Marie Manilla: RETROSPECTIVE • Cleaver Magazine

Marie Manilla
RETROSPECTIVE

Lena skids around the backseat as the cabbie rudely shifts lanes. Her gnarled knuckles couldn’t negotiate the seatbelt. The tunnel engulfs her, the hum and grrr. The weight of all that earth compressing her brain. But they emerge and she breathes and there’s Pittsburgh’s skyline, looking much as Lena remembers. What she can see of it, anyway. Astigmia frays city lights into fireworks that rain down on her. Sparks pebble her wrap, her skirt. She brushes them off, sending embers into the footwell. Years ago, Edmund had lauded her imaginings until he didn’t.

Traffic is congested around the gallery as Lena expected. Cabbie jabs the horn, and other drivers join in, budging nothing.

Lena leans forward and taps cabbie’s shoulder. “Here’s fine.”

He twists in his seat, eyes the Dowager’s hump she’s been growing since birth, more pronounced by the decade. Cabbie says: “You sure?”

Lena re-drapes the wrap around her hump, her throat. “I can walk two blocks, can’t I?”

Cabbie’s face expresses doubt.

“Just pull over.”

Lena has trouble with the handle, so Cabbie gets out and opens her door. She accepts his arm and holds tight until the ground settles, the last of the embers pattering the sidewalk.

South Side is no longer working class. Gastro pubs and internet cafes have replaced mom-and-pop grocers and hardware stores. The patrons are younger than when Lena moved here at thirty. Doddy was fifteen.

The Victorian façades above the businesses haven’t changed. The Rudnytskys’ blue dormers. The Hubers’ mansard roof where pigeons once roosted. All dead now, Lena imagines, including the pigeons. “Good riddance,” she says to the birds that once clotted her eaves too.

College kids bustle by, nudging her, and she reads their minds: Out of our way, old woman. She’d once been vibrant on this street, even with the curved spine. She and Doddy strutting arm-in-arm, hogging the sidewalk. “The painter’s women,” millworkers called after them. “There go the painter’s women.” It was all so bohemian.

Commotion ahead and a girl marches toward Lena in a halter top and bellbottoms. It’s Doddy, long hair shuddering against bare shoulders. How can she still be young? Lena’s heart thuds dangerously. Doctors have warned about this. Doddy’s head swivels from side to side: one cheek smooth, the other marred, but not by age.

Doddy aims for Lena, face still swiveling. Maybe she’s deciding which side to present to the hopeful woman stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, arms akimbo.

And there’s Doddy within feet, then inches, face forward now, eyes sparking. She shoves Lena into a cluster of young men as she passes. Out of my way, old woman!

The men steady her. “Whoa,” one says. “You all right, Granny?”

Lena slaps their hands away. “I’m no granny.” She looks for Doddy’s receding back but doesn’t find it.

The crowd spilling from the gallery coos like the Hubers’ pigeons, heads darting and ducking, claws clutching wine glasses and tiny plates of food. They give Lena no notice, a relief, and she enters the building, also busy with birds. The space is unrecognizable now that walls separating rooms have been removed, the rear kitchen exposed. The tin ceiling remains, the wooden floors. But no glass cases up front where Edmund’s Aunt Alice displayed pies when this was her bakery. Edmund stored paints and brushes, turpentine and rolled canvas in them after he’d inherited the place. Lena likes to think the old spinster would have approved. She also lived a bohemian life, if the rumors were true.

Through the birds, Lena catches hints of Edmund’s paintings lining the walls, all those oversized impasto heads: a cyan forehead, alizarin jaw. She isn’t ready for more. “Ravaged,” the Wheeling newspaper had said. “The early works of Edmund Price.” Lena had held the article to the light in her apartment. Ogled grainy photos of the upcoming opening. Not just paintings, but displays of Edmund’s smeared palettes, crumpled paint tubes, coffee cans jammed with brushes. Artifacts gathered from his Brooklyn brownstone where he lived with wife number four who found him on his studio floor, cold. “He died doing what he loved,” the woman had said. There was no picture of the widow in the paper, and Lena scours the pigeons now. She must be here. Maybe that young one with the bent nose. Or the other one with offset eyes. Edmund had a penchant for asymmetry. Lena scans for another face, perfectly symmetrical, but none of the faces are Doddy’s.

