The Middle Stories Read online

  The woman ran out from behind the table and grabbed the Miss by the arm. “Wait!”

  “Ow!”

  “I know you from another life!”

  “I told you! I was here yesterday,” said the Miss, and she pulled her arm from the woman’s grip.

  “But I’ve had dreams about you.”

  “No, that’s ridiculous. I don’t believe in any of that stuff.” And the Miss turned and lost herself in the bustle, not looking back. The woman slowly returned to her stall but kept her eyes on the delicate form that was not being kind.

  THAT NIGHT, AS the Miss was falling asleep, a ring came from the telephone. She felt too tired to pick it up, but on the seventh ring she did. After all, it could have been her new boyfriend, who was so new he was practically not even a boyfriend at all.

  “Yes?” she said into the receiver.

  “This is Sam.”

  “Hello!” she squealed, brightening and sitting up a little. “I was just falling asleep.”

  “Were you thinking of me?”

  “Of course I was.” She began to blush and played with the neck of her nightie a bit. “I was thinking it would be you. I’m psychic you know.”

  “You’re not psychic. What are you wearing?”

  She told him its color and texture. Then she said, “And how was your day?”

  “Can I come over?” His voice was a bit of a whine.

  “No!” she said, quite astonished. “It’s nearly one in the morning!”

  “But you’re up, aren’t you?”

  “No,” she said. “It wouldn’t be appropriate.” They said a few more words to each other and then she fell asleep, a little bit perturbed.

  IN THE MORNING, as the sun was tiptoeing in through the blinds and she was shifting in her sheets, a knock came from the door. “Oh, darn,” she said, and pulled on her new bathrobe and pulled on her slippers and went down the hall to answer it. “Who is it?” she asked as she was unfastening the chain, but when she saw who it was she cried, “Oh no!” and pushed her weight against the door. “This is not right,” she said through the wood, and was just about to fasten the lock when the visitor popped herself in and slammed the door shut.

  “I haven’t been following you,” said the woman from the market, who seemed to have dyed her hair overnight, for now it was orange, not gray. “We have a friend in common: Sam.”

  “Sam!”

  “Sam’s my brother,” the woman said lightly. “Can I sit down?”

  “Why—” the Miss was nervous. “Sam’s not your brother!”

  THREE WEEKS LATER the whole thing was arranged. The Miss was going to marry Sam, and Sylvia, the woman from the market, was going to be the flower girl.

  Sitting around a card table under a dim light, Sylvia went on throwing out her thoughts. “I’ve always wanted to be a flower girl! All my life! Remember when we thought Uncle Mervin was going to get married and I was going to be a flower girl then, but he just never did, and the whole wish just floated away?”

  “You’re real funny,” said Sam, smiling. He hadn’t stopped smiling since he had met the Miss, and now the two were leaning into each other, and grinning so broadly, and giving each other sweet little looks out of the corners of their eyes.

  Sylvia leaned back in her chair across from them, and she was all smiles too. “I’m so happy for you both. I’m so happy. I just know it’s going to work out.”

  “I’m going to help Sylvia with the business,” said the Miss eagerly, as though Sam had never heard it.

  “I know.”

  “She’s really going to do it, Sam!”

  “I know!”

  The Miss had always loved antiques, and now she was going to help with the business! It really was something else.

  THAT SATURDAY, SYLVIA and the Miss were down at the market, under a cloudy sky, resting their heels behind a table, when a woman came up to them. She was similar in color and build to the Miss, and she kept her eyes on the wares, touching ornaments from Christmases half a century ago. “How much is this? And how much is this? And how much is this?” It was a horrible day and suddenly it began to rain. Everyone started packing up their things to move them quickly inside. “But how much is this! And how much is this!” Her terrible eyes were brown and fierce and she pushed her face toward them as they hurried to box it all up.

  “You can follow us inside,” said Sylvia harshly. “We have to get these items in before they’re soaked by the rain.”

