So Special in Dayville Read online

  The young woman makes a big show of waving, as if from a great distance. “Bye, Sally,” she calls.

  “Yep, yep. See ya soon.”

  Returning upstairs to their apartment, Crystal decides to put a happier face on things. “Babe, it’s me,” she says brightly. The door swings shut behind her. She’d expected to find Ajeno still on the mattress, but he is instead standing nude and motionless, staring at her from the middle of their living/bed/dining room. “Whatcha doing?”

  The fat man’s baby-like face pouts. “I thought you’d gotten lost. I was trying to decide what to wear to go looking.”

  Crystal, honestly touched, begins to blubber. “Oh, Ajeno!” She tries getting over the bulk of his stomach to plant a hard kiss on his lips. “You care.”

  “I got worried that you’d wandered off.” He holds up her purse from a side table. “You didn’t take your ID with you or nothing.”

  “Baby, I’m so sorry. I was just taking out the garbage and ran into Sally. She needed a little pepping up is all.”

  “Huh.” Ajeno finally leans across his stomach to allow her a smack of the lips. “Okay then.” Sighing, he lowers himself into the striped recliner with faded upholstery. The steel frame makes shrieking sounds like a wounded animal. “It’s good ‘cause I didn’t know what to wear anyhow.” His excess of nakedness can’t adjust to the small chair; his fat billowing over its armrests until he resembles two scoops of strawberry ice cream melting, in great drooping layers, over a fragile cone.

  “You don’t need to worry ’bout me, hon.” Crystal, feeling better now, resumes her place at the counter, folding the laundry. But when she notices Ajeno looking back to the TV, she finds herself creasing a clean towel instead of folding it. The creased cotton fits just perfectly into the crook of her arm.

  As a teenager, she’d gotten pregnant by her first boyfriend. Theirs had been a steamy union of love, summer, and sex. The seed in her belly, sprouting beneath elastic adolescent skin, had been to her a playful source of joy.

  Not so the abortion soon forced on her by her mother who had helped her into the stirrups at the doctor’s office. “Honey,” she told Crystal, “you got a whole lifetime of mistakes ahead of you. But let’s start with the small ones first, okay? Like shoplifting or racing down Main Street naked. No need to jump ahead to the last page of all the stupidest things you could possibly do at your age!”

  But still Crystal remembers. Remembers what it had felt like—to carry another person inside her, feeding it with her body, nurturing it with her soul. Now all she carries is a brittle calcification. So, cuddling the towel, she rocks it gently, crooning, “Hush little baby, don’t you cry.” Her eyes wander automatically outside their window. The air over Dayville is smudged today as if with India ink beneath a yellowish haze. “Momma’s gonna buy you a big blue sky, and if that big blue sky don’t stay, Momma’s gonna buy you Doris Day, and if that Doris Day don’t sing, Momma’s gonna buy you a diamond ring, and if that—”

  “We got cookies?”

  Crystal sighs as she reluctantly returns the towel to the counter. A quick search of their mostly bare cabinets surprisingly reveals all the necessary ingredients. She picks up a bag of artificially flavored chocolate. “You want chips in ’em?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Ajeno sneaks a look away from the television screen. The girl is bustling about the kitchen and his mouth waters, imagining the taste of cookies. He returns to watching television.

  He’s not stupid. He knows how much Crystal wants a baby. He knows how she hungers for one in which to deposit all the love never used by her dead fetus. He feels it every time she cuddles a towel or gazes wistfully out the apartment window. She’s told him how he can give her a baby. How he can make all her dreams come true. And that, he tells himself, is what I gotta do. He’ll have to, or else she might leave him.

  He does understand, after all. When a child himself, he’d desperately wanted a dog, maybe a stray mongrel from the city pound. Some abandoned creature that he alone could care for and be loved by unconditionally. But Alejandro, his brother, had had allergies. A baby, he thinks, must be much the same, a sort of pet to be coddled and sheltered from the elements. Something to root him and Crystal more firmly in place. He glances back at the girl, who’s measuring out the vanilla extract. “Put extra chips in ’em, okay?”

