ORANGE BLOSSOMS by Aurelie Sheehan
Eliza is walking the interminable and daily distance between Castle Arms and Walgreens. Her hands stink of key, the blackened key the man gave her, the man who owns the apartment and lets her stay as long as she signs over the government checks to him in advance. “I’ll do you this kindness,” he said. “You may pay rent in two parts, but you’ll need also to pay me twenty dollars extra, each time, for the favor.” His eyebrows have not just grown together, but the hairs are like the tendrils of a plant, or the flailing arms of a drowning girl before the quicksand slips over.
It’s the only key she’s got, and when he first handed it to her she looked at the black shape in her palm, a shadow of something no longer there.
She waits at the signal and the man in the yellow vest will hold up his stop sign any minute now, and he will smile the jolly smile of the vulnerable, leading her, along with the schoolchildren, across the street and onto the other side. She hears nothing from the front of the stroller, the baby they’d given her.
Lenox Madison Ferrar III was the first name on the document. How it felt, seeing his name all spelled out like that. Until then she hadn’t been aware of the curve of the r’s and the n’s, nor the wide insistence of the three I’s at the end, the sense of continuity and importance that might come of him, this strange agent.
Lenox Madison Ferrar III
Richard M. Nutley
John Rea
Mario Jesus Vega, Jr.
Later she saw the names a second time, in the newspaper, with small photographs of each face, ash smooth scalps, brilliant orange around their necks, eyes and mouths and noses and cheeks scarred as if the negatives themselves had been damaged, pockmarked. For one vast moment she contemplated them, thought of what it might be like to be a mother and find your child like that, soulless in the head, willing to open up a girl like she was a candy bar. She already knew she was pregnant by then; the people at the building next to the courthouse had made her take a test. The nurse or whatever she was, in a green uniform with a teddy bear pin, said under her breath, Be glad they were caught, right? That they aren’t on the streets to fuck up other girls.
That night she’d lain on her bed and beat her midsection with her fists. This is what it was like: a train coming in. This is what it was like: oblivion.
Eliza stands at the threshold of Walgreens and the automatic door sweeps open, as if she is royalty, and lets her in.
Pushing the stroller in front of you is like pushing your face into a wall, or diving with your arms tied behind your back, or closing your eyes while driving. She herself has only driven two times. She drove her grandmother to the emergency room when she was fifteen, last year. Nanie had emphysema and she was having some kind of reaction; she couldn’t breathe and she was knocking her arms against the raggedy afghan. Eliza felt she had no choice, no choice at all, but still her father was stern later. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about his wife’s mother, but, as he explained it, there was a slippery slope to everything, and you must remain vigilant. Why hadn’t she called a taxicab, as they’d taught her to do if she found herself in an uncomfortable situation, a situation, for instance, when an adult was belittling her family or their faith in the Lord?
Walking down the aisle, Eliza can feel the baby’s face like a mask even on the other side of the stroller’s blue and white checked canopy. The baby is sleeping, but she is still massive as King Kong. At the hospital they identified her as Baby Eliza Solgang, and two months later the baby still does not have a name.
Anyway, she’s not Baby Eliza. If she was Baby Eliza, Baby Eliza Solgang, then Eliza’s parents would surely have come to love the little infant, just as they love her.
She goes to the back of the store and picks up what she needs, a box of Cheese Nips and some Chips Ahoy cookies and two cans of chicken noodle soup, and she’s on her way to the Coke aisle when Baby Eliza Solgang suddenly lets out a tremendous and horrible howl, like someone’s twisting her legs out of joint. Eliza lets go of the stroller and rushes to the front whispering first shush shush, then soon, shut the fuck up shut the fuck up, and she’s struggling with the clasp, the two three eighteen clasps, and then she pulls the baby to her body and starts spinning around, the words hoarse and low in her throat, shut the fuck up shut the fuck up and the baby is screaming and when Eliza straightens her arms to get a look at the baby’s face, to knock some sense into her with a look of authority, the baby is by no means looking back. The baby’s face, which has some eczema, some flecks of dry and some patches where the skin is whiter and other patches where the skin is red as a candle, is all closed up, all not looking and not seeing, like
Lenox Madison Ferrar III
Richard M. Nutley
John Rea
Mario Jesus Vega, Jr.,
the four of them interchangeable, their sperm swimming together in a thick sea, a cornucopia.
