown in self-pity.

  This reasoning met silence. That singing grandmother would have agreed with Donna—she’d no doubt sent many a stray cat packing. Donna mentioned the wretched guest who, by carefully l
eaving wrapped food for the alley rats, had brought the wrath of the church upon their heads.

  Mimi leaned forward. “The gerbils are entertaining,” she said calmly, “and maybe we’ll find some off-label use for them,” she added, looking first at Donna and then at Pam, who said, “Let’s give it a try,” and the management of the Ladle passed from Donna to Pam at that moment, as it was supposed to do, as Donna had meant it to do, as she had dreaded its doing since the day she noticed that her period was late.

  Donna, swallowing, reminded herself of Pam’s fidelity to the Ladle’s values of nonintervention, uninquisitiveness, and tolerance.

  At first the two gerbils seemed indifferent to their good fortune. They just sniffed their toys, rode their wheel, gobbled their pellets of food, chewed on cardboard toilet-paper rolls. Then one weekend Mimi built a platform for the cage, and on Monday she placed it in the middle of the dining room. “Now they are integrated into our community,” O-Kay said. To Donna they looked above the community, little high priests. Sometimes they stood up with their claws on the bars and silently orated, bits of cardboard clinging to their mouths like cigars.

  “They speak in tongues,” Miss Valentine claimed. “Français,” she clarified.

  The gerbils’ new position in the center of the room tempted guests to feed them. Pam warned that the gerbils would soon refuse their usual food. “They’ll become tyrants.” But some women couldn’t resist spoiling the animals, and on certain days the gerbils’ confused friskiness followed by torpor indicated that they had been treated to booze as well as salad. After a few overfed weeks they grew bored with their wheel. Instead of chewing the cardboard rolls they crawled inside them. “They’re shooting up,” O-Kay said.

  By December, a very wet month, almost everybody was sharing lunch with the gerbils. Pam stopped urging restraint, since the animals now turned up their snouts at anything except fresh vegetables. Also, constant rain was making the whole crowd more irritable than ever; best not to notice minor infractions. In front of the church the street ran like a river. The newspapers used the word deluge every day. “The Almighty wants to get rid of talk radio,” Rabbi Steve explained.

  The church’s subcommittee on social action, dripping, made a surprise inspection of the facility. The chairwoman, speaking for the committee, suggested that the presence of rodents so near food was unhygienic. Mimi treated the speaker to her level gaze; the chairwoman looked alarmed, as if she sensed that her own coven could be dispatched by a wink of that sapphire eye. Then Mimi lowered her lids and stood like a penitent with the rest of the staff, their hands in hastily donned surgical gloves crossed on their breasts or clasped at their waists, except for Donna’s, whose were splayed on her belly.

  One of the volunteers interrupted the tense silence by suggesting coffee. Miss Valentine, talking to herself, appeared with a tray of unopened dinner packets that had just been delivered by a Sabena airline steward on his way home. The site visit turned into a party.

  The rains continued. Mushrooms appeared overnight on lawns. O-Kay fed some of them to the gerbils. “Enjoy your sweet life while you can,” she told them. “Because someday soon…”

  “Shut your hole,” Miss Valentine said, and she hit O-Kay on the side of the head with her pocketbook. Miss Valentine was immediately barred for twenty-four hours by the staff. A volunteer put her arm around O-Kay. O-Kay ducked under the arm, embraced Pam, and began to shake uncontrollably. Pam suggested that O-Kay lie down. The volunteer burst into tears. Donna suggested that she lie down. The gerbils passed out, but they woke up half an hour later with no apparent ill effects.

  Still the rains came. Storefronts gleamed coldly in the brief intervals of pale sunlight. The alley behind the church bubbled with mud, and a black lake formed in front of the stairs leading to the Ladle’s door.

  Donna too would soon be awash. Her sac of amniotic fluid was just holding. On the Wednesday of the second week in December she felt a mild wrench. She had a doctor’s appointment that afternoon. Leaving, she recklessly told a little clutch of women that the baby, male, would be theirs to name.

  “Oh, Jesus, Donna,” groaned Pam, but her voice was drowned out by suggestions: Achille, Nelson, Steve…

  The obstetrician looked pleased during the examination. “Any day,” she said.

  Donna returned to the Ladle. The Cuisinart had broken again; maybe she could fix it before the baby came. And O-Kay’s car had sprung some new leaks. She’d speak to O-Kay about spending a night or two in a shelter.

  In the alley Donna paused dreamily before the big puddle. The rain had stopped, probably only briefly, just to tease them. The sky was a deepening mauve. The puddle was the color of garnets. Beyond this jeweled lake the three stone steps descended damply to the Ladle’s door, which was slightly ajar, as if by inadvertence. But that heavy door couldn’t have been left ajar accidentally. Donna squinted. A brick made of Legos had been inserted between the door and its jamb. She walked around the puddle to the nearest ground-level window and lowered herself into its well, her sneakered feet sinking into decaying leaves. She peered into the dining room.

