Home Beautiful
Rosalia Scalia
I know that
sound. I’ve made that sound before. It is the rhythmic creaking of an old bed
straining when two people make love in it. The sound follows me like a panting,
hungry dog. Again.
When the creaking starts, I turn up the stereo to drown it out. But the rhythmic eek-ee-eek-ee-eek-ee-eek-ee always overwhelms the rock and roll blaring from the stereo speakers, and I can’t concentrate on anything else.
Josie lives upstairs with her two sons, Sal and Jake, both in their early 30s. I live downstairs with my two daughters, Rachael and JoAnna. The house, divided into two apartments, mine and Josie’s, belongs to Josie’s brother, who comes once a month on the seventh to collect the rent. The place, a dump, sits across the street from the projects, across the street that serves as an unspoken border between a good and bad neighborhood, a safe and a crime-ridden neighborhood. Plaster walls in our house blister and peel like sunburned skin. So does the gas-station green paint that covers every room and hallway, except for the walls in our apartment. I call it “gangrene,” and I’ve decorated around it until the color just made me sick. So I have repainted every room in our apartment with a clean, glossy white. My place looks like a sanctuary compared to the rest of the building, and although Josie’s brother has promised to reimburse me for the cost of the paint, I’m still waiting.
JoAnna, Rachael, and I love our neighbors. They don’t congregate outside our front door all night long, playing loud music. They don’t fight, bang doors, or entertain a never-ending flow of visitors like the roughnecks from our old neighborhood, like the roughnecks across the street. They’re quiet. They’re old ladies, widows, a trio of them. My parents are gone, and I don’t have other relatives. I haven’t seen my ex since Rachael was three, and he hasn’t sent a dime in child support.
The old ladies and I trade for dinners. I drive them to the Broadway market to buy fish or to the supermarket for groceries or to Highlandtown to the salon where they all go once a week for their “sets, hon.” When I can, I take them to doctors’ offices and wait until they are done to drive them back, and they babysit for me for free.
They sometimes visit for a couple of hours, telling me stories about the neighborhood. Over coffee or tea and cookies and cakes, they relive special moments when their now-dead husbands were courting them. They repeat the same stories, but I don’t mind. They remind me of my Grandma Carolina. Before Grandma Carolina died, she and I spent hours in her kitchen. She taught me how to grate cheese and cook simple dishes, and she let me wear her beautiful red shoes. Grandma Carolina’s stories were about how she and Pop survived “the Big War,” how food was so scarce even for dogs, reduced to chewing leather shoes they found in the rubble of bombed-out buildings, how Pop had to turn his bakery over to Nazis and deliver by bicycle bread to their camps, how he stole a case of sauerkraut from them, and when he brought it home, how it stank when Grandma Carolina opened the cans, and how they threw it away, thinking it had rotted. Grandma Carolina crinkled her nose at the smell of sauerkraut all those years later, much the same way Mealie crinkles her nose when she sits in my kitchen and the creaking starts.
“Asia, what da hell is dat noise?” She stares at the ceiling as if the answer would suddenly appear in the air.
“Who knows?” I say with a shrug. I suggest we go outside to see if Blondina or Rosa or both of them are sitting on the corner bench. They provide a distraction to the creaking sounds. Better yet, Blondina and Rosa distract me from thinking about the creaking sounds. Talking, speculating, or thinking about them is the last thing I want to do, so I get Mealie out of the apartment before the creaking speeds up and before the thump-thump-thump sounds of the old bed banging against the wall start. How in the world would I explain that, if I couldn’t explain the creaking?
I want to move, but I can’t because the place is cheap, and still, I can barely make the rent sometimes. So we live with the quirks. Like the creepy creaking. Like the dining room ceiling. Every time the toilet upstairs overflows or Josie’s mental son Jake overflows the tub, rust-colored water comes rushing down into my dining room like sea into a sinking ship.
“It’s leaking again. It’s leaking!” I scream up through the ceiling while shoving the dining room table out of the way of the cascading water and hollering for JoAnna or Rachael to bring a bucket. And I can almost picture that 300-pound demented fool upstairs, grinning like a giant ghoul, his bandana-ed head tilted to the side, clapping his big, outstretched arms, mumbling, “Jesus Christ, son of a beetch, son of a beetch, shit-shit-shit” while watching as the water pours over the side of the tub. I can almost hear him laughing through his nose like a sneaky cartoon character, and when the water leaks, I hate his stupid grin, the menace of him, and his fat cow of a mother.
Why does Josie allow him in there by himself? Why does she allow him to fool around with the spigots, anyway? Couldn’t she get it through his thick skull that backing up the toilet and overflowing the tub is a no-no? Even a two-year-old understands the word “no” and understands cause and effect. Jake knows too. I swear he does. He understands simple commands, and when his mother or Sal talk to him, he seems to be able to connect the dots. He never talks, never forms words, but he communicates. He lets it be known what he wants.
The once-a-week water seepage has caused a large, unsightly hole in the water-stained dining room ceiling, a giant black eye staring down at me from above. The place is drafty. Two winters after having complained about the drafts of cold air coming in through the rotting wooden windows, Josie’s brother finally came to fix them.
His solution? The windows are now painted shut, forcing me to buy an air-conditioner at a yard sale and have it installed into the dining room wall because we couldn’t open any of the windows in summer. How can I ask him to repair the hole in the dining room ceiling? I’m too afraid of his solution to ask. I think about hiring a workman to come in to fix it but realize it would be as pointless because of Jake upstairs. Josie won’t or can’t stop him from flooding the bathroom once a week.
“How can she stop him after the hole is fixed?” Josie’s brother Philip stares at it one month on the seventh when he’s collecting the rent.
“That’s her problem. Mine’s the hole in the ceiling. I need it fixed,” I say.
“No point. The cause ain’t structural or from the pipes. The cause is human,” Philip says.
“The cause is your nephew. How about you fix the hole and read the riot act to Josie about teaching that lump of a son of hers to shower instead?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Philip says, stuffing the envelope with the rent check into his back pocket.
