The Late Child

  But then the news came of Pepper’s death, and the bombs of grief began exploding. The part of her heart where the maternal emotions stayed sort of got smacked by one of the bombs. The emotions were still there, somewhere, but they were buried beneath the rubble and dust, like the homes of people in Sarajevo. Every now and then, while Eddie was rolling the cable channels with the remote, he would release the button at CNN, and there would be shots from Yugoslavia or Israel or somewhere, showing people whose homes had just been bombed or otherwise destroyed. The people who had lived in the homes, if they survived, would just be wandering around looking blank, as if they could no longer quite get a grip on what life meant, or think of what they were supposed to do next. Some dug in the rubble with spades, hoping to unearth a possession or two, but most just wandered around looking blank.

  Harmony sympathized; she thought she knew a little of what they felt—or maybe, how they didn’t feel. Mainly, that was how it was with her, a sense of not feeling. She had had it that afternoon at the Statue of Liberty, but it wore off while they were in G.’s dirty white bus, stuck in the Holland Tunnel. Harmony hadn’t realized they were in a tunnel, at first. She was sitting in the back of the school bus, and hadn’t really been paying much attention to the road. The bus had been stopped about five minutes, inching into the Holland Tunnel, before Harmony came out of her numbed state sufficiently to realize that something unusual was happening. She realized it when she saw Pat trying to rip the blue seat cushions off a row of seats in G.’s bus. All the turban men except G. himself were looking at her sternly, and trying to get her to stop ripping the cushions off the seats.

  G., though, with only about a sixteenth of an inch separating his bus from a shiny white stretch limo, had to concentrate on his driving and couldn’t take part in the defense of his seats.

  “Do not rip up seat!” Salah said, frowning.

  “Little children need to sit on these seats, very important,” Omar said. “Many little children need to sit on the seat, every day.”

  “This cushion might save my life if this tunnel cracks open and the ocean comes pouring in,” Pat said. “I got a right to use any flotation device I can find, and this is the only one I can find.”

  “Neddie, what’s she doing?” Harmony asked. “Where are we? Why would Pat need a flotation device?”

  “Because we’re under the ocean, or whatever this body of water is that’s on top of the tunnel,” Neddie said.

  “We’re under the ocean?” Harmony said, suddenly remembering that she was still a mom; she also suddenly remembered that she was very claustrophobic.

  “Why do we have to be in a tunnel—couldn’t we find a bridge?” she asked. The walls of the tunnel were only a few inches from the sides of the school bus; she was beginning to feel very claustrophobic.

  “If you two believed in predestination—it’s Baptist doctrine—then you wouldn’t be having fits,” Neddie said. “If we’re meant to die in a tunnel under the ocean then we will, but if we ain’t meant to die in a tunnel under the ocean then there’s nothing to worry about and Pat don’t need to be tearing up G.’s seats.”

  “I thought there were bridges, where’s Brooklyn?” Harmony asked.

  G. succeeded in edging just in front of the stretch limousine, but the bus was still pointing down, deeper into the tunnel. Harmony was beginning to remember that her claustrophobia wasn’t just a minor thing, it was a major thing—it was just that in a desert city like Las Vegas there were no tunnels to activate it. About the worst Las Vegas had to offer was the parking garage at Caesar’s, which had real low ceilings.

  “G. is accomplished driver, he knows best routes,” Abdul said, shocked that a bunch of infidel women would think to question G.’s decision to use the Holland Tunnel.

  “Bridges under construction,” Omar said, just as they approached a flashing orange sign blocking the right lane of the tunnel. The sign said: TUNNEL UNDER CONSTRUCTION: EXPECT MAJOR DELAYS.

  Harmony had been told by someone, probably Gary, that the best cure for claustrophobia was to chew gum vigorously. She began to rummage in her purse, hoping to find some gum that she could chew vigorously, but she couldn’t find any.

  Neither Pat nor Neddie had gum. Pat was annoyed that Harmony would even bother her with such a request, when she needed to devote all her strength to ripping the cushion off her seat.