  The woman didn’t want to leave. “I want to buy these ornaments!” she cried.

  The Miss was getting scared.

  Sylvia repeated, “You must wait till we’re inside! Please stay out of our way.”

  “This is inexcusable! I’m a valid shopper!”

  “Oh, please don’t fight!” cried the Miss, her eyes all alight, her whole chest fluttering. “Don’t fight. Don’t fight. You can have them for twenty dollars, the set.” She glanced at Sylvia for approval, but Sylvia only rolled her eyes. She was trying to get everything into boxes.

  “Good,” said the woman. “Thank you. That’s the courtesy I was looking for.” And she reached into her bag to get the money, but before she could pull out the bills a tiny thunderbolt came from the sky and shot straight down through the woman shopper’s head, striking her to the ground.

  “Good God!” screamed the Miss, and she fell to her knees, shrieking and sobbing hysterically, patting her fingers against the charred-up body. “She was just standing here! Just standing here!” She continued to bawl as the rain poured down, harder and faster, drenching everyone and everything.

  Sylvia continued to put away objects, but she was nervous and spooked. She said quietly to herself, “I don’t understand. I told her to go. I told her not to hang about.”

  THE WEDDING FOR the Miss was three weeks away. As they gathered around a fountain, talking over plans, it was Sylvia who came up with all the ideas and who was the most excited. The Miss and Sam mostly sat there holding each other. “What marvelous day,” the Miss kept saying. “What a beautiful marvelous day with tons of sun!”

  When the wedding came, Sylvia gave a little speech that was squeaky and uncertain, and the Miss got drunk on dry white wine and ended up sleeping near the cake.

  CLEANING THEIR ROOM the next moning, Sylvia suddenly stood upright and said to them, “I’m leaving now. I’ve got to go to Hamilton for three whole years. I don’t know when I’ll see you again.”

  “Hamilton!” cried the Miss, who had grown to like Sylvia. “But why?”

  “Better fairs,” explained Sylvia. Then she dropped her hands in her pockets. “Everything is cleared up. The cake is in the fridge. I must go now. I want to get the prime spot.” And she kissed them both on the cheek and disappeared.

  The Miss and Sam lay in bed, licking each other’s bodies. Then he turned her over and took her from behind.

  THE NEXT DAY, as they were leaving for Israel to go on their honeymoon, Sam said, “There’s just one thing I forgot to tell you, dear.”

  “What?” exclaimed the Miss, not afraid, but anxious. “What is it?”

  He smiled. “That’s the whole point, darling. I forgot.”

  She shook her head and widened her eyes. What a strange and awful man, she thought. Then she checked her bag. The tickets were still there.

  THE WOMAN WHO LIVED IN A SHOE

  SHE WAS ONLY a woman living in a shoe, and she didn’t understand the ways of the world. Didn’t know how to act at every specific social gathering. Wasn’t invited to many anymore, not even museum openings.

  One day a man came to her shoe and knocked on the front door. She went to open it and saw an older fellow who was quite charming looking. He was holding a huge burst of roses and smiling at her, and she smiled back from inside.

  “Why…” she said.

  “I love you Dora,” said the man, and he held out the flowers, and they were so grand and vast that they blocked her face entirely.

  She was a modest woman an
d did not know what to say.

  “Say you’ll marry me.”

  “I can’t,” said the woman. She had said this before.

  “There’s only room for me in the shoe, and if I leave, it will disappear and fall to the ground out of sorrow and uselessness.”

  The man turned and went away.

  “Wait!” she called after him, waving her hand, but he kept walking in such a sorrow because he really did love Dora, and it was not good enough if she just kind of liked him back. He was the one she had to worry about falling to the ground out of sorrow and uselessness, not the shoe.

  Well, there were a number of opportunities for the woman to have fun, and go to public events and make herself known to the world as the woman she was. But whenever she was invited she would just look at the card and shake her head.