It’s a roof. A roof over our heads—even a leaky one—in such a good neighborhood is better than no roof at all or a place in a crappy one where drug dealers ply their trade. After the Charmless Prince vanished, we lived in worse places for twice the rent, and Josie’s brother hasn’t raised the rent much over the years. He tries. I point to the hole in the ceiling. “When will that be fixed?” I ask. “How about we revisit the rent thing when the hole is fixed?”
Still, I daydream about more money and apartments with dishwashers, intact ceilings, and no Jake. Mostly, no Jake. Haphazard freelance income lends itself to daydreaming and raises adaptability to high art.
I’m a graphic designer, though honestly, I haven’t been working much. My client base is drying up, gradually. I need to get a day job. This I also know, but I can’t bring myself to answer want ads, to rush the girls and me out of the house every day, to give up my independence from the nine to five, the intellectual challenge of a variety of projects for a variety of clients. My office—a Mac computer, a light table, a printer, a color printer, a bookshelf, a wax machine for the pasteup work, and a small white desk—sits in the corner of the dining room—the farthest point away from where the ceiling leaks. Aside from the dining room, there are two slightly smaller bedrooms, a living room, and a full bathroom off the kitchen—and the highlight, a roomy backyard large enough to fit a large plastic pool in summer. Josie’s second-floor apartment has a small porch that overlooks the yard. Her small porch acts as a roof for our porch, where we store onions and potatoes in a three-tiered metal hanging basket, some outdoor toys, and my plant collection. A garden borders the yard where JoAnna, Rachael, and I usually plant flowers in one section and vegetables in another. The yard is peaceful. Summertime we cook outside on a dime-store hibachi and eat dinner outside on our small picnic table, next to the plastic swimming pool.
Sometimes when we’re swimming, Jake sits on the upstairs porch, grinning like a rabid ghoul and gawking down at us. The girls call him Mr. Beast. Mr. Beast stamps his huge foot continuously, mumbling “Son of a beetch, Jesus Christ, shit-shit-shit” under his breath, loud enough for us to hear. He leans over the porch wall and leers down at us. That’s when we get out of the pool and scurry back inside, worried that his weight and stomping will cause the porch to cave in.
I never have a hard time getting my girls out of the pool then because we are all afraid of Mr. Beast. Sometimes he’s grinning quietly when he gawks down at us. JoAnna usually feels his presence first. She’ll swim over to me and quietly whisper “Mr. Beast” in my ear, then in Rachael’s. Then when we look up, he’s there, standing on the porch, wearing that stupid grin, watching us as we get out, gather our towels from the picnic table, and scurry inside. Damn him. Mr. Beast.
When we first moved in, Josie said he was born normal, that a three-day-long high fever left him that way, that she didn’t know what caused the fever, that her family was cursed. The fever may have fried his brain, but his body matured into that of an unusually large man—Mr. Beast easily towers over all of us, including Sal. Even with his husky build, I bet he’s close to six-four. His mother considers him as a perpetual child, speaking to him as if he were a toddler, referring to him as “Jakie-boy.” And I can see it sometimes too, flashes of innocent facial expressions under his shock of curly, brown hair, which his mother keeps long and full rather than barbered like a grown man.
When they’re outside on the corner bench, “Jakie-boy” sometimes licks her face with his fat pink tongue, and the old-timers look away disgusted. Josie just sits there with her arms folded over her ample breasts and acts as if it is all normal, childish behavior. She ignores “Jakie-boy,” who touches her constantly. I’ve never known any toddler who does that, but maybe it’s normal for the mentally challenged. And maybe he gains real satisfaction stringing multicolored beads onto shoestrings, if that’s how he spends a portion of his day, and maybe chickens can fly, but when he stands on that porch, his face loses any hint of innocence, and when he gawks down at the girls and me when we’re in the pool, his expression raises the hackles on the back of my neck because it doesn’t look like a toddler’s to me.
Compared to Mr. Beast, Josie’s oldest son, Sal, looks like a wimpy man with Elvis hair, but he is the only one who controls that giant idiot brother of his—something he proved about six months ago when I let my guard down.
The girls and I were carrying groceries into the apartment when one of them left the door ajar. I told JoAnna to run her bathwater, while Rachael and I put the frozen vegetables away. Rachael was looking for a missing box of butter, while I stacked the fat cans of crushed tomatoes on the countertop.
“Son of a beetch, Jesus Christ-shhhit-shhhit-shhhit.” Jake, his head tilted, stood in the middle of the living room. Grinning stupidly, he walked slowly through the dining room toward us. “Shit-shit-shit.” Eyes as big as moons, Rachael looked up from her search, then stood up, dropping the grocery bag, which landed with a thud. Fingertips in her mouth, she whimpered, “Ma, Mr. Beast.”
“Rachael, go into the bathroom with JoAnna. Lock the door behind you. Stay there until I tell you to. Go now!” I said through clenched teeth.
Rachael’s little body darted behind me. Relief flooded my senses when the bathroom lock clicked, but my stomach somersaulted and my head pounded. I heard the girls crying through the bathroom door.
“Go home, Jake,” I shouted. “Your mother’s looking for you.” Grinning, he moved forward, toward me in the kitchen. Extending his arms as if he wanted to touch me, he cursed as he moved one gigantic leg in front of the other. He stuck out his tongue, and I could tell he wanted to lick my face the way he licked Josie’s.
“Go home. Go back upstairs, home, home, home!” I screamed, hoping that Josie would hear me. There was nowhere to run, except out the back door, which leads to a dead end. “Go home, Jake,” I yelled and looked around the kitchen for something to hit him with and spotted the wooden meat mallet in the jar of oversized utensils on the counter near the stacked tomato cans. I grabbed it and braced myself against the counter, waiting for him to get close enough. He placed his huge hands on my head, and, pinning me against the counter with his body, he stepped closer and attempted to lick my face. I could feel he was hard against me, and I pushed him back. He didn’t move, so I hit his side with the meat mallet. He looked stunned.
“JAKE!” Sal’s voice boomed just as Jake’s expression changed into anger. Maybe no one had hit him before.
