She had seen the classified ad before (set in a boldface type that the owner must have paid extra for): "Wanted: Person, preferably handicapped, to count, sort, and classify pennies. Minimum wage." The phone number followed. The a.m. sunlight hadn't yet slashed through the fishbowl windows of the laundromat, so it was still cool inside. A few women hustled their laundry in and out of the machines, sure as scouts on a trail. She watched her own belongings tornado around in the dryer, the metal studs and buckles knocking like castanets. She wheeled herself closer, pulled the door open, and stuffed clothes into a duffel bag. Slinging it across the back of her wheelchair, she headed out the door, bumping it open with the prow of her footrest. None of the other women paid attention.
She took the same route home she always took, down the street on the right, cross over at the school crosswalk (the matron stopping traffic for her, mouth in philanthropic smile), and then down the small hill to her apartment. Once inside, she emptied the duffel bag on the bed and quickly but haphazardly put away the clothes. There she was, 9:20 a.m., laundry done, and a whole day of nothing to do. She stared at her apartment: the telephone mute and frog-like on the table -- the overstuffed chair she would never sit in, reserved for guests who never came -- the books in disarray on the shelves -- the cyclops TV. She reached over and turned on the tape deck: Scriabin. Pulling the paper out of her pocket, she found the classified. The traffic on the street barely rattled the windows.
He ran his eyes down the column until he found the ad. Yes, done well enough, big enough to catch the eye. Only it hadn't pulled in enough responses to justify the cost. The responses he'd gotten were, well, unsatisfactory. People came posing as handicapped, even a blind man! Times were hard, as he knew. Thus, the pennies. Very soon the "wheaties" -- having sat quietly in their jars for years -- would be worth a good sum of money because of their scarcity and copper. "If" they could be found. Which meant the tedious distillation process: reading dates, cataloguing the shards. Something which his eyesight and patience did not rise to. Hence, the ad. Which had not worked. Yet.
He finished his breakfast, checked his watch: 9:20. Plenty of time before his first appointment. He rinsed the dishes, filed them in the drainer, did his ablutions, and stopped to reset his clothes in the hall mirror before going out the door. Sample case in hand, he surveyed the living room, swept his eyes over the pictures, the bric-a-brac, the immaculate furniture, the untrodden carpet. Silt, now that she was gone. Filling up the channel. The ringing phone was too late to catch him as he drove away.
The voice on the message machine was clearly a woman's, but apart from that, revealed only that she was interested in the job and would be over that evening to talk to him. He listened to it several times, wondering what he was looking for, then erased her voice and the number she'd left. So, he was to have company this evening.
As he started his dinner, the evening paper propped against an empty flower vase, he heard a shrill whistle. The children running through the yard again. Then, the whistle again, sharp and frisking. He got up, went to the front door, and was mildly braced to see a young woman in a wheelchair anchored to the bottom of the porch steps. "Hello," she said. "This the right place?"
He said it was. In the silence that followed he finally looked at her, an army-jacketed slender woman with only barely-washed hair down to the epaulets, a flannel shirt and jeans covering two useless legs dangling over the edge of the seat. "You were the woman who called, about the job?"
"Yes. When can I start?"
He stepped onto the porch. "My name is Jordan Riley. I think we should talk first."
"Fine. I can count, read, and write."
"But -- "
"But what?"
His tongue stuck in his mouth.
"But what?"
He stared at her in the failing light. He couldn't read the name on the right breast of the coat. She stared back at him. He watched her face curdle, the neutral face she'd worn twisted into an amalgam of anger and sarcasm. "Forget it," she said, and pivoted to leave.
"No, wait, come inside. I'm being rude."
She turned back to him, her face still hinged tight.
For another second, for the space of intake and exhalation, their eyes locked. Then his body jerked, remembering his manners, and he hurried down the three steps. He jockeyed the wheelchair straight, and then, with a sharp jag across his shoulders he hadn't felt since he'd bailed hay as a teenager, he jounced the chair up the three steps to the porch. Sweat popped out like a thousand prairie dogs from their burrows and his breath tasted like sandpaper. She said nothing.
He wheeled her into the kitchen, where his dinner sat like a patient dog. "Something to drink?" he asked, more to himself than to her.
"Water'd be fine." He noticed her nails were bitten and dirty.
"Water it is."
Again the silence settled on them like an old pontiff's hand. "The job," he finally said, "is to separate pennies."