  ***

  The next day is a Monday. It dawns like any other morning, except for an increase of frowns and profanity used on the street. “Howdy,” greets Sally to passing pedestrians, who ignore her on their way to jobs they hate. Wrapping herself in doughy white arms, she closes her eyes and counts to ten.

  Members of Stormin’ Hamsters are again approaching. She hears them. The ground vibrates with their incoming proximity. Faint growls of motorbikes are carried on the breeze. She presses her spine deeper into the crease of brick and stucco. The two buildings cosset her terror, but the creaking fire escape over her head signals that the sky is falling.

  Is that a gale blowing up from the south? She sniffs to detect rain upwind of Dayville. Nothing. An infinitesimal amount of tension leaves her as the roar of motorcycles fade. She tightens the grip of her arms around her torso, feeling the delicate webbing of ribs beneath the sweater. A storm isn’t always preceded by smells, though.

  In face of this possibility, Sally starts her mantra. “Won’t get knifed,” she mumbles with her eyes shut tight, “or strangled, raped, or buried alive in a quake.” She stops, gasping a fresh breath. “Or suffocated in a flood, or rot away from a disease . . .” She always recites this sequence when afraid. It consoles her in the face of disaster. Money in the bank—all the other terrors she’ll escape scot-free, if this proves to be the one. The Big Exit. The Last Curtain. Her final breath.

  She strictly repeats the mantra disaster by diaster. And its list is always the same, unless she’s actually being threatened by one of the mantra’s horrors. In which case, she’ll stop reciting the list. Just for a second. Just for the time it takes not to speak the horror’s name. She acknowledges it by smothering the syllables in her throat.

  Meanwhile, Crystal is stepping out the double front doors of the apartment building. The heavy glass doors swing shut behind her with a clatter. She’s wearing her typical outfit for work: a long, dark skirt with a matching dark sweater over a shocking-white blouse. With her delicacy of bone structure and wide, shy eyes, she resembles a slightly plump Audrey Hepburn wearing a tuxedo.

  Briskly, she picks her way through the weekend trash that’s accumulated on the sidewalk. “Sally!” the girl calls, deliberately pretending not to see the woman pressed into the crevice behind the shopping cart. “Sally, are you home?”

  “Yep, yep. I’m here,” yells back the older woman.

  “How are you doing today?”

  “Good. I’m good. Real good.”

  Crystal smiles as the other woman opens the door by sidling past the shopping cart. “Well, that’s great!” She picks up a posy of half-dead wildflowers lying atop a stained blanket in the cart. “Your garden looks lovely today—these are beautiful!”

  With a shy grin, Sally nods. “Flowers are pretty. They make me happy.” She nervously licks her lips, edging closer to the girl. “Ajeno, will he be outside today?”

  “Sure,” confirms Crystal, “he’s going out later to look for a job. Keep your eyes peeled, and you’ll see him.”

  Sally sighs with apparent relief. “Good, that’s good.” Retreating behind the shopping cart, she makes a little wave. “See ya.”

  “Have a good day,” bubbles Crystal, her wave exaggerated. She backs away from the crevice, having again “blinded” herself to the middle-aged woman now standing behind the closed door of the shopping cart.

  A quick check of her watch shows that she’ll have to run to make her bus at Tenth and Vine. Hurrying away, she contemplates the homeless woman’s attachment to Ajeno. Crystal knows that ever since they panhandled together in Ajeno’s homeless days, Sally has adored him. What sh
e doesn’t know is that the first time Sally ever saw the fat man, her eyes squeezed shut, her mantra automatic. “Won’t get knifed or strangled, raped, buried alive in a quake, sucked up in a tornado, suffocated in a flood, rot away from a disease . . .”

  It was Ajeno who first brought Sally to the crevice of the two buildings. And now, whenever he lumbers forth, she runs as best she can, plastering herself, like a bug on a windshield, against his shirt front. “Won’t get knifed or strangled, raped, buried alive in a quake,” she’ll babble, “sucked up in a tornado, suffocated in a flood, rot away from a disease . . .”

  Crystal doesn’t mind. She knows there’s nothing sexual in the embrace. It’s more like that of a child eager to rest in safe arms. And Sally, the girl knows, has no one else. Her family, including her own children, abandoned her when she first started living on the streets. But Ajeno treats her just right. He’ll wrap his arms around her, a wide grin wreathing his face as she clings to him. “Sally, good,” he will say as her face dimples in pleasure. “Good girl. Good girl!”