“Jake, come on. We need to go upstairs now,” he said. Still looking angry, with his eyebrows linked and his lips stretched over his teeth, Jake turned toward Sal, in the dining room. Sal grabbed his brother by the elbow and led him outside.
Shaking, I dropped the meat mallet and the barbecue fork and slid down the cabinets to the floor. I could tell that Jake was angry that Sal had interrupted him. His eyes, flashing anger or rage, held mine for an instant before Sal led him away. I kicked the door shut, and my fingers shook as they fumbled with the locks.
“It’s okay now, girls. You can come out now,” I yelled through the bathroom door. The three of us sank to the kitchen floor in a huddle and rocked.
~ ~ ~
Maybe in some aspects Mr. Beast really is like a small child, given his mysterious intelligence level and his mysterious handicap. Maybe Josie still mourns the normal child lost to a high fever. Maybe that fever killed a part of her when it maimed Jake’s brain. No matter.
Those damned creaking sounds continue. Working at home makes it hard to escape them, especially deadline time when a poster or a brochure or a magazine design is due. I concentrate on my X-Acto knife and on the light table, where 50 tiny drawings, all of shoes, are piled for a poster project due in two days. The stereo doesn’t drown out the rhythmic eek-ee-eek-ee-eek-ee. Lately the sounds interfere with my work schedule, and I’ve been working late into the night after the girls are in bed. Sometimes they carry on at night, and then I can’t sleep even with the radio on. They pick up frequency after Jake’s attack.
“Come on, girls, let’s go take a swim.” JoAnna and Rachael are playing with their collection of Barbie dolls in the living room and jump up and down, happy for the unexpected water play. I want to get them out of the house before they ask questions about the creaking noise again. I let them leave Barbie’s considerable wardrobe littered all over the living room floor because I don’t know how to explain the noise and want to escape it. Last time they asked, I told them Josie sits in a rocking chair and knits, or maybe Mr. Beast jumps on his bed. They laugh. “Can we jump on the bed too?” Rachael asks.
We put on bathing suits, grab towels, and head out the back door to the yard. Playing in the sun-warmed pool, we don’t worry about Mr. Beast gawking at us from the porch or stamping his huge paws, because he’s never outside on the porch when the creaking goes on. And neither is Josie.
Sometimes I imagine flipping him the bird, but I don’t. He’s always with her, like a shadow. Sometimes he places his mammoth hand with his fingers spread over the top of her head. Sometimes he fondles her nose as if it were a hook on her face, and her cheeks with his fat fingers, letting them sit there. Arms folded across her bosom, Josie says nothing, does nothing, as if it weren’t happening when he licks her face. When he sits next to her like that, he seems content enough listening to his mother commenting on the weather and what the neighbors are doing. I look at Jake’s eyes, and they look as if they understand. Jake understands a lot more than his mother lets on. Or maybe Josie isn’t aware that Jake understands? She sits, her arms crossed over her huge tits, while Jake, his bandana-ed head tilted to the side, occupies the bench’s edge. He grins at women who walk by the bench where they sit together every summer night. His mother simply ignores what he does to her.
And though everyone else pretends not to, they watch him carefully. When Jake sees a woman he likes, he honks loudly like a goose and mumbles, “Son of a beetch, Jesus Christ, shit-shit-shit” loudly under his breath. He stamps one of his huge feet, and, arms stretched outward, he claps his chubby hands. Sometimes he leaps up from the bench and begins pacing up and down the length of the sidewalk, next to the brick wall of the building next door. Sometimes he smacks the brick wall with his hand and honks loudly with each blow.
“JAKE! Stop!” Josie yells, only when he gets extremely loud. She doesn’t look at him when she yells and simply bellows the word into the air in front of her. Sometimes he stops and returns to his seat on the edge of the bench. Most times he doesn’t. Ranting, he just keeps right on looking at the women and honking or stamping his foot loudly on the pavement. And he sits on the bench, annoying the neighbors with his honking, stamping, clapping, cursing, and sticking his tongue out with his mouth wide open most of the night before somebody tells her that he’s being a nuisance.
“I do my best with him,” she says.
As soon as he starts, JoAnna, Rachael, and I edge away from the bench. Sal’s gone a lot lately. Who in the hell is going to stop him? His vacant-eyed mother?
“That Jake is something else, ain’t he?” says Mealie. We all leave after Jake starts an outburst. “Ain’t you afraid living in the same building?” She shakes her head.
I don’t answer.
“I don’t know why Josie don’t do something with him. At least she could send him to a special school during the day. Then he won’t be around so much of the time, and he can learn something useful,” Rosa says.
“Terreeible,” Blondina says.
I think about those creaking sounds. “He’s her life,” I say, finally. “He’s her child. Just not right up in his head.”
“You live there. Maybe you can talk some sense to her about a doin’ something wit dat boy of hers. We sure tried. Over the years, we tried and each time, she gets mad at us. He’s gonna end up doing something terrible one of these days,” Blondina says.
“She ain’t no spring chicken anymore. What’s gonna happen to him if something happens to her? Somebody’s gotta get her to think ahead. Especially with Sal working and going out now,” Mealie says.
“Her husband used to take the boy out at night and give her a break. It’s hard for her, I know. Asia, can’t you say someting in nice way? She might listen to you,” Blondina says.
They want me to say something because I’m the outsider, not someone who grew up with Josie, who knew her husband, who knew Jake before the fever robbed him of his wits.
“Isn’t this something you had better do yourselves?”
“It might sound better coming from you—a stranger,” Mealie says.
“I don’t think so,” I say, hurrying up with the girls to the house.
That night, when JoAnna and Rachael undress for their baths, they pretend they are Mr. Beast but act like Godzilla instead.
The next day the creaking begins after lunch. We go outside to the pool until the sunshine falls. We get out of the pool for dinner, though I, feeling annoyed that my shoe poster will take an all-nighter to finish in time for the deadline, cover the pool with the blue tarp. Inside, the girls change into dry clothes, and I start dinner.