  “It pisses me off that the last person I made love to was Rog,” she said. “If I’d known something like this was going to happen I’d have tried to find someone a little more studly.”

  “You’re heartless, Pat,” Neddie said. “For all you know, that poor man was blown to smithereens in a gas explosion.”

  Harmony suddenly recovered her maternal feelings; she had a great longing to see Eddie.

  Salah began to stare at Pat intently. Her dissatisfaction with what she assumed would be her final love act aroused his sympathy—and his sympathy was not the only thing it aroused.

  “Organ available for love act,” he announced. “Plenty bus seats available for pleasing actions.”

  “Why are these Arabs always talking about their dicks?” Pat asked.

  “Because they’re guys,” Harmony said. “I hope Laurie and Sheba remember that Eddie doesn’t like cauliflower. If they try to serve him cauliflower he might go on a hunger strike.”

  She was beginning to shake a little.

  “Harmony, it’s just a tunnel,” Neddie said. “Everything will be fine. At least it will be if we don’t have to watch Pat get seduced by Salah.”

  “No way, I’m holding out for someone American-made,” Pat said.

  “Pleasant coition on bus seats,” Salah said, though his hopes were fading. “Much joy comes from good-sized organ.”

  “Salah is braggart,” Abdul said. “Organ is nothing special.”

  “Besides that, he needs a shave,” Pat said.

  Harmony’s claustrophobia was getting worse. The fact that nobody had any chewing gum made her feel a little desperate, so desperate that when Omar finally understood her problem and offered her some betel nut she immediately accepted it, much to her sisters’ dismay.

  “Harmony, you don’t have to take some weird drug just because we’re in a tunnel,” Pat said.

  “This seat must have been glued on with Super Glue,” she added, sinking down on the seat she had hoped to use as a flotation device.

  “That’s a foreign drug, Harmony,” Neddie said.

  “You got no room to talk, you’re addicted to all kinds of prescriptions,” Pat told her.

  “Mostly just codeine cough syrup,” Neddie said. “It’s not as bad as taking some Arab drug that you never heard of.”

  “We may be in this tunnel all night,” Harmony said. “I feel like getting out and taking my chances on foot.”

  G. turned and looked stern.

  “Do not leave bus,” he said. “Take more betel nut.”

  Harmony took G.’s advice. At least it gave her jaws something to do, other than just being clenched from the tension of her claustrophobia.

  “We was in that tunnel forty-seven minutes,” Neddie said, when they finally emerged and were in New York City. Another of Neddie’s odd habits was her habit of timing events, or even things that didn’t feel very much like events.

  “I guess if I was getting strangled you’d time it,” Pat said.

  “I don’t see what harm it does to time things,” Neddie said, a little offended that her sisters thought there was something weird about her timing their passage through the Holland Tunnel.

  Now they were all safe in Laurie’s apartment, though, and Eddie was back from six TV appearances. Iggy had been sleeping in Otis’s coat pocket: Otis wore an old green parka with capacious pockets. Once Iggy was awake, though, he began to scamper about as if he had lived in Laurie’s apartment all his life.

  “There’s plenty of room here for you guys,” Laurie said, to Sheba and Otis. “Just grab a blanket and roll yourselves up somewhere.” Otis ac
cepted a blanket, but Sheba just took off her wig and curled up on the end of the couch.

  “Keeping up with Ed wore everybody out,” Otis said, covering Sheba with his blanket. He lay down on the floor and pulled the hood of his parka over his head.

  “Sure nice not to be in no Dumpster,” he said. “Too many old soggy tomatoes gets thrown in that Dumpster.”

  “Harmony, you have a famous child—would you like some tea?” Laurie asked.

  “Isn’t there a better neighborhood than this, in New York City?” Pat asked.

  “Plenty of better neighborhoods, I just can’t afford them,” Laurie said. “I didn’t make much money even when I had a job, and now I don’t have a job. I’ll probably have to sink even lower than this, if I want to stay in New York.”

