A BELL IS A CUP UNTIL IT IS STRUCK by Amber Dorko Stopper
BEDTIMES
“What are we going to do now?” she asked.
“Well,” he said, “I’m going to put me to bed.”
“I want to help,” she said.
“Good,” he said. “Can you go brush my teeth for me?”
She sorted her pills into her palm and set them on the nightstand next to a glass of water. He lay under the covers on his side of the bed, with the chain of the lamp pinched between his thumb and forefinger.
“It’s okay,” she said, “you can turn it off.”
She sat on the edge of the bed in the dark. She pulled back the sheet and comforter and lay down so that they were merely tucked under her knees; she was not under them nor on top of them. He lay on his back, one hand over his heart, and she took it. He curled his fingers into hers as she stroked upward, but she felt them release involuntarily as she brought her hand up around the other side of his. He was falling asleep already. She let her hand fall under his against his chest.
“You know how much I love listening to your heart beat?” she asked him.
“Limited engagement,” he said.
From where she lay facing him she could see only the tops of the green digits on the clock radio. The toilet ran. She smelled toothpaste on his breath. She preferred his breath at other times – sharp with coffee and adrenaline or hours of sleep. She remembered how once, early in their friendship, she had debated whether or not to tell him: he needed to brush his tongue too when he brushed his teeth. She had never told him.
She lay in the dark while his breathing became quicker with sleep, and she fought her own at the same time. She felt herself reawaken again and again, in intervals of time that could have been no more than a minute or two. She thought of getting up and doing the dinner dishes they had left in the sink. She looked beside the bed at a stack of belongings that were her own, growing now, comfortable on the floor, a dress and a sweater, in addition to the three pairs of panties under the bathroom sink, tags still on, an eye pencil, an antiperspirant, a toothbrush, a pair of clean socks. A nightgown hung on the knob of his closet; he had put it there after washing it for her. A pair of her black dress shoes sat under a piece of exercise equipment in the corner.
She had said that she would be home by midnight. At 11:35, she kissed his cheek, and he grunted softly. She put her shoes on, swiftly kissed his cheek again, and said, “I love you.”
“I love you too,” he said, asleep, kissing the air in front of him as she swooped down for her purse, kissed his cat with her remaining ardor, and slid out the door of the apartment, letting in as small a chunk of light as she could.
She sped under the fluorescent lights down the hall to the elevators, pushing the button excitedly, smiling to herself. It had never made so much noise, its door jolting open, as it took her from the eleventh floor to the lobby, with its prefab maintained-building smell and potted pothos. She dug into her purse for an open cellophane packet of jellybeans and shoved a handful into her mouth in a celebration of aloneness and gluttony and love.
On a grate across the street slept a black man with full, soft hair, his feet bare, his shoes lying beside him for the night. The streetlights were flattering, and the man looked safe and comfortable, even snug. She hailed a cab. She had hardly ever taken cabs before in her life, before evenings like this; now she recognized the drivers, and they recognized her.
In the cab, she felt the pills begin to take effect. The cab went past the same things every night, a neighborhood she had become familiar with only through these rides: a check cashing place, bodega, block of houses whose doors were bordered by the quilted, stainless steel material that lunch trucks are made of. Still light on her feet, she tipped a full half of the fare. She walked three doors to her own, opened it with her key, went up the stairs, and opened the door to her own apartment, where her husband lay half-asleep on the couch, lights on.
“I’m tired,” she told him, “come to bed.” Together they switched off all the lights in the apartment and got in together, she curling her body against his as she had done for the past nine years, and neither of them stirred until morning.
A WIDOW
“He’s dead,” she said. “Dead dead dead dead dead!” The automatic doors of the Mall opened to her like she was a queen.
My father’s girlfriend had stayed married to her junkie husband for five years after she left him. She had never seemed married, and it had never seemed to matter. This husband she had wasn’t a real person. And finally, like she had always said he would, he had overdosed and died. “I’m a widow,” she announced happily.