"That's what the ad said. I can do that."
"It doesn't pay much. Maybe a few hours a day."
"When can I start. Tonight?"
This was a little too fast for him. "No. I have guests coming."
Her hesitation was calculated to the second and he knew she knew he had no guests coming. "What time tomorrow?"
"Morning. Yes, morning. 10 o'clock."
"I'll be here."
When the scene had reversed itself, when he'd gotten her down the stairs and watched her navigate the pools of streetlight until she disappeared, he suddenly realized the practical obstacles to the whole enterprise, something his manners and excitement (yes, he had to admit he was excited by her arrival) had obscured. How would she get upstairs to his office? Would he have to lug the few hundred pounds of coins downstairs every day for her? This would not do, and he'd have to tell her, tonight. He suddenly realized he'd erased her phone number. And he didn't know her name. So, a confrontation. His shoulders ached.
Schoenberg. The car lights scarified the darkness of the living room. She watched, hands locked together in her lap. Jordan Riley. She wiped the name off her mind, let the music invade her. Occasionally the lights inflamed a photograph, framed, on her television set, of a group of smiling women dressed in fatigues. The jungle brooded behind them, just beyond the jutting edge of a hut. She was to the left, crouched over two women kneeling next to a fire at which someone was roasting hot dogs. Her hair was clipped helmet-like. Her smile cupped indistinguishable eyes.
She did not sleep until the cars had long left the streets.
By 10 a.m. she was there, posted like a buoy on the shoals of his porch. He'd watched her roll down the street, her arms like the strong pivots of a paddlewheeler. He disliked the idea of this confrontation, had worried it well into the empty hours of the morning. By breakfast his resolve, jury-rigged as it was, seemed willing to hold. But as she canted and jerked through the street debris, potholes, and unforgiving cars, an irrational tide of pity for the woman carried away his determination. Yet clearly the whole situation was unworkable -- he simply wanted to get his coins counted.
As she arrived he let snap closed the lace curtain on the door. Simple abandonment, cold-eyed pickled speech, ahemming apology -- the options flew in and out like petrels. Finally, trusting in a way he'd never done to chance, he opened the door and walked out.
"Mornin'."
"Good morning." He hesitated. "Very good morning."
Her silence seemed rude to him. He wasn't even getting a chance to run out of civilities.
"I'm here on time."
"Yes, well," and here he hesitated again, having a sudden momentary vision of flowers and piled mountains of crutches and, oddly, her naked body, as, with his steps sounding ominously like muffled drum beat, he descended the stairs to lift her into the house, "right you are."
Once inside he hesitated still again, not used to the improvising. The coins: upstairs. They: downstairs. She was clearly waiting for him to catch up to his thoughts. He briefly resented the fact that she couldn't storm out in a huff, saw the stupidity of that, accepted his fate, and decided to carry her upstairs.
"The coins are upstairs." As if the executive board of his guts, blood, and brain had miraculously pounded out a consensus at the eleventh hour, and without quite knowing what he was doing, he threw his left arm across her shoulder, levered his right under her vacant knees, and, with sharp amperes of strain racing through his lower back and legs, hoisted her up in swift motion. Unwittingly she threw her arms around his neck, scared by the sudden unmooring from her chair. For a brief synapse, in the mid-morning spring silence of a foyer lodged in a house full of emptiness, they stood like confused lovers. Then, in a fluster, whetstone in her voice, she barked, "Upstairs?" He sidled crablike up the steps, fearfully aware that his arms were already leaden, he was no Fred Astaire on the slippery plastic carpet runner, and the pain in his back made him gulp air in a way he hadn't since his wedding night.
He slipped her into his desk chair, her face now sullenly condensed, as if outraged or, worse, discovered. He explained what he wanted done, embarrassedly aware of the corona of sweat on his forehead. She simply nodded, slipped her jacket off (he didn't avoid noticing she wore no brassiere, the curve of her left breast just visible through the spread collar of her half-buttoned shirt), and began the counting and sorting. Her silence and hunched shoulders dismissed him.
He tried, before embarrassment or vexation prompted him to leave the room, to add apology to his words. "You didn't ask when you'd be paid."
"Friday'd be fine," she said to the pennies.
"I have some errands to do. I'll be back in a couple of hours."
She nodded again.