That’s when we hear the loud knocking at the door. The rapid succession of the knocks makes it sound urgent. I think of Mr. Beast right away, banging on the door with his fat hands. My stomach jumps. What if he has decided that gaping at us over the porch wall isn’t enough anymore?
“Who is it?” I ask through the door. My heart pounds.
“It’s Josie. I need to talk to you right away. It is an emergency.”
“Is Jake with you?”
“No. He’s upstairs. I don’t want him to hear what I have to say. Open the door.”
I let her in. It’s the first time she’s been in my apartment since we moved in, and I can tell she’s surprised.
“It’s nice in here—so bright,” she says, looking around. I motion her to sit down while I lock the door. “You got it fixed up pretty nice in here, Asia,” she says, “just like Home Beautiful.”
“Thanks.” I turn around to see JoAnna and Rachael peeking out of their room.
“I got to talk to you about something important. It’s Jake.”
“Oh?” I say, wondering if she is going to tell me about that creaking bed. I feel my face flush. “What about him?”
“Blondina, Mealie, and Rosa called this morning. They said nobody likes Jake. That he’s dangerous and they want me to put him in a home. I can’t do that to poor Jake. I just can’t.”
“Maybe they’re looking out for you too,” I say. “Maybe they want you to think about the future. Jake needs a lot of attention, and you could use a break, couldn’t you?” I ask.
“NO!” she says. “How can you say that? Would you put one of your children in a home if she was like Jake? Jake has a home, and it’s with me.”
“What if something happens to you?”
“Sal will take care of him then,” she says.
“What if Sal doesn’t want to?”
“Just like I don’t have a choice, Sal doesn’t either. Jake is not a dog. He’s a boy. My boy.”
“Others may see him as a man,” I say. “He’s big enough to be a man.”
“The fever done that to him. Left him like a three-year-old. In his mind, he’s only three.”
I picture Josie sitting on the bench without Jake licking her face. I picture her wearing something besides a snap-on housedress and dirty terry cloth slippers. I picture her with red lipstick and big hair, walking to the harbor with Mealie, Rosa, and Blondina.
Josie stands up. She looks around the apartment, and for the first time since I’ve known her, I can see wheels turning in her head.
“Families take care of each other no matter what. I ain’t putting Jake in a home,” she says. “Jakie-boy is not dangerous. He ain’t going to attack ANNNNY body!” Josie yells and gestures with her entire arm. “Mealie, Rosa, and Blondina are wrong…dead wrong…because, because…well, because I do what needs to be done. Understand?” Her eyes bulge in her crimson face.
“But Jake attacked me!”
“No. No, he did not. He was just down here trying to visit with you, but Sal told me you just screamed at him to go home. You didn’t even give him a chance to have a simple visit. You could’ve given him some cookies and milk and invited him to sit down and watch TV with your girls or something nice like that. You ain’t nice.”
“Sal lied to you,” I say. “Jake did attack me. He pinned me against the counter, and I hit him with a meat mallet. But he wouldn’t get off me. So you’re wrong, Josie. And he isn’t a three-year-old anymore. He’s a man.”
Josie moves toward the door. “If those ladies come here and ask you anything, you’ll tell them. You’ll tell them that everything is peaceful here, and that Jake ain’t a problem.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“I’m protecting my child from vicious people like you and those three busybodies,” she says. “You got a pretty nice apartment here. It could get much nicer too.” She gestures widely and points to the hole in the dining room ceiling. “I’ll have my brother come over and fix that.”
I don’t answer.
“Rents around here and in other nice neighborhoods ain’t getting lower, you know. Another apartment round here’ll cost you a pretty penny, a lot of pretty pennies. You can’t touch a place downtown for what you’ve been paying. Just keep that in mind, Asia dear.” Josie waddles to the door, grunts in disgust when she spies all the locks. “Who you trying to keep out?” The door slams behind her like an exclamation point.
The girls and I eat dinner. JoAnna plays with her noodles. “What’s going to happen, Ma?” she asks, looking worried. “Will we have to move?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“I wish Mr. Beast was dead,” says Rachael.
I wince. The next day we stay inside. We avoid the convenience store. We avoid the bench with the old ladies. We swim in the morning hours. Jake sits on the porch. Tongue sticking out from between his fat lips, he leans over the wall, stares down at us. He mumbles, “Son of a beetch, Jesus Christ, shit-shit-shit.” He’s grinning, and I know his huge paw is going to start crashing down on the tile-topped porch fence. Just as the sound of the first crash echoes off the porch floor, we flee inside without bothering to grab our towels off the picnic table. Who do I hate more? Jake or Josie? Or myself?
The girls change into dry clothes, leaving their swimming suits on the bathroom floor. Ten minutes later the crashing sound outside stops, and the creaking begins. Again.
I turn on the stereo, but the rhythmic eek-ee-eek-ee-eek-ee competes with the music.
In the dining room, I look up at the ceiling and imagine how it will look without the hole. I wonder if a new dishwasher will help drown out the creaking sounds. I picture new, oversized kitchen cabinets and new ceramic black-and-white tiled floor in there and new windows. I imagine new plaster on the walls and delicate plaster reliefs of leaves, vines, and flowers decorating the ceiling. I picture a new sofa. My mind’s eye has transformed the dump into a layout from Home Beautiful.
Eek-ee-eek-ee-eek-ee. The creaking sounds wilder, faster, louder, louder than the stereo. I remember Jake gaping, his head tilted as he advanced into our shabby kitchen during his “visit,” and wonder if he grins like that when he’s upstairs on the creaking bed. With Josie.
Eek-ee-eek-ee-eek-ee. I shudder. We can’t escape into a loud stereo or hide in new, oversized cabinets if Jake visits again. And the beauty of delicate plaster reliefs of leaves, vines, and flowers cannot calm frayed nerves or protect little girls or unlock imprisoned minds or free misguided, imprisoned souls from their self-imposed hell.
I snap off the stereo. The creaking old bed thumps against the wall, my teeth clenching with every banging boom. Finally, I hate this life. More than the pair in the apartment above me. Finally, I hate this life enough to reach for the phone book and the phone. I flip to the blue-edged section with government listings and dial.