The thing she can’t get over is the monstrous size of the child. The way she is light and small, and yet has this aura. An aura is what you’d call it, thinks Eliza, this idea a fluff, a fragment, as she humps the baby on her shoulder.
Neither father nor mother wanted to hear the details, not that she was necessarily interested in discussing them, but she couldn’t help but notice the distinct lack of interest in the details on the part of these people, her parents. Indeed, when Eliza was in the hospital, it was only her mother who came to the room (her father was too upset, her mother told her), and she hugged Eliza – as best she could with Eliza’s IVs and the cast on her arm and the sling on her shoulder – but she would not meet her eyes. The sharp line of Eliza’s mother’s brown bangs spanned across her forehead, nearly as far as her ears, and this sharp line, slightly curled under, was all that Eliza saw. She would have done anything if her mother would only look at her, would look her in the eye and tell her it would be all right, would make it all right, be a mother.
Then her mother left and Eliza turned the television back on. It was a show about Africa – poor people – children. Images of little huts, hunched old people, and then a teenage girl. The girl was standing by herself on what looked like the edge of nowhere – three stalk trees and one half-dead goat or deer in the background. The girl wore a scarf as clothing and had big earrings and a nose ring and as she talked flies came near and buzzed away again. The flies she ignored.
She held a baby.
Apparently the baby came after she’d been raped by a bunch of army guys who had invaded the village.
“Janjaweed, janjaweed,” the teenage girl said. That was what they called the baby – spawn of the devil, translated the commentator. When the baby was born, the girl’s family had thrown them both out and now she was living with her uncle, though she didn’t know for how long. This was happening to lots of girls, lots of girls who had been raped by the invading army men from another region, another culture.
Eliza squinted at the TV, irritated. When the credits rolled by, a big white-on-black title, THE LOST BABIES OF DARFUR, she turned the television off.
She’d never actually heard of such a thing as this before. It was, if anything, close to what animals would do, she thought, searching for ideas. Wild cats rejecting a kitten touched by human hands, or a mother mouse eating her babies like little hot dogs. It was entirely against and different than everything she’d read about in, say, their family Bible hour or even Little House on the Prairie, or Married with Children for that matter.
Eliza closed her eyes. Something like that wouldn’t happen here. Nonetheless, there was this: her father’s absence, and this: the distant tiny puppet look of her mother.
* * *
Theirs is not just a kind of Christianity, it is the Christian way, and it is the way, period. And it is true that when Eliza’s father spoke, after dinner, about faith, his eyes became the softest of browns, and his hands, holding each other on the table, looked patient, kind, humble, but also strong. Wise, strong: Daddy’s hands.
Eliza remembers laying in bed together, just her and her dad, Mom in the kitchen making breakfast. He’d read her the funnies. He read “The Family Circus,” which had one picture only, and wasn’t really all that funny. He read “Baby Blues,” also about a little family, and sometimes when he read it to her she wondered, in a vague corner of her nightgowned world, why it was “Blues”? What was blue about it, any of it, after all? He read “Marmaduke” and “Pickles” and he chuckled, along with Eliza. And he would, at times, just remain quiet afterward, his reading glasses in one paw, and stare out at nothing, at their feet under the covers maybe, and stroke his short beard. He was a gentle man. He always had been.
Once a week they had a Family Meeting. This was on Saturday, four p.m. sharp, and then they’d go out to dinner.
The last family meeting, before what happened happened, seemed typical at the beginning. The five of them – Eliza was the oldest of three – sat around the Mission-style table with matching chairs they’d gotten at American Home Furnishings with the last year’s tax refund – and began, as always, with the prayer. Her father was a shorter man than some, but at this table, with these people, he was god. He had pale white soft hands, and the cuffs of his purple-green-white striped shirt were somewhat worn as he lifted his palms to the sky and began. Our Lord in Heaven, we are your disciples, guide us in our actions, guide us in our decisions, guide us as we try, with all our might, to live in your image, to be worthy disciples, obedient children, and humble leaders of the wicked from darkness into the light of your love. For at the Good Word Holy Family Church, where Mr. Solgang served as assistant deacon, not just personal, but universal, outward-reaching salvation was required. It pained him, the sinning of others.