When he'd gone, when she was sure his footsteps had led conclusively away from her, she sat back and drew a deep breath. Why, she thought, had she been so rude? The man's hands had been gentle, he did his best, and she bit off smiles like tobacco and spit the juice at him. She glared at her legs, angry. Her finger moved among the rabble of pennies, tracing glyphs, then tucked her lanky hair away from her cheeks as she began to divide and compare.
Two hours later he came back, dressed in a three-piece, hair skewed across his pate, and told her that he had to leave. She pushed the chair away from the desk and waited. With a hitch of his shoulders and a determined best-face-forward stride, he walked to her and lifted her gingerly. With an effort he could not know, she loosely draped her arm across his shoulders and let her body relax into his arms. He felt the yield, puzzled at it, but had no time to ponder it as his body began its tocsin of pain and the adrenalin corps raced to his heart's rescue.
Even though tomorrow was Sunday, he agreed to her request to come over. As she steamwheelered down the street, he realized he still didn't know her name. And, despite his aching body, he had liked her arm across his shoulder, like some bandoleer full, not of ammunition, but pollen. His afternoon appointments, he thought that night, went extraordinarily well.
The music tonight was Copeland. She had the photograph in her hands, raised like a chalice to eye-level, and she bored into that immobile face of a woman she'd once been. She had never excavated the memories, hoping they would fossilize and be lost in the sediment of time. But the gentle, if awkward, touch of his hand, his confusion, the unfeigned way he tried to be businesslike and ended up being civil, pried the relics loose and they floated back into the net of her words like those long-forgotten prehistoric fish captured out of the frigid depths of the ocean.
Nineteen sixty eight, just 21, finished with her LPN training, filled with idealism buffed to a high gloss of patriotism and service. She and four other girls wanted to be nurses in Nam, and over they went. ("Dulce et decorum est") She had known guys who had gone to fight for John Wayne, for baseball, for boredom and beer, for loneliness and the need to be hitched to a cause, and she hadn't been any different. Except that she wanted to release pain, not encourage it. (Children, she thought, all of them children then, the whole war like the Children's Crusades that had used the blood of innocents to gild the fortunes of old men.)
But soon she was adrift in a sea of young bloodied faces, breathing the stench of outgoing life, unable to put in a stopcock, bar the flume, command the waves. And after that night attack, with the mortar rounds belching shrapnel, death meandering like a robber baron among his sweatshop slaves, she could no longer care for their innocence because she was in a pain so monstrous and sterilizing that is burned her compassion dead. She had no surplus anymore, reduced to her five senses.
The night of the attack, the unswerving surgery of the metal in her legs, the brutish evacuation -- then months of lying in hospitals and bearing witness to the flotsam that passed as people, each cargo labeled "Fragile" and "Not For Re-sale." ("pro patria mori") The bile chalked her throat -- the music ended. All because of that man's arms across her shoulders. The doctors had said the old twat could still sing, that babies were still a prime possibility, and they seemed to think this a coup: though her legs weren't whole, her hole was. And then that first night, when the orderly had quietly undressed himself and climbed atop her, gently forcing her legs apart, taking her virginity and leaving a wet spot for payment. (He had put her legs together again.) And she didn't care. And they knew it. And each night someone else made his ritual spasm in her empty gut. Yes, the old twat still worked fine, just like a sewer or rat-hole or a grave filled with quick-lime.
They shipped her home (no parades, just a welcoming party like a wake), and then, suddenly (her parents now unsure of who inhabited the downstairs bedroom), she left them all behind, part of the midden of blasted faces and voided legs and memories stiff with scar tissue.
The music had stopped. The picture had fallen from her hands. She wasn't even a statistic. Nam vets were men, though there had been thousands of women. She was buried beneath their gutter lives, locked away as if that were the privilege of her sex, a fate devoutly to be wished for, better than wholeness and competition and the angry joy abundance. And here she sat (her only legacy had been a series of greater or lesser thrones: wheelchairs, toilet seats, but no man's lap, no meadow, no pew -- certainly no pew) starting her fourth decade, a score and a half almost gone, not quite an old bitch gone in the teeth but a deponent for her own casual desecration, full of an anger that only bred maggots not saints, an anger habitual not ephiphenal.
She snapped off the light, replaced the photograph. The car lights swam in schools. In her head she remembered the skeleton in her high school biology class. She found herself in the vision rewiring the crooked legs to the rest of the body.