When the creaking starts, I turn up the stereo to drown it out. But the rhythmic eek-ee-eek-ee-eek-ee-eek-ee always overwhelms the rock and roll blaring from the stereo speakers, and I can’t concentrate on anything else.
Josie lives upstairs with her two sons, Sal and Jake, both in their early 30s. I live downstairs with my two daughters, Rachael and JoAnna. The house, divided into two apartments, mine and Josie’s, belongs to Josie’s brother, who comes once a month on the seventh to collect the rent. The place, a dump, sits across the street from the projects, across the street that serves as an unspoken border between a good and bad neighborhood, a safe and a crime-ridden neighborhood. Plaster walls in our house blister and peel like sunburned skin. So does the gas-station green paint that covers every room and hallway, except for the walls in our apartment. I call it “gangrene,” and I’ve decorated around it until the color just made me sick. So I have repainted every room in our apartment with a clean, glossy white. My place looks like a sanctuary compared to the rest of the building, and although Josie’s brother has promised to reimburse me for the cost of the paint, I’m still waiting.
JoAnna, Rachael, and I love our neighbors. They don’t congregate outside our front door all night long, playing loud music. They don’t fight, bang doors, or entertain a never-ending flow of visitors like the roughnecks from our old neighborhood, like the roughnecks across the street. They’re quiet. They’re old ladies, widows, a trio of them. My parents are gone, and I don’t have other relatives. I haven’t seen my ex since Rachael was three, and he hasn’t sent a dime in child support.
The old ladies and I trade for dinners. I drive them to the Broadway market to buy fish or to the supermarket for groceries or to Highlandtown to the salon where they all go once a week for their “sets, hon.” When I can, I take them to doctors’ offices and wait until they are done to drive them back, and they babysit for me for free.
They sometimes visit for a couple of hours, telling me stories about the neighborhood. Over coffee or tea and cookies and cakes, they relive special moments when their now-dead husbands were courting them. They repeat the same stories, but I don’t mind. They remind me of my Grandma Carolina. Before Grandma Carolina died, she and I spent hours in her kitchen. She taught me how to grate cheese and cook simple dishes, and she let me wear her beautiful red shoes. Grandma Carolina’s stories were about how she and Pop survived “the Big War,” how food was so scarce even for dogs, reduced to chewing leather shoes they found in the rubble of bombed-out buildings, how Pop had to turn his bakery over to Nazis and deliver by bicycle bread to their camps, how he stole a case of sauerkraut from them, and when he brought it home, how it stank when Grandma Carolina opened the cans, and how they threw it away, thinking it had rotted. Grandma Carolina crinkled her nose at the smell of sauerkraut all those years later, much the same way Mealie crinkles her nose when she sits in my kitchen and the creaking starts.
“Asia, what da hell is dat noise?” She stares at the ceiling as if the answer would suddenly appear in the air.
“Who knows?” I say with a shrug. I suggest we go outside to see if Blondina or Rosa or both of them are sitting on the corner bench. They provide a distraction to the creaking sounds. Better yet, Blondina and Rosa distract me from thinking about the creaking sounds. Talking, speculating, or thinking about them is the last thing I want to do, so I get Mealie out of the apartment before the creaking speeds up and before the thump-thump-thump sounds of the old bed banging against the wall start. How in the world would I explain that, if I couldn’t explain the creaking?
I want to move, but I can’t because the place is cheap, and still, I can barely make the rent sometimes. So we live with the quirks. Like the creepy creaking. Like the dining room ceiling. Every time the toilet upstairs overflows or Josie’s mental son Jake overflows the tub, rust-colored water comes rushing down into my dining room like sea into a sinking ship.
“It’s leaking again. It’s leaking!” I scream up through the ceiling while shoving the dining room table out of the way of the cascading water and hollering for JoAnna or Rachael to bring a bucket. And I can almost picture that 300-pound demented fool upstairs, grinning like a giant ghoul, his bandana-ed head tilted to the side, clapping his big, outstretched arms, mumbling, “Jesus Christ, son of a beetch, son of a beetch, shit-shit-shit” while watching as the water pours over the side of the tub. I can almost hear him laughing through his nose like a sneaky cartoon character, and when the water leaks, I hate his stupid grin, the menace of him, and his fat cow of a mother.
Why does Josie allow him in there by himself? Why does she allow him to fool around with the spigots, anyway? Couldn’t she get it through his thick skull that backing up the toilet and overflowing the tub is a no-no? Even a two-year-old understands the word “no” and understands cause and effect. Jake knows too. I swear he does. He understands simple commands, and when his mother or Sal talk to him, he seems to be able to connect the dots. He never talks, never forms words, but he communicates. He lets it be known what he wants.
The once-a-week water seepage has caused a large, unsightly hole in the water-stained dining room ceiling, a giant black eye staring down at me from above. The place is drafty. Two winters after having complained about the drafts of cold air coming in through the rotting wooden windows, Josie’s brother finally came to fix them.
His solution? The windows are now painted shut, forcing me to buy an air-conditioner at a yard sale and have it installed into the dining room wall because we couldn’t open any of the windows in summer. How can I ask him to repair the hole in the dining room ceiling? I’m too afraid of his solution to ask. I think about hiring a workman to come in to fix it but realize it would be as pointless because of Jake upstairs. Josie won’t or can’t stop him from flooding the bathroom once a week.
“How can she stop him after the hole is fixed?” Josie’s brother Philip stares at it one month on the seventh when he’s collecting the rent.
“That’s her problem. Mine’s the hole in the ceiling. I need it fixed,” I say.
“No point. The cause ain’t structural or from the pipes. The cause is human,” Philip says.
“The cause is your nephew. How about you fix the hole and read the riot act to Josie about teaching that lump of a son of hers to shower instead?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Philip says, stuffing the envelope with the rent check into his back pocket.