  Harmony was hoping everybody would go to sleep—maybe when they did Laurie would talk about Pepper. She had already looked through Laurie’s scrapbooks two or three times. As she watched Laurie move about the apartment, serving tea or putting blankets over people, she tried to imagine how it must have been with just Laurie and Pepper living there together. She tried to see a kind of movie in her mind, of Laurie and Pepper in their days of happiness. She wanted to know where Pepper sat, and whether she had been helpful in the kitchen—of course Pepper had been brought up to be helpful in the kitchen, but she had been a teenager when she left for New York, she might have forgotten those habits. Also, Harmony wanted to know if Laurie and Pepper held hands and were friendly and sweet when they were alone together, or if they bickered like women sometimes did, or what.

  “I can’t even glance around this place without having some memory of her,” Laurie said later, when everyone but herself and Harmony had nodded off. “Come on into the bedroom and let me show you some of her clothes. Pepper had good taste right to the end. She would have spent every cent we have on clothes if I’d let her.”

  “She always had better taste than I did,” Harmony admitted, as they were looking at Pepper’s clothes. “She always thought I dressed a little tacky.

  “Did you two disagree a lot?” she asked Laurie.

  “Well, she bossed me,” Laurie said. “I hate quarreling, so I didn’t get my way very often.”

  Harmony took Pepper’s outfits out, one by one, and looked at them. They all looked very Pepper-like—outfits you had to be as beautiful as Pepper to make work. As she handled the clothes, her mood started yo-yoing: one second she wished that she had never left Las Vegas, that she had just let Pepper’s life in New York be a mystery, and her death a mystery; but the next second it was all she could do to keep from clinging to Laurie, and finally she did cling to Laurie, standing at the foot of the bed, Pepper’s outfits strewn on the bedcovers. Harmony began to tremble so badly that she felt she might have fallen if Laurie hadn’t been hugging her.

  “It might just be claustrophobia from the tunnel,” she said.

  “I don’t think it has anything to do with the tunnel, Harmony,” Laurie said. “I think it has to do with your loss.”

  Then Laurie began to shake too.

  “If only it had never happened,” Laurie said. “I’m going to put Pepper’s clothes back in the closet—she hated having them strewn all around.”

  Crying, she hung Pepper’s clothes back up, as quickly as she could.

  “I even keep them in the order she hung them in, do you think that’s sick?” Laurie asked.

  Harmony felt too weary to deal with the issue, or any issue. As soon as Pepper’s clothes were hung up, she lay down on Laurie’s bed. About the time she closed her eyes she felt Laurie sink down on the bed beside her.

  “Laurie, is your mother alive?” she asked.

  “My mother is dead,” Laurie said. “She was killed on the Santa Ana Freeway about a year ago. A truck flipped over and landed right on her and her little Honda.”

  “Maybe you ought to pretend to be my daughter, just for a while,” Harmony said. She didn’t really know why she said it, she just felt like saying it.

  “Yeah, you know, why not?” Laurie said. “I don’t miss my mom near as much as I miss Pepper, though.”

  “Maybe it would help us both,” Harmony said.

  “Yeah, maybe it would,” Laurie said, before they both let it all go, and went to sleep.

  20.

  Eddie and Iggy came into Laurie’s room, very early. For a moment Eddie pretended that he was going to be very quiet, and not wake his mom.

  “Be very quiet,” he told Iggy loudly.

  But Iggy didn’t know how to be very quiet. Eddie had on his sneakers, and Iggy began to tug at the shoelaces. While he tugged he growled. He growled more and more loudly and then he began to yip, as he had yipped at the astonished tourist just after he fell off the Statue of Liberty.

  Harmony saw it was no use; she opened her eyes—anyway she wanted to see Eddie, and there he was, smiling like an angel.

  “I told him not to yip, Mom, but he yipped anyway,” Eddie said. “He doesn’t know how to behave. He’s just a puppy—he isn’t educated yet.”

  “I think Iggy’s a candidate for obedience training,” Laurie said, in a very sleepy voice.

  “Are there going to be pancakes?” Eddie asked.

  “Not unless we go out and get some pancake mix—I guess the mice ate all I had,” Laurie said.

  “I don’t see any mice,” Eddie commented.

  “Well, mice are sly, they had to be,” Laurie said.