“Did you have any insurance on him?”
“I did once,” she said. “But not recently. I’d have stood to make fifty thousand dollars, damn,” she said. “But at least he’s dead.”
We went shopping, bought Capri pants and nail polish. My dad’s girlfriend got a watch for her daughter, a silly, sparkly watch. We went to Friendly’s and had sundaes. My dad’s girlfriend pouted; they had left off her cherry. She was going to complain. “Ah, drop it,” said my dad. “Just think of George, cold and dead in the ground.” She cackled.
“What can I do? I’m a widow,” she said.
I had been having an affair for months, had moved out of the apartment I had shared with my husband of eight years only weeks before. A lifetime of permissive parenting – my ballet class sit-downs, my pink hair, my GED, my adultery – all common knowledge in a family that had always made it a point to never raise an eyebrow, and just hold their breath.
The four of us sat in a booth at Friendly’s: my dad, his widowed girlfriend, the man I was having an affair with, and me.
“It’s hard to be the scandalous one in this family,” I explain to my lover. That’s what my husband calls him. “Your lover.”
“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree!” says my father’s girlfriend happily, spooning the cherry from my dad’s sundae onto her own.
YOM KIPPUR
On Yom Kippur he fasted like usual and she told him it was because he wouldn’t accept Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior that he got the headache he did, but of course it was because it was his first Yom Kippur having an affair with a married woman, and one who wasn’t Jewish.
She spent the day with him and fasted as well, but by mid-afternoon his headache was so bad that he lay on the bed rigid with an arm flung over his eyes, breathing laboredly. “Relax, and it won’t hurt so much,” she said. She took his hand gently. He started to hyperventilate and alternately grasped and wrenched away. Three hours went by like this on the bed, as the sun went down.
“Please just relax,” she said. He was whispering to himself incoherently. “It’s nerves,” she said. At sundown she broke his fast with a glass of orange juice with a .25-mg tablet of Xanax sneakily crushed into it.
Ten minutes later he had his eyes open for the first time in hours, and was sitting up eating a bowl of rice. “Do you hurt less?” she asked him.
“I think so,” he said.
“I’ll go to the drugstore and see what I can get for you,” she said, and he stroked her hand.
“Forgiveness,” he said, “and new beginnings. That is what today is about.” But he was falling asleep as he said it, and within moments she had her coat on.
She went to three different drug stores before she found one that was open. Migraine capsules, migraine poultices, hot packs, cold packs. She got one or two of each, and a can of Chunky Clam Chowder, his favorite.
She went to the deli where the two of them usually had brunch on Sundays. “How are you guys doing?” the hostess asked her.
“I’m fine,” she said, “but he fasted for Yom Kippur and got a migraine. I just want to take him something to eat,” she said. She got three sandwiches, thinking they could use that many, at least for lunch the next day.
She got back to the apartment and he was sound asleep, immobile. In an hour or so, he stirred. “Are you going to the store?” he asked her.
She drew a bath for him and used some bath crystals that she found in his cabinet, so old they were devoid of scent. He sat in the bath and she lay a hot wet washcloth across his back. “What kind of sandwiches?” he asked.
When he stood up from the tub, she held out his striped bathrobe to him, and he put it on, crying. “What?” she asked.
“This was my uncle’s bathrobe,” he said. “He never would have acted like this. He never would have let a thing like this happen.”
“What uncle?” she asked.
The uncle who had been killed changing his tire on I-95. Had he never told her that story? No, he hadn’t. She had not known this. They ate sandwiches.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“Fantastic,” he said. “I keep having these tiny almost-dreams.”
From then on after she showered, she liked to wear the bathrobe.
HAIR
“Your hair’s at a really stupid stage,” her husband said in the Thai restaurant where they were eating Thanksgiving dinner together.
