Alligator - Lisa Moore [53]
He understood things were this way when his mother was diagnosed with cancer a second time and when she explained to him that it was all through her, a phrase that has haunted him ever since, all through me, all through me, all through me, how thorough and definite such a phrase can prove to be, he well understood, and they wanted her to go to hospital at once because in the hospital they could manage the pain and there was a very good chance she wouldn’t be coming out of the hospital and all of that proved to unfold exactly as his mother had said it would for the simple reason that that was the way things were.
And when the Russians moved into the bed-sit on the third floor, Frank had the uncomfortable feeling that things would once again prove to turn out the way things often turned out.
The guy named Valentin had been slapping a girl around the bed-sit the night before and Frank heard her screaming and he heard what he thought was her head smack the wall and then he heard her running down the stairs. They had one of her shoes and Frank went to his window and she was dishevelled and snot-nosed and the knee was torn out of her stocking and her knee was bleeding like she’d scraped it.
The shoe flew out the window and hit her in the head and she dropped to her knees on the pavement and the men were laughing and a Gulliver’s Taxi came up and there was a long wait with her knock-kneed because of her tight skirt and she was dazed by the smack of the shoe on her head and the terrible predicament she’d got into because Valentin was yelling he would look for her wherever she went.
Try to leave, he shouted.
Just try.
Kneeling on the street and the back door of the cab opened and still she stayed and finally the driver got out, the guy named Lloyd. He picked up the shoe, took the girl by the elbow, and got her standing up. He put her in the back seat and a beer bottle flew out the window and smashed near Lloyd’s heel. The glass glittering and rocking near the heel of Lloyd’s boot and Lloyd didn’t even acknowledge it; he just walked around to his side and closed his door. The taxi sat for a moment because Lloyd must have been asking the girl where she wanted to go and probably wasn’t getting any sense out of her. Another beer bottle flew out the window and bounced off the roof of the taxi but it didn’t break, it just rolled down the street. Then Lloyd drove away. He didn’t burn rubber, he just drove off quietly.
Frank’s mother believed there was no difficulty that couldn’t be surmounted. This unending willingness not to be defeated kept his mother going, but she was also beaten down by it. Frank had learned from his mother not to give up on those things that are sacred. He could be yielding, but if something was sacred he would not bend.
What was sacred was he would not give up the hot-dog permit to those Russians because he had worked for it.
The girl at Sears had pink lipstick on, which made him focus on her mouth and the word wet bar sounded like an invitation to something altogether different; so he followed her to that part of the store.
It was black padded vinyl with vinyl-covered buttons that held the diamonds of padding in place. It had a shoulder of chrome and the part you’d rest your elbow on was a smoked mirror with gold veins running through it. It had a lazy Susan, which he had never seen before and thought ingenious. There was a lone bottle of Tabasco sauce in the lazy Susan. He had to admit it was an impressive piece of furniture.
The girl was chewing gum and she blew a bubble. She said she was getting married in a month to a guy who drove a bus and they had put this exact item on their registered wedding list and many of the guests had already put down as much as fifty dollars toward it. She said they had been buying furniture for three years always with the same plan in mind, when they had enough to furnish a small apartment they’d get married. They didn’t have a single thing on credit.