He opened the discussion part of the meeting, inviting the others to speak first, and Samuel, age five, raised his hand.
“Yes, my son?”
“Can we get the swing set now, Daddy?”
“The swing set.” Mr. Solgang made a show of jotting this down.
Eleven-year-old Rachel raised her hand. “I’ve done the poop-scooping job for two weeks now. I think I’ve learned my lesson and would like to go back to my regular chores.”
Mr. Solgang nodded solemnly, writing.
Neither Eliza nor her mother had anything to add that time around. Eliza’s mom remained still, her eyes two amazing deep blue orbs underneath her bangs. If it weren’t for the freckles and cute, baggy sweatshirts, if you just looked at her eyes, you could say to yourself: Whoa, what planet did she come from? Once, at a costume party, she wore a sequined mermaid-like bathing suit and skirt, and she wore bright green eye shadow. It wasn’t that she looked beautiful, but that when she turned to Eliza after Eliza said, Hey, Mom, where’re the chips?, her eyes flashed hostile with freedom.
At the Mission-style table, Mr. Solgang’s own eyes were opaque, thoughtful. He dispensed with the two questions from his children, no, yes, and then he said that he’d had a revelation, and the revelation was that they were to move from Tucson to St. Petersburg, Florida, site of the Good Word Holy Family Church headquarters, at the end of the school year. “Father Hansen has given me his blessing. We can be an exemplary family, a showcase family, devoting our lives to the will of the Lord.”
The children and the wife took in the information, and before long the children were asking fairly predictable questions – Sam asked about Disneyland and Rachel asked if her best friend could come to the beach with them – but Eliza remained silent. Her brain was funneling into a gray hole, for she was in love for the first time. Really, really in love, and she and Jon, who was Jewish, had just last week gone to third base in a van in the school parking lot. Eliza had not gone to third, or even second base before. At this point, she didn’t think anyone knew about Jon. She’d kept it quiet around the house. There was, of course, the Jewish Problem.
The feeling in her own body, this was something she’d never known before, and in their heat it was Eliza’s hand that had pulled his hand further down.
Baby Care 101. The hospital sent her home with a light green plastic bag, a matching bottle, a bib dotted with green bunnies, and a small towel dotted with similar animals. A plastic bag with the hospital’s name on it was filled with samples of so many things: nipple ointment (disgusting thought), formula, baby powder, baby shampoo, baby moisturizer, a few diapers, a slim box of baby wipes, another package of baby wipes. Wipe, wipe, wipe. Wipe and feed and wipe and feed, but the situation is more dire than that. It’s not just that the baby is monstrous in size, but every time you touch her your hands get stuck with this invisible spider web stuff, threads of goop, and you can never get away, you can never truly get rid of it.
There is one time that Eliza likes: when the baby is sleeping in her bed. The baby lies on her side. (NOT ON THE STOMACH! Everyone at the hospital chanted this as if that had been the cause of more death than all the wars in the universe. She knew three things for sure: DON’T PUT THE BABY ON ITS STOMACH! DON’T SHAKE THE BABY! IF YOU HAVE PROBLEMS WITH CONTROL, CALL THIS NUMBER, OPEN 24 HOURS!) And when little Baby Eliza Solgang was sleeping on the bed yesterday, she had her arms raised above her head, and her chin raised, and her lips were soft and parted, and it looked, for a moment, like she was having a beautiful dream of her own: a dream of bunny rabbits, a dream of a mother.
Because no matter what Eliza thinks, the baby wants her more than anything, more than life itself. Shut the fuck up shut the fuck up. Eliza hears the words rehearsing, echoing, even when the tiny giant sleeps. It’s at this moment when Eliza stands up, grabs her purse, and indulges in her new habit, smoking, just outside the patio door, in the lascivious heat of Tucson’s spring – until, through the door, she hears the screaming of spider webs and she knows the dreams are done.