She had already been to her mother’s with the new boyfriend; her soon-to-be ex-husband had gone to the movies alone. He had a big party to go to the next day, with his soccer club. But she had called him on the phone Wednesday night, much more upset than he was about the arrangements. “We’d always said we wanted to eat Thanksgiving in a restaurant once,” she had said. “Please come have dinner with me tomorrow.” He agreed.
She picked at some spring rolls, already full from turkey dinner, while he ate a roasted red snapper.
“Your hair looks okay now because you’ve had the hat on,” he said, “but I can tell it’s at that stage where, when you first wake up in the morning, it’s all matted down and sticking out around the ears.”
They hadn’t seen each other for a few days, and were heading into even longer stretches of not seeing each other. “And when you first wash it, I bet the curls kink up. But it looks okay when you’ve had the hat on for awhile.”
An older woman, leaving the restaurant with her husband and full of holiday mood, said, “Isn’t this the best Thanksgiving food you’ve ever had?”
She had to agree. The cellophane noodles contradicted the heavy traditional meal at her mother’s house, where her newly-spiritual mother had brought her recently dead relatives to the table, one in the form of a small turtle figurine and the other in the form of a gravy boat.
With her soon-to-be ex-husband, she walked back to the apartment where she had lived for eight years. There he peeked under the foil of the plate she had brought him from her mother’s; and she called the boyfriend to come get her in the car.
Halfway back to his place she realized she had left her hat in the Thai restaurant. Her boyfriend offered to go in for her, but she said “They don’t know you. They just saw me in here with another man, they’re not going to give you my hat.” She went in and got it herself.
ALLEN DORSETT
They called him “our homeless guy” or “our angel.” He was a young black man with lots of soft-looking hair and thyroidal eyes. When they left the apartment, they often saw him leaning against a mailbox, smiling into a small carton of milk. In the evenings, if they were coming home from a restaurant, they saw him curled up on a grate with a matted blanket. Once they saw him sitting cross-legged on the corner, an entire pie in his lap.
Often they talked about giving him money, or just stopping to talk to him to find out what his story was. But he haunted their block; if they started a relationship with him, they knew, they might never be able to cut it short. If they bought his little carton of milk for him one day, they would be buying it all days.
It was Christmastime and a French horn student from the Curtis Institute of Music was perpetually blundering on the corner opposite the homeless man. From the seventh floor, they could see both of them. Inside their warm apartment, holiday greetings arrived in the mail and got stacked along the ledge behind the kitchen sink, growing taller and more ragged each day, like bolting cabbage. “Hey,” he said one Sunday morning, while attempting to clean it all up. “You got a check back from your car insurance company. You accidentally made an extra payment.”
It was good news during the holidays, to have extra cash, but they had bought gifts already: her sister, his sisters, three sets of parents and stepparents. They were eating out for holiday brunches and dinners with friends and family regularly. Almost two hundred extra dollars, and they weren’t sure what to do with it.
“Give me the check,” she said. “I want to give it to him. I’ll endorse it.”
“Give it to who?” he asked.
“Our guy,” she said. “With the milk and the pie.”
“You know his name?” he asked her, incredulous.
“I don’t need to know his name,” she said impatiently. “I just want to sign the check over to him.”
But the burst of holiday bravery faded, and she didn’t sign the check over to the homeless guy, nor did they buy treats for the animal refuge like they had said they would. On Christmas Day, the homeless guy was nowhere to be seen, and they did not see him again until after the New Year, in a down coat and with a silent transistor radio to his ear.
DOG VOICE
They still saw each other socially, mostly because they needed to speak in the voice of the dog to each other. That was the thing each of them most missed about their marriage: the dog’s voice.
They had begun it when she was just a puppy, and it had taken them a few weeks to get it down pat. It evolved even after that, each of them altering it slightly so that it sounded as much as possible like it did when the other one used it. Soon they were both utterly proficient and no one, not even the dog, could have told their voices apart. The dog talked to Mommy, the dog talked to Daddy. It was a little Lisa Simpson, a little Blanche DuBois. They had created a third voice in their household.