It’s a roof. A roof over our heads—even a leaky one—in such a good neighborhood is better than no roof at all or a place in a crappy one where drug dealers ply their trade. After the Charmless Prince vanished, we lived in worse places for twice the rent, and Josie’s brother hasn’t raised the rent much over the years. He tries. I point to the hole in the ceiling. “When will that be fixed?” I ask. “How about we revisit the rent thing when the hole is fixed?”
Still, I daydream about more money and apartments with dishwashers, intact ceilings, and no Jake. Mostly, no Jake. Haphazard freelance income lends itself to daydreaming and raises adaptability to high art.
I’m a graphic designer, though honestly, I haven’t been working much. My client base is drying up, gradually. I need to get a day job. This I also know, but I can’t bring myself to answer want ads, to rush the girls and me out of the house every day, to give up my independence from the nine to five, the intellectual challenge of a variety of projects for a variety of clients. My office—a Mac computer, a light table, a printer, a color printer, a bookshelf, a wax machine for the pasteup work, and a small white desk—sits in the corner of the dining room—the farthest point away from where the ceiling leaks. Aside from the dining room, there are two slightly smaller bedrooms, a living room, and a full bathroom off the kitchen—and the highlight, a roomy backyard large enough to fit a large plastic pool in summer. Josie’s second-floor apartment has a small porch that overlooks the yard. Her small porch acts as a roof for our porch, where we store onions and potatoes in a three-tiered metal hanging basket, some outdoor toys, and my plant collection. A garden borders the yard where JoAnna, Rachael, and I usually plant flowers in one section and vegetables in another. The yard is peaceful. Summertime we cook outside on a dime-store hibachi and eat dinner outside on our small picnic table, next to the plastic swimming pool.
Sometimes when we’re swimming, Jake sits on the upstairs porch, grinning like a rabid ghoul and gawking down at us. The girls call him Mr. Beast. Mr. Beast stamps his huge foot continuously, mumbling “Son of a beetch, Jesus Christ, shit-shit-shit” under his breath, loud enough for us to hear. He leans over the porch wall and leers down at us. That’s when we get out of the pool and scurry back inside, worried that his weight and stomping will cause the porch to cave in.
I never have a hard time getting my girls out of the pool then because we are all afraid of Mr. Beast. Sometimes he’s grinning quietly when he gawks down at us. JoAnna usually feels his presence first. She’ll swim over to me and quietly whisper “Mr. Beast” in my ear, then in Rachael’s. Then when we look up, he’s there, standing on the porch, wearing that stupid grin, watching us as we get out, gather our towels from the picnic table, and scurry inside. Damn him. Mr. Beast.
When we first moved in, Josie said he was born normal, that a three-day-long high fever left him that way, that she didn’t know what caused the fever, that her family was cursed. The fever may have fried his brain, but his body matured into that of an unusually large man—Mr. Beast easily towers over all of us, including Sal. Even with his husky build, I bet he’s close to six-four. His mother considers him as a perpetual child, speaking to him as if he were a toddler, referring to him as “Jakie-boy.” And I can see it sometimes too, flashes of innocent facial expressions under his shock of curly, brown hair, which his mother keeps long and full rather than barbered like a grown man.
When they’re outside on the corner bench, “Jakie-boy” sometimes licks her face with his fat pink tongue, and the old-timers look away disgusted. Josie just sits there with her arms folded over her ample breasts and acts as if it is all normal, childish behavior. She ignores “Jakie-boy,” who touches her constantly. I’ve never known any toddler who does that, but maybe it’s normal for the mentally challenged. And maybe he gains real satisfaction stringing multicolored beads onto shoestrings, if that’s how he spends a portion of his day, and maybe chickens can fly, but when he stands on that porch, his face loses any hint of innocence, and when he gawks down at the girls and me when we’re in the pool, his expression raises the hackles on the back of my neck because it doesn’t look like a toddler’s to me.
Compared to Mr. Beast, Josie’s oldest son, Sal, looks like a wimpy man with Elvis hair, but he is the only one who controls that giant idiot brother of his—something he proved about six months ago when I let my guard down.
The girls and I were carrying groceries into the apartment when one of them left the door ajar. I told JoAnna to run her bathwater, while Rachael and I put the frozen vegetables away. Rachael was looking for a missing box of butter, while I stacked the fat cans of crushed tomatoes on the countertop.
“Son of a beetch, Jesus Christ-shhhit-shhhit-shhhit.” Jake, his head tilted, stood in the middle of the living room. Grinning stupidly, he walked slowly through the dining room toward us. “Shit-shit-shit.” Eyes as big as moons, Rachael looked up from her search, then stood up, dropping the grocery bag, which landed with a thud. Fingertips in her mouth, she whimpered, “Ma, Mr. Beast.”
“Rachael, go into the bathroom with JoAnna. Lock the door behind you. Stay there until I tell you to. Go now!” I said through clenched teeth.
Rachael’s little body darted behind me. Relief flooded my senses when the bathroom lock clicked, but my stomach somersaulted and my head pounded. I heard the girls crying through the bathroom door.
“Go home, Jake,” I shouted. “Your mother’s looking for you.” Grinning, he moved forward, toward me in the kitchen. Extending his arms as if he wanted to touch me, he cursed as he moved one gigantic leg in front of the other. He stuck out his tongue, and I could tell he wanted to lick my face the way he licked Josie’s.
“Go home. Go back upstairs, home, home, home!” I screamed, hoping that Josie would hear me. There was nowhere to run, except out the back door, which leads to a dead end. “Go home, Jake,” I yelled and looked around the kitchen for something to hit him with and spotted the wooden meat mallet in the jar of oversized utensils on the counter near the stacked tomato cans. I grabbed it and braced myself against the counter, waiting for him to get close enough. He placed his huge hands on my head, and, pinning me against the counter with his body, he stepped closer and attempted to lick my face. I could feel he was hard against me, and I pushed him back. He didn’t move, so I hit his side with the meat mallet. He looked stunned.
“JAKE!” Sal’s voice boomed just as Jake’s expression changed into anger. Maybe no one had hit him before.