Her father, soft-handed man, patient man, had the house half-packed before the incident, the outrage, the concomitant punishment. Turns out he’d had a refinement of vision: instead of waiting for the school year to end, they’d simply stay through the testing season, get the kids’ Stanford 9 reports, and then start homeschooling in Florida. The children had stacked plates in between sheets of newspaper. The mirrors in the house had come down and lay between towels in the master bedroom.
There’s an enormity and an importance to one’s place in the community, to one’s role in society, to one’s mission here on earth. Some are called to be leaders, to be examples for others. Some are humble and must bow to the whim of the Lord.
There’s a historical, or biblical, precedent for penance. It’s not that Eliza asked to be gang-raped behind Blockbuster, but she’d already been descending, and this was a wake‑up call. Abortion was certainly not an option. And it wasn’t like her parents had abandoned her forever; they simply required that she stay away, out of view, until the baby was older.
Why? Why couldn’t she come to Florida?
Because you have failed us, Eliza. You and this child of Satan. If it hadn’t been them, it would have been the Jew. Yes, we know about him.
The little baby will not stop crying, and Eliza has abandoned her basket with the Cheese Nips and the Chips Ahoy cookies before the coolers and put the baby back in her stroller and is taking a peripheral walk around the store and back toward the front door.
This is when she runs into Jon.
When Eliza looked in the mirror this morning, this is what she saw: a grown-out haircut and bags under her eyes and a whole mess of zits on her chin, worse than she’d ever had before, and a look in her eyes that could only be described as fear. So things had gone a bit downhill since tenth grade, since she’d last seen Jon and she’d been, if not popular, at least not someone who stood out as a freak of nature.
In the meantime, Jon has gone punk. He’s wearing gel in his hair.
“Eliza,” Jon says, struck practically dumb. He has frozen in the middle of the automatic doors, and he only jumps forward when the doors start close-opening, close-opening, in a frantic automatic half-witted hysteria.
“Jon.” Eliza remembers everything: the theater of high school, the inflections, the slow turning away from the undesirable ones. She doesn’t have the will to live. Here. Now. In Walgreens.
Jon puts a hand up to his chin, pitted and sore with his own furtive pickings. He lurches, like something has given way in the atmosphere. “Is this your baby?” he asks. He says it boldly, as if this is a Christmas party and she’s wearing a cute pair of antlers.
“Yes.” But he wouldn’t go to a Christmas party, thinks Eliza dimly. Then she thinks, of course he would. We make them go to our Christmas parties all the time.
“What’s her name?” (The baby is wearing pink: maybe that’s how he knew.)
Eliza thinks quickly. “Her name is Jessica.”
“Wow. Holy shit, wow.” Jon stands back up from where he was half-kneeling.
Eliza is frozen in place, hands on the stroller. She feels the roundness that has not yet left her waist, the sausage aspect. She feels the pull of the elastic band on these, not really maternity, more like XXL sweatpants she’s wearing. I wouldn’t be caught dead in pants like these, she’s thinking. But I am caught. I am caught dead in pants like these.
“She’s an okay baby,” Eliza says at last. “She sleeps a lot. When she sleeps she makes this little gurgle.”
The baby, newly named, has been blessedly silent for all of this, as if the red and green streaked Mohawk interests her.
“That’s cool.”
A silence, then Eliza asks: “So, how’s school?”
“Sucks. You’re not missing much.”
They’re standing in a section of firewood and clearance cosmetics, all the bottles and jars slashed and reslashed with neon green, then red, then yellow stickers.
“Yeah,” she says. “I’ll probably do the GED, maybe go to college when she gets a little older.”
Since when is she the concerned mother, the one with a name for her daughter, with plans for the future? The reality she’s creating for Jon is disturbing, like taking off your sunglasses and blinking at a yard of scrap metal. Her headache is about to come on, but she’s got a few minutes yet. Maybe she can get the Cheese Nips and the cookies, maybe she can talk to Jon some more, or even give him her cell number –
“Well – ” Jon says, the “well” that comes before departure.