  Incredibly, Sally had once taught at the technical college right there in downtown Dayville. This was, however, before the brain-eating phobias consumed her. For years now she’s stayed close to the Eden Palace, never straying too far. One of her most morbid fears is of getting lost and being unable to find her way back.

  If she has to visit the dumpster behind the Chinese joint on the corner, she’ll whip out her small notebook, furiously recording how many steps she has to take to reach her destination and what left and right turns are necessary. This way she’s confident of always finding her way back home.

  “Were you lost before?” Crystal asked her once. “I mean, is that why you’re afraid of getting lost now?”

  Sally nodded, her lips pursing, giving her face a gummy, toothless appeal. “Yep.” She nodded again. “Yep. Got lost when I was little. Real little. All alone, walking down the sidewalk, and things suddenly go strange.” A frown creased her face. “Should I go right or left or forward or back? Don’t know. Don’t know. Everybody gone.” She spoke louder, and Crystal patted her arm. “What to do? What to do? I was alone, you know.”

  “Yes, I can see where that’d be difficult.”

  Crystal is now redoubling her pace. The bus is already barreling down Vine, and if she misses this one, she’ll be late for class. Her school, Dayville Elementary, operates in the center of town out of a big, crumbling, art deco building.

  Its high-quality construction clearly signals, to anyone who looks, how Dayville was once a real community. A place where stovetops simmered with cranberries at Thanksgiving and folks all had roofs. Where summer melons were eaten socially, juices dripping, on hot porch steps. And where neighbors generously shared snowblowers in winter or clipping shears in spring.

  Some days, when Crystal sits at her teacher’s desk, hearing the noon whistles of surrounding factories, she imagines that Dayville. A place of bird warbles competing with shouts from impromptu football games. But today, having indeed missed the first bus, she can only imagine her unsupervised students as she hurries down an echoing school hallway.

  Reaching her silent classroom, she catches her breath. Her students are turning their heads to face her in one movement, their unified gaze tainted with accusation. She smiles, relieved to carry an olive branch that she knows they’ll enjoy. Just five minutes before, the school principal, bubbling with excitement, had caught up to her at the school’s main security checkpoint.

  “Good news, children!” trills Crystal, “The mayor’s arranged for the governor to come all the way from the state capital to tour our school. And to see Dayville’s answer to the terrible problem of homelessness!” She imagines excitement in their eyes. Her lifted palms are meant to calm their enthusiasm. “So, yes, there’s no need to ask, but we will have both elected officials here at the same time! Aren’t we lucky?”

  “Yeah, sure,” replies one little boy in the front row. His eyes are crossing as they focus on the finger she’s pointed at him. “Who they?”

  “I think you mean to say ‘Who are they?’”

  “Yeah, sure. Who they?”

  Crystal regards the small, upturned faces quizzically before explaining the American political system. “Understand?” she asks tentatively. Her good mood returns when all the little heads dip at precisely the same time. “Excellent, now can anyone give me an example as to how you might exercise your political freedom?” She breathes easier as several hands lift above the rows of desks.

  The children’s perspective sometimes troubles her. It’s so . . . different than hers. Just last week, they were talking quietly among themselves as she graded a spelling quiz. Naturally, she’d eavesdropped, as any good teacher would, and quickly realized they were exchanging stories about family pets.

  This puzzled her initially. After all, most of her students come from families too poor to own a dog or cat. Even their outfits are near rags. Their only luxury possessions are the shiny smartphones handed out free each year by the federal government hoping to eavesdrop and track its residents and their families via satellite. And so when listening to their stories of pets, Crystal had had to take a minute to size up the situation. Finally though comprehension dawned. Essentially, the children were showing each other photos of their domesticated vermin!

  Little Turner Dobson, a big grin plastered on his freckled face, was holding up a phone over his bright-red hair. “This is Charley,” he explained the close-up image of a sewer rat. “He likes eating outta our garbage cans!”

  “Hello, Charley!” chorused the children, staring up at the rat’s whiskered face.