A familiar wooziness and Lena aims for a bench facing the front window that offered the good morning light. She remembers that. Countless times she posed on a green settee that matched her eyes, nearly. That’s what Edmund had said. “Just needs a dab of ultramarine.” She didn’t know if he meant the couch or her eyes. How she fabricated stories as he worked to amuse him. Like the one about Andrew Carnegie tipping his bowler hat as he passed by, slumming it, never mind that he’d been dead for over fifty years. Or the fantasy of little Andy Warhol entering the bakery with his mother. How Mrs. Warhola scrutinized Alice’s offerings—Baked fresh today, right? I don’t want no day-old pie—while Andy carved his initial into the base of the wooden counter, that fancy A Lena had found one day while mopping.

She laughs now at the idea of it as the outside crowd presses against the plate glass she can fully see through. But back then, Edmund had taped newspaper to the window’s lower half after police threatened to charge them with lewd conduct. “This isn’t lewd,” Edmund had said, pointing to Lena hastily draped in a quilt. “This is beauty.”

“Delinquency of minors, then,” said the cop, pointing to the window where a row of boys pressed their grubby faces to the glass. Their ogling did not unnerve Lena. She at last felt beautiful beneath Edmund’s gaze that extended to onlookers who she imagined also saw her through his eyes.

The birds push in on Lena, their asses and tiny clutch purses. Their arty rings. “They’re of his first wife,” the gallery owner says about the paintings. Lena chuffs at the ridiculous fascinator strapped to the woman’s head, a cluster of trembling luna moths.

“Second wife,” Lena corrects. They weren’t officially married, she and Edmund, but a piece of paper didn’t matter. Isn’t that what he’d said? Standing right there by the Franklin stove warming his hands. The stove is no longer there, but the tile inlay it sat on is. The wood flooring around it charred because no amount of sanding could get that out. Character, developers would call it now. History. And it was their history. Edmund’s and Doddy’s and hers. Flames erupt from the tile inlay and lick the tin ceiling. “Stop it,” Lena commands, and they do.

“They’re the earliest exemplars of his work,” the gallery owner says. Moths quiver with each word.

“Not true,” Lena spits. She wonders what happened to his even earlier canvasses. Pitched into the stove during an avenging frenzy, she imagines. “Serve me right.”

Patrons back away from the bent woman muttering to herself.

Lena knows what they’re thinking, so she stands and heads toward the back. She intentionally jabs folks with her knotty fingers. “Get away, dirty birds. Shoo!”

The icebox is gone from the kitchen, as is the industrial stove Aunt Alice baked pies in. The tiled counter remains. The open shelves that once held pie tins Edmund inherited along with the wooden box filled with Alice’s recipes, a holy relic he refused to move, not even to dust. “It’s where she left it,” he’d said, awed by her unexpected benevolence. Lena imagines his face when he first noticed the box was gone.

The back stairwell has been cordoned off with rope. The dangling sign attached reads: Employees Only.

Lena grips the rope. “I was an employee.” That’s how it started, anyway.

Edmund had blustered into the Bloomfield diner with the rain, sopping wet. “Jesus Christ!” he’d said, shaking his hair, his knapsack, water dripping on the penny tiles.

Wind scattered Doddy’s loose-leaf homework from the front booth where she sat pimply faced and stringy haired, bathing averse because of the efficiency’s unreliable hot water. “Close the door!”

Edmund obeyed and collected the blown sheets at his feet. “Sorry, kid.”

Behind the counter, Lena grabbed a stack of dishtowels and held them out. “Here.”

Edmund’s head snapped at the sight of her. “Jesus Christ.”

She wanted to take the towels back as his eyes roved over her curved torso. She was used to quick glances, gawking from a distance. Unabashed scrutiny from those schoolboys lined up behind Fucelli’s garage when she was a girl. They wanted a peek of her twisted spine and were willing to pay, so she’d peel off her dress, her slip. Charged extra to touch and she’d pluck nickels from their sweaty palms. Most critical of all was her mother. “You’ll need a skill,” Mother had said early on. “No man’ll have you.” Guess Lena showed her.

“You’re stunning,” Edmund had said, which stunned Lena. Even more so when he yanked a sketchbook from his knapsack, plopped down on a counter stool, and started drawing her. Didn’t even ask permission. “You’re stunning,” he said again, fingers smeared with vine charcoal. The satisfying scritch-scritch of it against paper. The charcoal’s slow-burn smell.