He realized, without too much deliberation, that the fireman's carry up the stairs simply would not do. So he decided to the move the mountain downstairs.
In the attic was a table that would serve. When dinner was finished and he was trussed in his workclothes and sneakers (it surprised him how long it had been since he'd worn the clothes -- they smelled clean and empty), he went upstairs to what he called the "reliquary": trunks like the coffins of saints stuffed with his dead wife's clothes and jewelry, her books and knick-knacks. For a moment they called to him but he shrugged them off, unwilling to know again even for a moment the anguish he'd once stumbled through like a drunk in a minefield. He located the table. He cleared away the surrounding debris, spanned his arms across the table, and heaved. His blind feet found their way safely along the softwood boards to the attic door.
"Bang!" The table leg lanced against the doorframe. He staggered for a second, readjusted his bearings, and aimed again. Two legs got through, but the others caught the far side of the doorframe and the table slipped out of his hands to the floor, not without just nipping the tips of his sneakered toes. He stood there for a moment, fighting back the pain careening up his legs, his eyes closed. Only when his breathing leveled and the pain in his feet had subsided to twin bars of red heat across the toes did he remember the distinct "crunch" as the table hit the frame. He leaned over the table top and wiggled the cross braces. They were all loose, but intact. He examined the legs. They were loose, too, but still attached. Unless it was a cruel illusion, the table was whole. He angled it carefully through the door, shut the light off.
The landing outside the attic door was as narrow as a cat's tongue, and he found himself uncomfortably pressed against a railing which felt none too secure against his buttocks. He edged behind the table so that he could embrace it again, squatted, and lifted. His feet squirreled carefully ahead of him, his rejuvenated toes gripping like claws for hidden acorns, until he reached the edge of the first stair, then eased over it, the table legs somewhere spearheading in front of him. He waited for the legs to ram the wall where the quarterpace ended, but he reached the landing without incident, made the 90-degree turn without scraping any wallpaper off, and started down to the second floor.
The second he made his first step his heel caught the edge of the stair and the table tilted upward. Two legs rammed into the sloped ceiling overhead and even as he fell, his legs like a spring gate shooting merrily out from under him, he heard the rain of horsehair plaster join the cataract of his frail body down the stairs. He landed squarely on his buttocks and gracefully slid like an upright otter down to the bottom. The table had taken every opportunity on every jounce to slash his thighs, so that when he came to rest, two legs out, four legs up, his pain was perfectly axial, with the y-axis rising from his rump up the spine, the x-axis shivering along his legs to his hips, the y-axis curling off somewhere across his thighs, and the indefinite point of his brain hovering three-dimensionally in space. He craned back to see the two dimples the table legs had made, discovered there were four. All things tended to equality, he thought fuzzily, and finally managed to get up, not without knocking a vase of plastic flowers off a small corner Hepplewhite. He didn't even pause to mourn.
By now, as the distance to downstairs got shorter, the pain raced to get larger. His wing muscles blenched from embracing the table, and his various ailments colluded into one generalized carousel of ache. He paced the short distance down the hall to the top of the last set of stairs, and without a pause he started down, feet splayed, toes at maximum clutch, the legs of the table now wobbling like a gossip's lips. Finally, he rested in the foyer, table set upright, his blood knocking like moored boats against his veins. Where to put it? Before him yawned the composed darkness of the living room that had more room than living in it, the one set aside for the entertainment of guests who never came, the one his wife doted on with her plates and mugs and miniature pianos of ivory and glass and onyx. Why not? He flicked the switch, chasing the room into focus, and walked the table into the middle of the room.
The legs were loose -- the table swayed in a rumba as he pushed against it. So down to the basement for tools. After an hour, with wood chips on the carpet and sclerotic patches of glue on his pants, the table was done, the legs rigged, steady and patient. He cleaned the table off, waxed it, and brought out a lace tablecloth whose skirt hung absurdly to the floor. But he liked the dainty texture and it pleased his eye. Then he began the Augean task of bringing down the coins. When they were safely landed, an hour later, he brought in the empty vase from the kitchen, started upstairs to get the plastic flowers he'd knocked down, but suddenly muttered to himself how absurd that whole business would be. Real flowers were in order.
