Lark and Termite (20 page)

By the time I’m finished cleaning up, Termite has eaten and Solly’s plate is just sitting there. Solly is tuning the radio.

“Joey used to listen to this station. Jazz piano, and someone singing scat vocals. That’s sounds, no real words. Termite might like it. If he wants to listen.” Solly’s talking to me, but looking at Termite. He wipes Termite’s mouth with his fingers, touches his face. I see Termite lean so slightly, rest his jaw on Solly’s palm, and stay quiet. Like he’s reading something he remembers. Someone he lost.

I never even thought, all this time. Termite lost Solly too. He just didn’t know why.

I see Solly realize. His face changes and he puts his hands flat on the table, like someone’s punched him and he needs a moment. It’s something else between us, all we’ve done and all we didn’t know. He looks over at me, but he keeps his voice smooth. “Joey’s down at Camp Lejeune, getting an education. Left last month. You knew he was going down there, didn’t you, Lark?”

I nod. Termite turns his head to listen, hear our voices, but we’re not talking. The radio is playing low, like whispering. I move to turn it up.

Solly stops me. “Here, let me. Listen to these voices, Termite. They sing the way you talk. No words.” He stands and moves the radio across the table to Termite, turns the volume louder. Piano, horns, voices trilling low and high, bebop and fluttering, then sliding long. Wail of a sax. The voices solo, join, move apart, rippling like instruments. Termite leans forward and touches the knobs, both wrists, turns the volume steadily, slowly, all the way up. Then he rests his head on the box itself, one ear pressed tight. Turns away from us, into the sound.

“He likes it.” I look at Solly. We’re by ourselves now.

Solly signals he can’t hear me and moves us back from the table, out of the kitchen. “Anybody would,” he says, “like it.”

“You better go, Solly.”

“I was going to. As soon as I finished with the boxes. But I kept thinking about what was in them. I never saw a picture of your mother except this one that you keep in the kitchen, her as a kid with Nonie. When she looks like you. I get you confused with her.” He steps close, so that we can hear each other over the music. “Then when I can’t picture your mother, I get to not quite picturing mine.”

I don’t answer. We’re in the living room now. I want him to go.

“We used to get in bed with my mother.”

“You told me that. I don’t remember her.”

“You were three. I was four. It must have been soon after you came here. Probably with those boxes.”

“I don’t know when the boxes came. Maybe they came with Termite.” I look past Solly, out the living room window into the rain. But he keeps talking.

“She’d have Zeke asleep in the crib beside us and we’d get in bed with her and she’d let us nurse what was left. She was in your mouth and she was in my mouth. It kept us quiet and it calmed her down. We’d fall asleep, and she would.”

“How could you remember that?”

“Because I know I crawled over her to get to you. That’s where I slept, next to you.”

I look at him. Then I can’t look away.

“Do something to me,” Solly says.

“You’ve got girls to do that.”

“I want you to. Do what you used to do.”

“Not anymore. That was a long time ago.”

“I’m like your brother, even if I’m not. I’m like Termite except I can talk to you. I can touch you back. I remember things.” He’s so close I feel the words on my face. I can see Termite in the kitchen, holding the radio now, ear to the speaker in front, eyes closed. I look at Solly. He’s so familiar, like he’s me, he’s mine, like he’s my child, but he’s a stranger, the cold, hot look he gets, like any of them. If I let him do what he wants I’ll get that look too, the look that cancels everything. It’s like a pit I could fall into. I need to keep out of it.

“Let me,” he says.

Solly could talk me into things because in my mind he still wore the face he used to have, behind the older face I saw. I forgot and I thought doing things with him was like doing things to myself. I got my period early and he was drawn to me then. I was eleven and kept myself so clean, but it was like he could tell. He would come and tease me and talk at me. It wasn’t just looking. He would try to get me to want to be touched, he would show me things. I liked it, thinking about it, liked watching his body work, how he delivered himself into it so quickly, so easily, what he could do to me, how my not letting him do what he wanted just extended everything, how he’d find some other way to get around what I wouldn’t let him do. He’d hold on to my wrists and mouth, the backs of my legs, I’d be blue on that soft skin behind my knees. He’d get to me, talking without words, with sounds. I’d have that achy, crampy feeling in my belly and he’d say he knew it hurt, he’d pull me across him and stroke the bones of my hips, those socket bones the belly sinks between, until the pain turned syrupy. I lay there feeling him harden under me and I thought about his hands, about bleeding into them. He wanted me to, he said. And other things. Lots of things.