  Sue Beth Chavez then held up her phone, which displayed a picture of cockroaches on a mound of spaghetti. “This is Miguel, Tomas, Freddy, and Angelita.”

  “Hello, Miguel, Tomas, Freddy, and Angelita!” chorused the children.

  Today, Turner Dobson is explaining his exercise of political freedom. “He wasn’t respecting me as an American, so I just threw it!”

  “But Turner, why,” enquires Crystal, “did you throw the rock at the man’s windshield? It wasn’t like he was doing anything wrong, was he?”

  Silence floods the classroom, and the young woman feels as if she’s uttered a blasphemy. Little Turner, his bottom lip quivering, balls his hands into fists. “He was . . .” (gulp) “trying to kill Charley—and Charley’s my best friend . . . EVER!”

  Sympathetic, Crystal goes to pat him on the shoulder. “Yes, but Turner, you’ve got to remember, Charley is a sewer rat and that man was a pest control technician.”

  “So?”

  “Well . . . it just means Charley’s not domesticated.” She smiles brightly at the now sullen faces of her students. “He’s wild. He doesn’t think of you as his best friend, does he?”

  Tears now stream down the boy’s freckles. “Course he does! He eats from my hands, don’t he? And, when it’s cold, I stick ’im inside my shirt so he can warm up.”

  “Your . . . shirt?” Crystal can’t help her look of horror. “But what if he should bite you?”

  The boy rolls his eyes. “Ah, Charley wouldn’t do that! That’s not like him at all. He just takes naps.”

  “Turner, all I’m saying,” explains Crystal, “is that being wild, Charley can’t expect to have the same rights as a domesticated rat.”

  A hand shoots up in the fourth row. Sue Beth Chavez pops to her feet. Unlike Turner, who’s now sitting stiffly at his desk, sobbing, Sue Beth demands with little-girl ire, “What about Miguel, Tomas, Freddy, and Angelita?”

  “What do you mean, Sue Beth?”

  “You saying they deserve to be bu...bu....butchered just cause people don’t like ’em?”

  Crystal’s smile cracks at the edges. “Well, Sue Beth, technically cockroaches aren’t, as you say, ‘butchered.’” She glances around the classroom. “Can any of you tell me the difference between ‘butchered’ and ‘exterminated’?”

  Chapter Two

  Conrad Stoffer,
the building manager of the Eden Palace, was once Dayville’s most prestigious landscape designer. But now, overweight and with middle-age acne, he lives with his wife, Darla Sue, in the thirteenth-floor’s penthouse—a dingy two-bedroom eagle’s nest stuck right at the very top of the Eden Palace.

  Stuffed with racks of Darla Sue’s old but once expensive cocktail dresses, the three rooms, plus a kitchenette and two bathrooms, reek of mothballs. And while the view past its grimy windows is divine, revealing Dayville’s wide, industrial vista, Darla Sue complains frequently about having to use the fire stairs. The aged elevator that services the Eden Palace is unable to rise above the ninth floor.

  So Darla Sue, age fifty-one, has to climb; the sharp clicks of her designer heels echo, bounce, and ricochet off the stairwell’s walls. On quiet nights, they even drift out into the rest of the building—tiny cracks like ice shattering on a mountainside.

  “He’s just not the man I fell in love with,” Darla Sue laments over a cola she’s now sharing with Crystal late that afternoon in the manager’s apartment. “Am I wrong to feel cheated? I mean, just because my guy turned out to be a lazy moron who can’t figure out how to dispose of garbage?” Licking the foam from a hairy upper lip, she sips from her glass. But then, with a gasp, she suddenly pats Crystal’s arm. “Oh, honey, I’m sorry, that was insensitive. I just forgot who I was talking to.”

  “I completely understand.” Crystal, unfazed, knows the story as well as anyone else at the Eden Palace.

  Conrad had once flew at dizzying, head-spinning, oxygen-depriving heights over their small town. They’d called him the undisputed king of fertilizer, the monarch of mulch, the ruler of roses, and the sovereign of taste, horticultural or otherwise. Not that his customer base had been large. Among Dayville’s sea of poor ghettos, there was only a tiny crescent of well-to-do houses that could have afforded his astronomic fees.