Edward, woken that day by a particularly crippling fugue of melancholy, could not contend with the figure at his door. He could barely even follow the sounds and images of his television. He’d been dreaming of Helena again.
She’d been waiting for him for hours in a Victorian greenhouse, ready for a road trip they’d planned carefully, her evenly worn leather bag packed and her hair tightly braided, but he was stuck in a club, trying to squeeze in one last gig: he’d been sweating under the lights, telling the audience about how his mother used to lock him inside for days, and tasting the blood that was filling his mouth.
“Have what?” he mumbled, reminding himself that the day was happening to him, despite his brain urging him elsewhere. He found it laughable that anyone could believe he possessed anything of transferable value. In his long-unwashed corduroys, lacking the crucial fly button and permanently tented open, with his beard that grew in temperamental patches and smelled of inexpensive soup, he stood and waited for her to clarify her accusation. He felt a pathetic thrill at the opportunity to expound upon how little he had.
“You’ve got my checkbook,” she hissed, pointing at him. “I know you do!”
“I do, huh?” He knew it was wrong to indulge her, but something acidic in his body had turned over. “Is that how I’ve managed to finance this luxurious lifestyle of mine? Cars and women, all the time? Why don’t you come in! View my collection of expired milk and secondhand sweaters! Gilded! Rare!”
Unfazed by his teasing, Edith shuffled closer with the determination of a prospector, her elbows forming sharp angles.
“Woolworth’s called. You’re buying up the jewelry department on my dime, you big-nosed faggot!”
“Listen,” said Edward. He found that the nastiness he felt towards himself shifted easily to another target. “Why don’t you just head back downstairs in your crazy hat and fix yourself a cup of bathwater tea, pick a fight with one of your moldy couches—”
Edith’s invented anger coursed through her thin body and she shoved him, but the reality of her lunge was slow, and Edward easily backed away. In a moment that felt much later and unbearably quiet, he looked down at her form laid across the doorframe, watched her hat as it lolled on the floor in a slowly diminishing half-life: he could understand time was advancing only from the movements of the felt brim on the hardwood. Edith’s open mouth made little gasps, and a thread of saliva trembled and played between her lower and upper lips.
“Thief,” she breathed and repeated, in and out, the false word finding lodging in her body.
—
TEN MINUTES LATER, Edward had arranged Edith on his chest and bent his knees in preparation for the first step down. He had determined that nothing was broken, but she refused to ambulate on her own, had remained bubbling the beginnings of sentences from her prone position in his entryway. His left arm cradled the blues and purples of her legs, and his right tensed against her shoulder blades. Her hat, which he had placed back on her head, obstructed his view as he felt his way down the steps, and her breath sounded in strained puffs from her unevenly pink-frosted lips. She began to sing.
Pardon me boy, is that the Chattanooga Choo-choo?
Right on track twenty-nine, boy can you give me a shine?
Edward knew this song. His mother, though pathologically joyless, used to play this 45 as if to say, I was once a person who wore dresses, took trains, looked out windows.
I can afford to board the Chattanooga Choo-choo,
I’ve got my fare and just a trifle to spare.
He whistled with her as her voice traveled down to the foyer like a recording slowly warping, the notes faltering in their execution.
You leave the Pennsylvania station at a quarter to four,
read a magazine and then you’re in Baltimore;
dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer,
than to have your ham and eggs in Carolina.
On the landing, finally resigned to the absurdity and the necessity of it, he shuffled his feet and put his throat into the next bit of song—Shovel all the coal in, gotta keep it rollin’—and raised up the dust from the maroon runner in several waves. Edward surfaced from his performance to see a man who appeared composed of only sharp angles standing in the foyer, where the light caught his gold-watched wrist. He removed the sunglasses from his bronze cheeks, folded them into the top button of a crisp pink shirt and sighed, even that sound precise.
“Mother,” the man said. His presentation of the word was hard, useful, as though he’d addressed a gas station cashier, asked for ten dollars on number six. Just inside Edward’s line of vision, Edith’s cheeks filled with blood. On the back of his chilled neck, her nails dug for a better hold. The brass mailboxes glinted, and the agitated air smelled like a garage thrown open to meet the street.