“Jake, come on. We need to go upstairs now,” he said. Still looking angry, with his eyebrows linked and his lips stretched over his teeth, Jake turned toward Sal, in the dining room. Sal grabbed his brother by the elbow and led him outside.
Shaking, I dropped the meat mallet and the barbecue fork and slid down the cabinets to the floor. I could tell that Jake was angry that Sal had interrupted him. His eyes, flashing anger or rage, held mine for an instant before Sal led him away. I kicked the door shut, and my fingers shook as they fumbled with the locks.
“It’s okay now, girls. You can come out now,” I yelled through the bathroom door. The three of us sank to the kitchen floor in a huddle and rocked.
~ ~ ~
Maybe in some aspects Mr. Beast really is like a small child, given his mysterious intelligence level and his mysterious handicap. Maybe Josie still mourns the normal child lost to a high fever. Maybe that fever killed a part of her when it maimed Jake’s brain. No matter.
Those damned creaking sounds continue. Working at home makes it hard to escape them, especially deadline time when a poster or a brochure or a magazine design is due. I concentrate on my X-Acto knife and on the light table, where 50 tiny drawings, all of shoes, are piled for a poster project due in two days. The stereo doesn’t drown out the rhythmic eek-ee-eek-ee-eek-ee. Lately the sounds interfere with my work schedule, and I’ve been working late into the night after the girls are in bed. Sometimes they carry on at night, and then I can’t sleep even with the radio on. They pick up frequency after Jake’s attack.
“Come on, girls, let’s go take a swim.” JoAnna and Rachael are playing with their collection of Barbie dolls in the living room and jump up and down, happy for the unexpected water play. I want to get them out of the house before they ask questions about the creaking noise again. I let them leave Barbie’s considerable wardrobe littered all over the living room floor because I don’t know how to explain the noise and want to escape it. Last time they asked, I told them Josie sits in a rocking chair and knits, or maybe Mr. Beast jumps on his bed. They laugh. “Can we jump on the bed too?” Rachael asks.
We put on bathing suits, grab towels, and head out the back door to the yard. Playing in the sun-warmed pool, we don’t worry about Mr. Beast gawking at us from the porch or stamping his huge paws, because he’s never outside on the porch when the creaking goes on. And neither is Josie.
Sometimes I imagine flipping him the bird, but I don’t. He’s always with her, like a shadow. Sometimes he places his mammoth hand with his fingers spread over the top of her head. Sometimes he fondles her nose as if it were a hook on her face, and her cheeks with his fat fingers, letting them sit there. Arms folded across her bosom, Josie says nothing, does nothing, as if it weren’t happening when he licks her face. When he sits next to her like that, he seems content enough listening to his mother commenting on the weather and what the neighbors are doing. I look at Jake’s eyes, and they look as if they understand. Jake understands a lot more than his mother lets on. Or maybe Josie isn’t aware that Jake understands? She sits, her arms crossed over her huge tits, while Jake, his bandana-ed head tilted to the side, occupies the bench’s edge. He grins at women who walk by the bench where they sit together every summer night. His mother simply ignores what he does to her.
And though everyone else pretends not to, they watch him carefully. When Jake sees a woman he likes, he honks loudly like a goose and mumbles, “Son of a beetch, Jesus Christ, shit-shit-shit” loudly under his breath. He stamps one of his huge feet, and, arms stretched outward, he claps his chubby hands. Sometimes he leaps up from the bench and begins pacing up and down the length of the sidewalk, next to the brick wall of the building next door. Sometimes he smacks the brick wall with his hand and honks loudly with each blow.
“JAKE! Stop!” Josie yells, only when he gets extremely loud. She doesn’t look at him when she yells and simply bellows the word into the air in front of her. Sometimes he stops and returns to his seat on the edge of the bench. Most times he doesn’t. Ranting, he just keeps right on looking at the women and honking or stamping his foot loudly on the pavement. And he sits on the bench, annoying the neighbors with his honking, stamping, clapping, cursing, and sticking his tongue out with his mouth wide open most of the night before somebody tells her that he’s being a nuisance.
“I do my best with him,” she says.
As soon as he starts, JoAnna, Rachael, and I edge away from the bench. Sal’s gone a lot lately. Who in the hell is going to stop him? His vacant-eyed mother?
“That Jake is something else, ain’t he?” says Mealie. We all leave after Jake starts an outburst. “Ain’t you afraid living in the same building?” She shakes her head.
I don’t answer.
“I don’t know why Josie don’t do something with him. At least she could send him to a special school during the day. Then he won’t be around so much of the time, and he can learn something useful,” Rosa says.
“Terreeible,” Blondina says.
I think about those creaking sounds. “He’s her life,” I say, finally. “He’s her child. Just not right up in his head.”
“You live there. Maybe you can talk some sense to her about a doin’ something wit dat boy of hers. We sure tried. Over the years, we tried and each time, she gets mad at us. He’s gonna end up doing something terrible one of these days,” Blondina says.
“She ain’t no spring chicken anymore. What’s gonna happen to him if something happens to her? Somebody’s gotta get her to think ahead. Especially with Sal working and going out now,” Mealie says.
“Her husband used to take the boy out at night and give her a break. It’s hard for her, I know. Asia, can’t you say someting in nice way? She might listen to you,” Blondina says.
They want me to say something because I’m the outsider, not someone who grew up with Josie, who knew her husband, who knew Jake before the fever robbed him of his wits.
“Isn’t this something you had better do yourselves?”
“It might sound better coming from you—a stranger,” Mealie says.
“I don’t think so,” I say, hurrying up with the girls to the house.
That night, when JoAnna and Rachael undress for their baths, they pretend they are Mr. Beast but act like Godzilla instead.
The next day the creaking begins after lunch. We go outside to the pool until the sunshine falls. We get out of the pool for dinner, though I, feeling annoyed that my shoe poster will take an all-nighter to finish in time for the deadline, cover the pool with the blue tarp. Inside, the girls change into dry clothes, and I start dinner.