When they separated, the dog was eight. She had been given birthday parties and she had signed cards with a purple inkpad pressed against her paw many a time. When they separated, the dog stayed in the apartment where they had all lived together. Sometimes the phone rang and she was told, “Mommy’s on the phone,” but she didn’t really care. Once she ate cat food and Daddy called Mom and Mom yelled at her through the phone: “You ate out of the cats’ bowls? Bad girl! You do not eat cat food!”
When Mom came over to see her, Mom and Dad used the dog voice almost exclusively to talk to each other. They missed it, and they didn’t talk to each other as easily as they had for eight years, yet so many situations still demanded that they did. The dog voice called Mom’s new boyfriend a “vacuous fucknut.” This was tolerated, the way that, when they lived together, he had talked in the dog voice when he had wanted to talk about football to her. She accepted it, however grudgingly, when it came from the dog.
CHILD
The kid is faceless like a Tupperware lid, either a boy or a girl, but old enough to understand something.
The kid knows, and now wants to know why its father and I are not married to each other. We live together, the three of us. The child, its gender flitting like moths’ wings, wants to know.
Faceless as the children I could populate a room with, this one that one, children never had, children I have fathered by my mind. One for every boyfriend, every crush, from the age of twenty on. This one sticks. This one next to me that wants to know: Why aren’t you and Daddy married?
I don’t think it’s important, I think of telling it. We don’t think it’s very important.
Silence for half a block or so; we walk by the Super Fresh. The kid has an apple, a package of Twizzlers, something red and sweet in its hand.
But I was married once, I say.
Like any common first offender, fetid with guilt, I begin to babble towards comradery or absolution – from this child, my future child, the only child I can ever picture having.
Do you know who I was married to?
In my imagination, this is what is important to me; that this child of mine be able to fathom me as its mother, a person with a wedding album, once years and years younger, married to someone the kid itself knows. From my company picnics/from extended family holidays/from our continued friendship. This man. My mom was married once. Not to my dad.
Know who it was?
The child has asked one question, which I have not really answered, and now I am asking it another; demanding a response for my own peace of mind. I wheedle my child. There is a playground, and we pass it.
IN THE BRIGHT LIGHT
“This is your home now,” he said, but she still found herself scouring the sink of her own hair, and tearing off more toilet paper than she needed, so she could be sure she left the ends even, and not ragged.
She would get up in the middle of the night to pee, and on her way back out into the darkness, she would close her eyes. She willed that this would be the time her foot would touch down upon the warm, worn hardwood of home, the home of her rotten marriage. That she would turn right and head down the hall, brushing up against the stucco wall, into her bedroom with her husband, a dog at the foot of the bed, a cat brushing her leg.
But she always just brought her foot down against his carpeting. His carpet, his toothpaste, his bread, all different from her own. “Before you came,” he told her, “this was just a place to come when I didn’t have to go to work. Now, it’s a home.”
There were times when she felt that way: at night, cooking ramen noodles in the little kitchen, looking at him in the living room watching the news. And she was free of many of her old responsibilities; no mail came for her, she had little right or inclination to rearrange or judge his mismatched spice jars, or care what went bad in the crisper. It was like a little vacation cottage. She had one book to read, one notebook to write letters.
On a Sunday evening when they had lain around the house far too long, both logy and slothful, she asked him to go out and get some ice cream. He left the apartment and appeared again within minutes. “I think the car’s been towed,” he said.
“How do you know it’s been towed and not stolen?” she asked.
His reply was irritated and certainly unconcerned with her edification. “How would I know?” he asked her.
“But how much will it be to get it back?” she asked.
When he left again a few minutes later for the impound lot, in a cab, she was feeling the first effect of hurt feelings, something he had never inflicted upon her. She went to the bathroom, and sitting down blinking in the bright light, she suddenly knew where she was.
Amber Dorko Stopper is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review. Her stories have also appeared in the Northwest Review and The Whole Story: Editors on Fiction.