The wickedness of it delighted him. Sneaking down the front porch steps, he slipped quickly, if stiffly, through the darkness across his next-door neighbor's lawn to the flowerbed under their front bay window. And there, with barely suppressed chuckling, he ravaged a dozen flowers, briefly peeking, as he finished, through the bay window at his neighbors stippled by the narcotic light of their TV while just outside their blue cave stalked a fleeting shape, no more than a brief flicker, who could threaten them but instead melts away. The smell of chlorophyll on his hands, the colloidal scent of lawns and damp earth, the brashness of the cool night air -- he was noticing this night as he had not noticed so many others, only slightly angry at his own bluntedness, glad to have discovered how sharp he needed to be. He slipped the flowers into the vase's throat, rocked the table once more the check its soundness, and went to bed.
Over the next few weeks they took turns replacing the flowers.
Other bits and pieces collected on the table, oddments that he left for her, or gauds from her own life. They were still cordial, but he noticed that her hair was cleaner, exuding a raven blueness when she lodged it behind her ears. She noticed that he no longer grunted as deeply when he lifted her chair up the stairs, that in fact instead of feeling wrestled she felt firmly lifted. When, in a brief moment of panic, she finished the initial batch of coins ($500 worth), he immediately collected the residue of non-wheaties and turned it in for $500 more. They didn't mention their panic, but they both smelled its scent in the way he chokedly praised her speed and she stupidly accepted the praise. The solid lump of 50,000 proved an odd pillow for their worry, but they accepted its necessity like the belly of a Buddha.
He even built a ramp for her from the driveway. She remembered seeing it as she paddlewheeled up the street, and she instantly felt as if she had just walked through a beaded curtain into a smoky back-room where the ante was in hearts and the chips were blood. She hesitated at its base (he'd rigged a doorbell button), afraid of what ascension would bring. Part came from animal suspicion: no one else had known how to treat her well. Part came from guilt: what could she give in return? what had she done to deserve? Part came from fear: what could he want? when would goodbye come? When he opened the door that day, he couldn't at first understand, did not recognize, the sweating twisted woman on his threshold, and only later understood what the climb had cost her, what chasms had been crossed.
Finally, she brought the picture and put it on the desk and waited. He had of course seen it, but had not remarked on it, studying it when she wasn't there, trying to puzzle it out as if it were some runic cure for death. She knew he had seen it, wondered why the delay. Misgivings tightened like ribbands across her chest. One evening, when the pennies were bewitchingly falling to the floor and the numbers slithered around, and he noticed the humped shoulders and the angular diction of her body, he asked what the picture was about.
As she began to tell him, her words struggling to queue up, her anger broke and embers she'd banked long ago flared in her breath. She told him everything, from the incense of the rotting corpses hanged and castrated to children clotted with hunger, from the callous that had become her spirit to the callous of the body that had suffered, from the deadness of her life to the unknotted blood she'd found in his house. He listened, listened to it all.
He had no answer to the labored breath and silence that followed. His only shock and despair came from the fact that she had been touched by it at all. That she had been used so. And had seen such evil. But it wasn't surprise that he was feeling. He wasn't just an auditor but a recipient, a sharer, someone, he found himself thinking, who was cared enough about to break pain like bread and take communion. Perhaps that was love -- he didn't know. But he knew that if, at this moment, she turned and floated away because of her anger and shame and fear, and he did nothing to stop her, an embalming emptiness would fill this house and he would be preserved in his singleness forever.
She caught her breath, struggled to trap it into rhythm again. She wanted to run from him. She didn't want him spattered with her poison, or to have him smile nicely and handle her gently while she knew that in his head was this figure of a spastic marionette. And this fed her anger more, so that she hated herself for being the victim she knew she was and hated herself for hating the only thing she could be. She was a weave of fire, fire consuming itself. She wished only to burn into darkness.
They sat for quite some time like this. Dusk turned to full night. Each waited for the other to move. Finally he took her hand. She pulled it away. "Please don't touch me." He heard the words, heard no rancor, took her hand again. This time she kept it there. Slowly he turned her wheelchair to face him. He was surprised at how hard his heart crammed against his ribs. She felt the quickening of her own heart. He stood and, coming to her side, yoked one arm across her shoulder and the other under her legs. She panicked briefly, and then relaxed.
He laid her gently on the bed, undressed her just as gently. When he crawled in beside her, she could feel his stiff penis against her hip, something that surprised him mightily, unsure as he'd been if he'd ever need it again.
And for the very first time, the old twat sang.
They finished the batch of pennies together.