The fact is, Eliza had been the one to break up with him, she’d said it would be best, that she needed to concentrate on her family now, that this was her decision, dropping out, keeping the child, breaking up with the Jewish boyfriend who had been only gentle, only sweet with her, as if all boys and reality had to be swept away in the wake of the resonant act, a funnel of time that was really only a half-hour long but was painted in darker, richer colors than other minutes, other hours.
Typically, the Christians would marry you off. Why hadn’t that happened to her?
Eliza and – Jessica – trudge back to Castle Arms. Her ears are ringing. Her eyesight is going. She feels every pebble under the wheels of the stroller.
At first it’s like maybe she’s seeing scraps of bags or fabric remnants or balloons from a graduation party, all colors, and she thinks her headache has taken on a new dimension. But it’s not that. It’s the refugee family; she’s seen them before. She’s seen them in ones or twos, but here, there’s a whole bunch of them together. They’re on a walk on the other side of the street; they’re all going to a refugee event together. Maybe they’re going to refugee church. And then Eliza sees, realizes, they are all women – where are the men, the fathers and brothers?
In some of the women’s arms, lashed to their bodies with batik cloth, are infants, and by their hands they lead small children in Western clothing. But they, the very black women who are laughing, smiling at one another, are wearing such amazing, the most vibrant colors. One woman is wearing a leaf-green and white long skirt, and then wrapped around her shoulders is a purple and red shawl. One is wearing a brilliant yellow caftan and an orange turban and her dreadlocks hang out the back like tassels on a fancy curtain. Another is in red, and then there’s blue, and more green, and a dark mustard yellow, and slipped inside the stretches of cloth, in the folds, every once in awhile, is a small black face, like the small white face in the stroller on the other side of Fifth Street here in Tucson.
Inside her first-floor apartment, Eliza goes to the bathroom, leaving the baby in the stroller, even though she has started howling. When Eliza comes back, blank yellow light comes through the shades like a malevolent life force.
It takes awhile to get used to the dimness, but the drawn shades keep the heat out, at least in part. When she was pregnant, Eliza didn’t think she’d breast-feed the baby, but then she was struck by the practicality of it. Wouldn’t you know she’d always be losing the nipples to the bottles, or leaving the warmed‑up formula in the microwave overnight? “Jessica, Jessica, Jess,” Eliza says, in the near dark, scrambling now to unlatch the eighteen million belts on the stroller.
A baby uses her head to express emotion, like punk rockers do. A head butt or two can mean I’m totally pissed off. Then they come gentler, slower, the baby turning her head this way for a second, pressing her cheek into her mother’s shoulder, then turning that way, press, close eyes, brief moment of silence, while the crying jag winds itself down again. Eliza sits in the stretchy plastic chair by the dining room table. She pulls up her T‑shirt and positions the baby and Jessica begins to suck, settling down with some murmurings and grumblings into the safety and comfort here.
There is a slice of the back courtyard Eliza can see from where she’s sitting, an orange tree, a section of a green garbage can, and then a flash of silver reflection that for the first couple of weeks Eliza couldn’t figure out, so finally she went out to investigate. It was a broken window, leaning on the wall, never picked up by the garbage collectors and never returned to someone’s home, either.
At this time of year, if you keep the door open a ways, you can smell orange blossoms. It’s a sweet, slow perfume, especially at night, luxurious and intoxicating as a riverboat ride or a serenade. Amazing, really, how much fragrance can come from one little tree – even if it’s just for a little while, before it goes away.
Jessica, she tries out, in her head. That’s a decent name. Why didn’t I think of that before?
As she sits, her head leaning on the wall, the warmth and weight of Jessica the baby melting into her, becoming her, Eliza begins to think again of the men who brought her here.
Where does religion begin? For Eliza’s father, it came as a revelation at some drunken moment in an alley or someplace. Eliza has heard him talk about the miracle of his conversion, and she knows it involved a last straw, a darkest hour – it involved stealing from his dear aunt Josephine, taking the money she’d saved for dentures and spending it on a bunch of cocaine and liquor. To illustrate his debasement, her father likes to recount that he bought silk socks, ten dollars a pair, each pair a differing hue and texture to match the pants he wore as a salesman of furniture.