He’s looking at me and his eyes are tawny and gold, flecked with green. His lashes look wet. “Lark,” he says.

I shake my head. “Solly, it’s not true.”

“What’s not?”

“We don’t have the same mother. You know we don’t. But it’s like you said: Nick knew them both. And Nick says things, about my mother.” I’m looking at Solly like he can tell me. “Suppose it’s Nick. Suppose Nick is my father, and he’s a reason your mother left, and mine did.”

“No,” Solly says. I can feel the tension in his shoulders and chest, his clenched hands, even though he’s not touching me. “If that were true, and he looks at you the way he does sometimes, I’d want to kill him.”

“If we’re related by blood—”

“We’re not, Lark.” He closes his eyes, opens them. “But if we were, it wouldn’t matter. What they did, any of them, doesn’t matter.”

“It matters what we did, Solly, why we wanted to.”

We must have stopped when I was thirteen or so, when we weren’t kids anymore. There was that one time, the last time. I told him so. After that I stayed away from him. Then he got angry and stayed away from me. Or not away, but we were never alone anymore, or trying to be. I’d left him, so he left me. He had this one and that one. I’m sure he got to a lot of them. He was too young, but that’s how he was; I guess it’s how I was, but only with him. It was like we ruined each other. I’d see him and I’d look away, but I always knew if he was in a room, or across a street or in a hallway at school, or tackling sandbags at a football practice, outside some classroom window. I’d sense him lunging and hitting, pounding at all the anonymous smeared bodies in their pads and helmets.

“Lark,” he says.

He puts his finger in the center of my chest like a hard little point, and moves it down like he’s writing a line on me. It’s the storm, I think, the storm has closed us off here, the rain has drowned everything out. I can hear the rain, pouring behind Termite’s music. The voices are chiming, high, sharp sounds against the rolling, the long low slide of the music.

“Don’t put your hands on me, or your mouth,” I tell him.

He knows this game. It’s an old game. He opens his mouth slightly and breathes, like he’s filled with some horrible relief. I feel like something has got us, just swallowed us.

“OK.” He mouths the word like he can’t talk or even whisper. Just the shape of a sound on his lips and he clinches his teeth. Now that he knows I’ll do it I can see the feeling come on him full blown, into his eyes, into his breathing and the tawny flush of his face.

“Don’t touch me with your hands,” I tell him, but he doesn’t have to. Just the force of him moving toward me backs us into my room and against the wall. I can see the flecks of dirt across his chest. A gleam of blond hairs and sweat fills the space my eyes can see and his nipples are hard and tiny. It’s so long since I’ve been this close to the smell and feel of him. He flattens his palms on either side of the wall at my head and keeps his hands still to promise he will. I put my mouth on him, and the brown nub of his nipple fits between my teeth like a little stone. I pull on the other and touch and roll it under my fingers, and the sounds he makes seem to start inside me. There’s a measure of time we have before he can’t hear me or listen to me anymore. He reaches down to pull the laundry basket, piled with all the clothes and sheets I haven’t folded, over behind us, and his face moves down my chest and belly, along the bone of my hip, and he nudges me back onto the basket. He arches over me and I get my shirt off and push my forehead hard against him through his jeans, then I put my hand inside the button and feel for the zipper, pull his pants down, close my eyes. I feel him hard and silken in my mouth, and in my hands, and against my face and in my hair. He’s pushing and pushing at me, all over me, not fast, on and on. I hold him at the hollow of my neck and then I raise my arms all along the line of his torso. The blunt head of him moves its tear of wet across my ribs and my breasts and finds the hollow under my arm, and that’s how he comes, and on my neck and my chest, with me holding him so I feel the pulsing as it moves through him.

“Do that to me,” he says, “do that to me, Lark.” He sinks to his knees and lies across me and we slide down on the towels and T-shirts and sheets that have spilled. It’s easy now, like no time has gone by without this, and I put my hand on the cleft of his buttocks and touch the secret fur, push my finger just inside, like I own his body, like he would own mine if he ever got inside me. If he got inside me I would never get away.