  “I’d have nothing to wear,” she’d say to herself, placing her hand against the leather walls. “And who would I meet there? And if I did, then what?”

  Then the woman who lived in a shoe would go outside and sit on the toe and watch as the world went by in all its busy activity: the cities making money and the sun as it so very quickly went up in the sky and down in the sky and up and down and up and down like a yo-yo.

  “My,” she would say to herself. “I don’t know how anybody finds any time to do anything in a day.” And she’d go back inside her shoe where it was one color of light and smelled of leather, and she’d knit or stitch or wring her hands, or not, or play cards with herself, or not.

  One day the woman put up a notice on the door of the shoe. When the mailman came by, he shook his head and walked away, saying to himself, “It’s a changing world. Without the shoe it’ll be any normal street, any normal city, any normal day. There will be a great tall tower put up there, and it will be the burial ground of the shoe. And I’ll never see another woman who lives in a shoe ever again, and every shoe I see forever more will be just a shoe, just a shoe.”

  Then the baker came by with a loaf of bread that he had been making every week for twenty years, perfectly sized for the woman who lived in a shoe. “No shoe!” he exclaimed, and hugged the bread in close to his chest. As the tears welled up in his eyes he started to pull off nibbles. And when the milkman came by to drop off a milk bottle, something he did only for the woman who lived in a shoe, he took several stunned steps back, shaking his head like all the rest. His heart was filled with an inexpressible sorrow, and he looked at the shoe, and at the horizon, and back at the shoe, and back at the horizon.

  That was all very well. When the woman came out she found no bread, she found no mail, she found no milk, and she found no men. So she took down the sign, picked up her suitcase, and looked into the distance at the city with the watch setting over the hill. She left the door open as she walked from the shoe, and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked.

  There was little one could do in a day, in the outside world, outside the shoe.

  THE MIDDLEMAN TO ELDA

  THE MIDDLEMAN WAS very confident these days, having just been given a big salary, and having just found a blond-haired woman who he liked and could talk to. The other night in bed the blond-haired woman had said to him, “Come on now, no more of that,” and had pushed away his head. But this did not bother the middleman as he strode down the street with the sun on his face and his shoes all asparkle.

  “It’s a good day for me,” he said to himself. “Yup, a good day for me.” And not even the blond-haired woman’s pushy hand could take that feeling away from him.

  He passed a bird. He passed a very interesting ramshackle house and a house that was beautiful, and he thought, “I’d like to live there.” Then he continued walking with a more purposeful expression, when suddenly he felt a pain in his heart from the night before.

  “She pushed away my face,” he realized, stopping short as the feeling of horror and humiliation welled up in him.

  “It’s not good, it’s not good.” He hadn’t realized it at all until now. Rushing back in the other direction he hopped on a bus to her part of town, a ratty neighborhood with garbage cans and soot. He climbed the fire escape to her room, which was crisscrossed in the window with brightly colored stockings.

  “Elda!” he cried through the window from the tiny landing on which was he standing. “Elda! Elda!” He had to speak to her quick.

  Elda sauntered over. “Why, Henry,” she said.

  The middleman took a step back. “May I come inside? I must speak with you.”

  “Why, sure,” said Elda, and she stepped away. The middleman took one quick look at her before he entered: she looked high.

  “Have you been smoking, Elda?” he asked, as he pulled in his wiry legs behind him. “You’ve been smoking drugs, haven’t you?” he asked, sniffing the air.

  “And what if I have?” She put up her nose defensively.

  “Nothing, nothing. Elda,” he said, and pulled her down on the couch with him, holding her hands in his own. “I regret everything!” And he explained it all at once. “I have tried to be the man for you but in trying I have not been a man at all, and I have been nothing and not myself, and I regret it—I regret it all terribly. Can we start again? Can you ever forget the man I was until right now—my deceit?”

  “Deceit?” she asked lazily.