Pride, he calls it. One of the seven deadly sins. Eliza never did find the seven deadly sins in her Bible reading, but her father certainly was fond of the list, and, later, he accused her of lust, last of the seven, and so in a sense they were bookends. She, too, needed to hit bottom, and, though it pained him deeply, he was doing what was best for her and her child.
Eliza’s new list reads something like this:
Get diapers
Back to welfare office with that form
Job bank Saturday
Call about GED practice test schedule
Lightbulbs
Talk to landlord about sink
Her father cried when he told her about his pain and her release. She’d seen him cry before, during Mass, but here he was crying in their kitchen. Tears ran from behind his glasses down into his beard. He held his hands out, somewhere between him and her, wavering. Palms up, palms soft and white as clouds. It was as if those hands were melting, becoming unformed, turning back to God, turning into light, into butter, there in the kitchen, before he turned from her.
In a sense she felt like she had a revelation at that moment. Eliza’s body was still stressed from the ordeal, as her mother called it; she had gray patches like clouds around her thighs and calves. Her insides had swollen and the two sides chafed when she walked, like she was holding a prickly pillow between her legs. The back of her head was scraped clean, she’d lost hunks of hair, and her skin was still pink and hairless and prickled with red dots in places: her neck, cheeks, wrists. They were like stigmata, these places of pain, and yet she felt faith rush from her.
Still, she cannot languish here, in faithlessness, forever.
When she thinks of her mother now it’s as if she’s looking into a camera and the telephoto lens is drawing in, sucking back in, and all things are getting small and distant. Her mother’s absence is loud and red, but her image is there, tiny, like a little doll in a balsa wood house in the corner.
Eliza flips the baby around to the other breast, gently, because that is how she has learned to keep the child quiet. Besides, this is what you do with a gentle quiet fragile thing like this, you act gentle quiet fragile too, you whisper and tiptoe and make smooth sounds. You do this as much as you can, plowing over the shut the fuck ups that come out of nowhere.
What can a baby remember? The baby seems forgiving, thinks Eliza. If I hold her all day and night, if we are joined together, the same person, even that would not be too much for her.
My own father – but she does not go there. It’s funny to think that the men, the defendants,
Lenox Madison Ferrar III
Richard M. Nutley
John Rea
Mario Jesus Vega, Jr.
mean so little to her.
The doorbell rings, slapping Eliza out of a slumber. She starts, almost waking up the baby in her arms. Eliza’s headache settles in as she tries to focus, tries to imagine whom it could be. The landlord is the only person who ever comes here.
The bell rings again. Eliza stands, puts the sleeping baby back into the stroller and walks toward the front door. Through the plastic edges, she sees a wavy shape of color. She opens the door: one of the African refugee women is standing there.
At first, Eliza cannot understand what she is saying, and then finally she realizes the woman is telling her that today is International Women’s Day, and that here is a flyer about a festival at Himmel Park. Many women will be there, many many, and they will be selling bracelets and necklaces and rings made of leather.
“Why did you come here?” is all Eliza can think to say.
The woman on her doorstep has a small, shiny face, and Eliza’s never seen such dark skin, with so much red pushing from underneath, like some kind of life force she’s never known or heard about before. The woman’s neck is terribly thin, and as she speaks Eliza notices the tendons tense and thrum in a fearful way. She doesn’t know much English, so the message about International Women’s Day and the festival at the park comes in multiple throws, repetitions, returns, and Eliza understands finally but does not understand the one thing: why here, why her.
“Do you have a baby, too?” Eliza asks.
“I have a baby boy. He is with my mother now but he will be at the festival. You can meet him. His name is Faisal.”
“Faisal?”
The woman’s hands, strong and thin like her neck, wrap around the neon pink flyers.
Eliza looks back at the woman, this stranger. She hesitates, but then she says: “My baby is named Jessica.”
Aurelie Sheehan is the author of the novels History Lesson for Girls (Viking Adult, 2006), The Anxiety of Everyday Objects (Penguin, 2004), and the short story collection Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant (Dalkey Archive Press, 2001). Her short stories have appeared in Fairy Tale Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and Willow Springs. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.