I
told Solly I wouldn’t leave. We wouldn’t need to leave, I said, we never had. Once, years ago, water got knee deep in the basement and rose in the yard to the kitchen door, and we stayed right here. We’ll see, Solly said. I packed food, rain slickers, boots. Solly helped me empty the bureaus, gather the winter coats, strip the beds and linen closet, pile everything in the attic. He got Termite’s fat upholstered chair up those narrow pull-down stairs, tilting and turning it on his shoulders. We brought up jugs of water, my transistor radio, flashlights, candles and oil lamps, even Nonie’s safe-deposit box. He’d signed on to help Civil Defense evacuate and they were opening shelters as well as the Armory, some of the churches. They were saying the water could rise fast, especially near the river. Before he left, he grabbed me hard by the shoulders to make sure I was paying attention. “When the water gets to the back stoop,” he said, “get into the attic. Don’t wait, and stay there all night, even if the house doesn’t flood.” I told him we liked the attic, we’d camp out. “If it’s bad,” he told me, “I’ll be back for you in a boat, and we won’t be taking anything out that attic window but you and Termite. You be ready.”

I’m in the kitchen, making peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches on the Wonder bread Termite likes, when the power cuts off. In the silence, the storm is louder. It’s afternoon, but the light in the house is pearl gray. There’s a sound to the rain, a rush and pressure, and I can’t see through it to tell how high the water in the alley is rising. The roads between here and downtown will flood. Nonie won’t get home tonight, but I’ll manage. I’ve got cans of baked beans and Vienna sausage up there, jugs of water, cheese, the cold chicken from the restaurant.

I have Termite sitting where I can watch him, propped with pillows on the living room couch. The windows are open a crack so he can hear the rain. He’s got his hands up but his fingers are nearly motionless, like the air is so heavy he can’t move them. I’m putting the sandwiches in a plastic bag, and I see him sit up straight and go still. He can’t do that, and he doesn’t. It’s not like he’s scared: he’s waiting, expectant, and what’s coming is now. I turn to the window, and suddenly, like a magic trick, the rain deepens and darkens. The wind changes direction and crashes a wall of rain flat against the house like a breaking wave. Wind hurls the rain and sucks it back, and just for an instant I see the surface of the flood. The water is murky, moving like a shallow lake. There’s no alley, no yards, and the little fence between the houses is gone. It’s like we’re on a boat in a bowl someone is squeezing. The water is coming up so fast that I can see it rise. Termite hears it coming.

“We’re going upstairs, Termite.” I’m across the room, slamming windows shut as I pass. They bang like gunshots and I pick Termite up, not too fast, but quickly, water pooling at my feet. The flood is in the house, almost warm, like a summer puddle deep enough to splash through, and we’re up the stairs.

It’s nearly dark in the attic, with the glimmer of the one window under the eaves. Solly put Termite’s chair there, turned to the rectangular view, but I don’t look. I put Termite in his chair with the bag of sandwiches in his lap and the flashlight in his hands. It’s a long metal flashlight with some weight to it, like mechanics use, and he likes it. He holds on to it tight and I turn it on, aimed at the stairs. “I’m getting a few more things,” I tell him. “You’ll see me there, coming and going.”

I don’t hear him answer because I’m moving down the steep ladder stairs in the dim light. I’m thinking about what’s irreplaceable. What we’ll need if everything is gone.

I grab an empty bureau drawer in my room and throw in my notebooks, my pencils, the drawings from my wall, drooping off their tape in the damp. The skirts and blouses, nylons and underwear, the one good cardigan and pair of heels Miss Barker says an executive secretary might need, are already upstairs. I don’t care about anything else. The seashells in their trays on my desk can float away, back to water, and the postcard Main Streets tacked to my walls can pull apart. It’s not my room anymore, it hasn’t been for a while. The novelty pitchers I collected can fill, sink their doll-sized dream scenes and souvenir words. I’ve got to find Termite’s moon-faced favorite, though, his moon-man doodad, and here it is, centered on his table like some miniature royal ornament. Maybe Solly put it there when he stripped the bed—Solly would remember it, he would know. If the phone worked, I could call Nonie. She’d tell me to get the first-aid kit from under the sink, the jewelry box with her pearls, the salt box with the wooden lid where she keeps household cash. I fill the drawer, splashing room to room, shove it across the floor at the top of the attic steps, and remember what Stamble said: smithereens. I need to get the wheelchair he gave us. My boots feel clammy when I pull them onto my bare feet, but I remember floods are poison, full of what’s burst and broken. That’s why Termite can’t stay here. Maybe we can’t be here anymore and something came to say so.