  O-Kay and Miss Valentine and Mimi sat side by side at one of the long tables. On the back of each chair was draped a coat—O-Kay’s schoolgirl parka; Miss Valentine’s black sateen trench coat, plucked from donations one lucky day; Mimi’s suede garment, the fur hat resting on its shoulder. The cage of gerbils had been removed from the platform and now occupied most of the center of the table.

  For a while all three gazed at the cage. Then Mimi lifted its gate. The gerbils ran out. Mimi lowered the gate.

  From the window well Donna moaned aloud. The creatures would head right for the pantry. They’d get into the rice or the cornmeal. She’d have to call the exterminator again, and throw out half the dry produce.

  But the animals surprised her. They raced not for the kitchen but for the hall leading to the back door. She lost sight of them. She stood up in the well in time to see them leaping over the Lego brick. Pell-mell, with all the willfulness of the crazed, they ran up the cement stairs and into the lake. There they drowned.

  Donna sat down again. Mimi was replacing the cage on its platform. O-Kay and Miss Valentine were putting on their outerwear. O-Kay wasn’t shuddering and Miss Valentine’s mouth was closed. Even on medication they had never looked so placid. Then the two disappeared from Donna’s view, like the gerbils. She transferred her gaze to the door and saw Miss Valentine pushing it open. Miss Valentine and O-Kay climbed the stairs. They skirted the puddle and companionably got into O-Kay’s car and drove away.

  Mimi, wearing coat and hat, stooped to pick up the Lego brick. She put it into her pocket and pushed the door open and climbed the steps while the door closed behind her, locking itself. She bent over the puddle where the drowned animals eddied. She retrieved them with her right hand, which was protected by a surgical glove. She lifted the lid of the nearby dumpster with her ungloved hand. She tossed in the corpses and lowered the lid.

  “What about that empty cage?” Donna called from the well.

  “Steve will deliver a new pair of gerbils tomorrow,” Mimi said. She peeled off her glove and raised the dumpster lid again. The glove arced palely into the trash. She walked to the window well. “If you stay there any longer, your baby will be born with the sniffles,” she predicted.

  Donna extended her hand and Mimi took it and helped Donna climb out of the well. They stood for a moment, hand grasping hand, like friends who have known each other long but never intimately and who now must say good-bye.

  “I look forward to volunteering under your supervision,” Donna made herself say. She discovered that once said it sounded true and perhaps even was true. “That business with the beasties—an inventive cure for madness, transferring the demons. Though of course you need animals always at the ready…” She trailed off.

  “We’ll have them,” Mimi said.

  Fishwater

  Truth lies within a little and certain compass.r />
  —Viscount Bolingbroke

  It took my aunt Toby twenty years to profit enough from fictohistoriographia to give up teaching, to release the two of us from New York, to realize her dream of buying a house on Lake Piscataqua in New England. But at last, the year the century turned, we could afford the very house she had in mind. We packed up the little Eighth Street apartment—furniture and a few treasures: the Turkish rug, the Dutch menorah. Toby held what you might call an exit interview. The interviewer was a young reporter from a literary rag. I sat in.

  “Fast and loose? I?” Toby repeated to him. “With men or women?”

  “With data. It’s been suggested. I heard,” said the flustered fellow.

  “No. Not. Not on your backside,” Aunt Toby said. “Never have I claimed something to be true that I knew was not true—or claimed something to be true that was discovered to be false.”

  “Fabrications, they say…”

  “Oh, fabrications. Literally, yes. I make things up out of whole cloth—that’s to fabricate definitions one and two. One: ‘to make; create.’ Two: ‘to construct by combining or assembling diverse parts, as in to fabricate small boats.’ However, three: ‘to concoct in order to deceive, as in to fabricate an excuse’—I don’t do that, darling.” He blushed. “I concoct,” she continued, “but only to illuminate! How could I possibly write a history of, say, the Slavic cleverness employed in the Battle of Thessalonica without adding some tricks of my own divining?”

  The Battle of Thessalonica left traces of itself in old histories. All the rest—the winged mercenaries, their pinions fabricated from cloth, the boy spy Dimitry and his pal the giant Vladimir, one on the other’s shoulders—is Toby’s doing, imagined by her dedicated intellect, unprovable, also undisprovable. The art of fictohistoriographia has been perfected by her, and without it the world would be a poorer place. So always said Mr. Franz Szatmar, her steady admirer. Franz Szatmar of the deep eyes, the major nose, the transparent hair fluttering on either side of his narrow forehead.