  “How many mice have you counted?” Eddie asked, patting Laurie on the shoulder.

  “Eddie, can’t I just sleep a few more minutes?” Laurie asked. “I haven’t counted the mice lately, but I think there’s about forty running around here.”

  “Iggy hasn’t seen any mice either,” Eddie said.

  Neither Harmony nor Laurie responded.

  “Mom, I have to be on many television shows today,” Eddie said. “If I don’t get some pancakes pretty soon, I’ll be starved and won’t be able to tell them about Iggy falling all the way off the Statue of Liberty.”

  “Why can’t Iggy tell them about it himself?” Laurie asked. “He can sort of yip it out.”

  “No, he’s just a dog, he isn’t supposed to talk,” Eddie said.

  “I’m a human, I’m not supposed to make pancakes at this hour, either,” Laurie said.

  “Mom, why don’t you say something?” Eddie asked. “You look like you’re deaded.”

  “Honey, I’m just tired,” Harmony said. “So is Laurie.

  “Go see if Sheba’s awake—maybe she and Otis can take you for pancakes.”

  “Omar’s snoring,” Eddie said. “That’s why I woke up. When he snores it’s like an animal’s about to eat you.”

  “Maybe he has a nasal obstruction,” Harmony said.

  “Maybe he has a monster that lives in his head,” Eddie said. “When Omar goes to sleep the monster roars and it comes out his mouth like a snore.”

  “I like that theory,” Laurie said.

  “The monster is the color of puke … green puke,” Eddie said. Then he giggled.

  Iggy was still tugging at Eddie’s shoelaces.

  “He likes my shoelaces,” Eddie said. “Maybe he thinks they’re pasta.”

  Laurie opened her eyes and sat up.

  “This kid’s not going to give up,” she said.

  Harmony agreed. Sleep never seemed more delicious than at some moment when Eddie insisted she wake up and feed him pancakes.

  “Sheba doesn’t have her wig on,” Eddie said. “I don’t think she would take me for pancakes unless she puts on her wig, because she doesn’t want to be seen on the street without it, because her hair is too short.”

  “In her view,” Laurie said. “Personally I think she looks better without the wig.”

  “Mom, they sprayed my hair when I was on television,” Eddie said.

  Laurie put her hand over Eddie’s mouth, like a gag, and he giggled into the gag. Harmony opened her eyes and saw that Eddie’s eyes were full of mischief.

/>   “Eddie, go and see if anyone’s awake in the other room,” she said. “Maybe someone else wants pancakes too.”

  “Aunt Neddie’s the only one awake—she’s smoking,” Eddie said. “It’s bad. It means her lungs will turn black.”

  “Go make Iggy bark at them and wake them up,” Laurie said. “We have to take a team approach if we’re going to get through the day.”

  “He won’t bark at them because he’s very polite,” Eddie said.

  “Well, you’re not especially polite, go pull their hair or something and get them up,” Laurie said.

  Immediately it was apparent that Laurie had made an ill-considered remark. The giggly look left Eddie’s face, to be replaced by a solemn look. In a moment his eyes got wide and filled with tears.

  “Hey, don’t look that way, it was just a joke,” Laurie said, horrified.

  “She didn’t mean it, honey, it was a joke,” Harmony said.

  “But she said it,” Eddie said. “She said I wasn’t very polite.”

  Tears slid down his cheeks.

  “Eddie, don’t cry, I was kidding—sometimes people kid,” Laurie said, looking at Harmony, to see if she could offer more help.

  Harmony was willing to help, but once Eddie got his feelings hurt, making them unhurt was no simple matter.

  “I didn’t want to hear those words,” he said.

  Then he slipped off the bed and started disconsolately out of the room.

  Laurie jumped off the bed and swooped him up in her arms.

  Eddie began to kick and struggle, but Laurie carried him back to the bed and hung on until he got tired of kicking and struggling.

  “He doesn’t hold grudges,” Harmony said. “He gets over things.”

  She said it because Laurie looked as if she might cry herself.

  “Yes I do hold grudges,” Eddie said. “I hold them forever and forever and forever until it’s the end of the world.”