  “I understand fully why you did what you did. It was what you had to do. I was inconsiderate. You have been good and honest with me and I have been playing a game. Look at me! I’m a fool! But I’m coming here knowing my humiliation is certain and risking that you may not love me for this, but I love you too much not to say it, Elda. I had to say it.”

  “What are you saying?”

  He looked at her deeply, puzzled, perplexed. “But Elda. Haven’t you seen how I’ve been behaving with you? Like a real country gentleman! But this is the real me! This is the real me! Not the man from before! Me, here, as I’m representing myself to you now!”

  “Fine,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. Then, seeing his distress was real, she leaned in close and looked into his eyes, pressing her hands down on his knees. “Really. It’s fine.”

  He looked at her blankly.

  “Fine,” he said, and stood up.

  “Really, it’s fine,” she said lazily, standing up behind him and moving in front of him to open the door.

  “Well, I’m glad,” he said, walking out. “I have letters to write,” he said, and walked out.

  THE FUNDAMENTAL RACE

  “THERE IS EXACTLY one of everything in the world. A tulip that looks around and finds its position to be lacking some cannot go and become a rose. Do not be afraid to be a rose, Lila. If indeed you are one.”

  This was part of what he had been saying all morning and trying to impress upon poor Lila: that there are no copycats in nature.

  Lila was a terrible student. She looked at the teacher with a face of dubious confusion. Though she knew nothing and learned nothing, she was willing and handed in her essays on time. Her teacher was one of seventeen she had ever had. His name was Mr. Phelps. He lived alone and his wife came to visit him with pies of every nature three times a week. His current project was How to Get It Through Her Head.

  “By looking at a rose you do not turn a little more red,” he gave as one example. “Loving the song of the bird doesn’t give you a more beautiful voice. You are locked in. All humans are locked in. Each human is a species unto itself. Comparing yourself with anyone—even if she is your age and has curlier, blonder hair—is like pitting pigs against toads. You would not pit a pig against a toad, right?”

  She showed that she agreed with him on this fine point but did not change her expression, so he was not convinced.

  He asked her patiently, “In what situation would you pit a pig against a toad?”

  She hated learning.

  HER MOTHER WAS a terrible woman and permitted Lila to sit with her feet on the table. She let the girl beat her in sports because she just didn’t care. Li
la never got any better this way, and one of her mother’s suitors thought, upon meeting Lila, that she had been born retarded. But she was not retarded; she just hadn’t been given the proper care. Of course, she did not accept the proper care. Like all things, she determined the rules of her own existence. Her mother couldn’t prevent Lila from being the way she was. But that didn’t stop those who knew the situation from criticizing her anyway, fundamentally, for letting such a life exist.

  LILA ORDERED A bouquet of roses and sat with them at her vanity table and looked at them as though, as her teacher had suggested, they were an alien species. She wouldn’t compare them to a bucket of water. She wouldn’t compare them to a snail. She liked snails; they had shells they could curl themselves into. Roses had no shells. But roses were romantic.

  On her speed-dial princess phone she called up a boy she had met once, several years ago. He had heard from her monthly, sometimes weekly, since they had danced together that one time. Already he was somewhere on his way to becoming a lawyer, if he wasn’t a lawyer already. His girlfriend was very sleek and not at all lumpy; a girlfriend to be proud of. She had slick brown hair, not at all the sort of hair that one found on imported dolls.

  He was exasperated when he found out it was Lila.

  “You sent me roses,” she said.

  “Can’t you tell I can’t stand you!” he cried, in a voice he used with nobody except her. She deserved it. She looked into the receiver and one contained bit of her sobbed uncontrollably at the tone he used, but the rest of her was blank with dumb confusion. She didn’t know what to make of it.

  Who was he again? She put the receiver to her ear and heard a click and then a silence. Her tongue lolled slightly behind her lip as she hung up the phone. She would not pit a cow against a bouquet of roses. Whatever for? The cow would win, surely.