That’s when we hear the loud knocking at the door. The rapid succession of the knocks makes it sound urgent. I think of Mr. Beast right away, banging on the door with his fat hands. My stomach jumps. What if he has decided that gaping at us over the porch wall isn’t enough anymore?
“Who is it?” I ask through the door. My heart pounds.
“It’s Josie. I need to talk to you right away. It is an emergency.”
“Is Jake with you?”
“No. He’s upstairs. I don’t want him to hear what I have to say. Open the door.”
I let her in. It’s the first time she’s been in my apartment since we moved in, and I can tell she’s surprised.
“It’s nice in here—so bright,” she says, looking around. I motion her to sit down while I lock the door. “You got it fixed up pretty nice in here, Asia,” she says, “just like Home Beautiful.”
“Thanks.” I turn around to see JoAnna and Rachael peeking out of their room.
“I got to talk to you about something important. It’s Jake.”
“Oh?” I say, wondering if she is going to tell me about that creaking bed. I feel my face flush. “What about him?”
“Blondina, Mealie, and Rosa called this morning. They said nobody likes Jake. That he’s dangerous and they want me to put him in a home. I can’t do that to poor Jake. I just can’t.”
“Maybe they’re looking out for you too,” I say. “Maybe they want you to think about the future. Jake needs a lot of attention, and you could use a break, couldn’t you?” I ask.
“NO!” she says. “How can you say that? Would you put one of your children in a home if she was like Jake? Jake has a home, and it’s with me.”
“What if something happens to you?”
“Sal will take care of him then,” she says.
“What if Sal doesn’t want to?”
“Just like I don’t have a choice, Sal doesn’t either. Jake is not a dog. He’s a boy. My boy.”
“Others may see him as a man,” I say. “He’s big enough to be a man.”
“The fever done that to him. Left him like a three-year-old. In his mind, he’s only three.”
I picture Josie sitting on the bench without Jake licking her face. I picture her wearing something besides a snap-on housedress and dirty terry cloth slippers. I picture her with red lipstick and big hair, walking to the harbor with Mealie, Rosa, and Blondina.
Josie stands up. She looks around the apartment, and for the first time since I’ve known her, I can see wheels turning in her head.
“Families take care of each other no matter what. I ain’t putting Jake in a home,” she says. “Jakie-boy is not dangerous. He ain’t going to attack ANNNNY body!” Josie yells and gestures with her entire arm. “Mealie, Rosa, and Blondina are wrong…dead wrong…because, because…well, because I do what needs to be done. Understand?” Her eyes bulge in her crimson face.
“But Jake attacked me!”
“No. No, he did not. He was just down here trying to visit with you, but Sal told me you just screamed at him to go home. You didn’t even give him a chance to have a simple visit. You could’ve given him some cookies and milk and invited him to sit down and watch TV with your girls or something nice like that. You ain’t nice.”
“Sal lied to you,” I say. “Jake did attack me. He pinned me against the counter, and I hit him with a meat mallet. But he wouldn’t get off me. So you’re wrong, Josie. And he isn’t a three-year-old anymore. He’s a man.”
Josie moves toward the door. “If those ladies come here and ask you anything, you’ll tell them. You’ll tell them that everything is peaceful here, and that Jake ain’t a problem.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“I’m protecting my child from vicious people like you and those three busybodies,” she says. “You got a pretty nice apartment here. It could get much nicer too.” She gestures widely and points to the hole in the dining room ceiling. “I’ll have my brother come over and fix that.”
I don’t answer.
“Rents around here and in other nice neighborhoods ain’t getting lower, you know. Another apartment round here’ll cost you a pretty penny, a lot of pretty pennies. You can’t touch a place downtown for what you’ve been paying. Just keep that in mind, Asia dear.” Josie waddles to the door, grunts in disgust when she spies all the locks. “Who you trying to keep out?” The door slams behind her like an exclamation point.
The girls and I eat dinner. JoAnna plays with her noodles. “What’s going to happen, Ma?” she asks, looking worried. “Will we have to move?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“I wish Mr. Beast was dead,” says Rachael.
I wince. The next day we stay inside. We avoid the convenience store. We avoid the bench with the old ladies. We swim in the morning hours. Jake sits on the porch. Tongue sticking out from between his fat lips, he leans over the wall, stares down at us. He mumbles, “Son of a beetch, Jesus Christ, shit-shit-shit.” He’s grinning, and I know his huge paw is going to start crashing down on the tile-topped porch fence. Just as the sound of the first crash echoes off the porch floor, we flee inside without bothering to grab our towels off the picnic table. Who do I hate more? Jake or Josie? Or myself?
The girls change into dry clothes, leaving their swimming suits on the bathroom floor. Ten minutes later the crashing sound outside stops, and the creaking begins. Again.
I turn on the stereo, but the rhythmic eek-ee-eek-ee-eek-ee competes with the music.
In the dining room, I look up at the ceiling and imagine how it will look without the hole. I wonder if a new dishwasher will help drown out the creaking sounds. I picture new, oversized kitchen cabinets and new ceramic black-and-white tiled floor in there and new windows. I imagine new plaster on the walls and delicate plaster reliefs of leaves, vines, and flowers decorating the ceiling. I picture a new sofa. My mind’s eye has transformed the dump into a layout from Home Beautiful.
Eek-ee-eek-ee-eek-ee. The creaking sounds wilder, faster, louder, louder than the stereo. I remember Jake gaping, his head tilted as he advanced into our shabby kitchen during his “visit,” and wonder if he grins like that when he’s upstairs on the creaking bed. With Josie.
Eek-ee-eek-ee-eek-ee. I shudder. We can’t escape into a loud stereo or hide in new, oversized cabinets if Jake visits again. And the beauty of delicate plaster reliefs of leaves, vines, and flowers cannot calm frayed nerves or protect little girls or unlock imprisoned minds or free misguided, imprisoned souls from their self-imposed hell.
I snap off the stereo. The creaking old bed thumps against the wall, my teeth clenching with every banging boom. Finally, I hate this life. More than the pair in the apartment above me. Finally, I hate this life enough to reach for the phone book and the phone. I flip to the blue-edged section with government listings and dial.