Doddy edged over to watch, as did Frank and Girdy from the middle booth. Even Jenkins popped off his stool and came over, soup bowl in hand, slurping as he ate.

“You can move,” Edmund had said to Lena. “You can do your job.”

Fred, the owner, called from the kitchen pass-thru. “She’d better do her job.”

But Lena didn’t want to move, enveloped as she was in the beams of light shooting from Edmund’s eyes, the warmth of them against her skin that coated her in a kind of bliss, a kind of value.

Edmund slapped a ten-dollar bill on the counter when he finished, though he hadn’t ordered a thing. The next day another ten, another day another ten, then a twenty. “Come to my studio,” he’d said. “I must paint you.”

She wanted to say yes to the light, but she nodded at Doddy, gaunt-faced in her booth. “I have to bring my sister.”

Edmund leaned across the counter. “Your mother can’t watch her?”

Something washed across Lena’s face, but it wasn’t sadness. “She’s dead.”

His consoling nod. “It’s good of you to raise her.”

“Like I had a choice,” the absolute truth. The minute Doddy was born Mother said she’d had enough of babies.

◊

Lena unties the rope from the handrail and slips up the back stairwell. The wooden slats groan as they always did. It’s slow going now, but how Lena used to clatter up them, Doddy on her heels, prodding her behind. “Out of my way, old woman!”

“Who’s old!”

She expects the second floor to be gutted, but the long hallway remains. The bathroom with the clawfoot tub and pedestal sink and reliable hot water. Doddy’s bedroom. “Your sister can sleep here,” Edmund had said when they eventually moved in. It’s an office now with desk and file cabinets. Printer stand by the window. Laughter in the corner and there’s Doddy, still limp-haired and pimply, teetering on her whiny bed taping a poster to the wall.

She spins toward Lena. “I finally have my own room,” she whispers before dissolving.

“Yes you do,” Lena says to the space where Doddy had been.

The bedroom Lena and Edmund shared is crowded with packing crates and rolls of bubble wrap. Stacked furniture she doesn’t recognize, but a brass headboard she does. It’s not hard to reconstruct. The wardrobe along that wall. The bed in the corner where she pressed Edmund nearly every night: “How can you love me?” “Because you’re stunning,” his always and always earnest reply. The ghost of a suncatcher in the front window and Lena edges through junk to get to it. Her feet remember where she stood. She nudges trash bags out of the way, a plant stand, to unearth that patch of wood and places first one foot, then the other. Pretends to hold a cup of tea as she always did when she looked out the window overlooking Carson Street. Below, the gallery spillover has grown. Guffaws and trills float up to her. Across the street, Popov’s Butcher Shop is a tattoo parlor now. Inside, the gloved artist scrubs the arm of a young woman in his chair. The second-floor windows are dark. No hint of Popov’s anemic son who often lurked there hoping for a glimpse of Doddy. He wasn’t the only one.

Night leaches into day. Gallery goers into babushkas with grocery sacks pressed to their chests. They scatter up the street and down to their rowhouses to start cabbage rolls and potato dumplings. The Kathmans’ dog pees on the corner hydrant. School kids race along the sidewalk. A thrum in Lena’s chest because there’s Doddy rounding the corner. No longer pimply or limp-haired, inches taller. That’s what two years under Edmund’s roof had done. His cooking that was better than diner food. Store owners and patrons stop what they’re doing to watch Doddy pass. Old men and young ones. Women. Wide-faced pansies swiveling toward the sun. Doddy enters the record store and the admirers sigh at the lost sight of her. It’s a harsh reminder that Lena was no one’s sun, except Edmund’s, if she could believe him, even with her nightly prodding. “How can you love me?” Mother’s relentless earworm: “No man’ll have you unless it’s out of pity.”

And there’s Edmund in that floppy felt hat strutting up Carson with his sketchbook. His eyebeams scour the terrain. He’d no doubt spent the day on the banks of the Mon scouting for treasure to draw: dead fish, industrial flotsam, the occasional bloated body. Lena taps the window, but he doesn’t hear. Up the street, Crowley waves and Edmund marches to him eager to see whatever oddity Crowley added to his barbershop shelf. A pickled two-headed bird. Stuffed albino alligator. Edmund enters the shop, already pulling the drawing pencil from behind his ear.

A woman exits the grocery next door, basket of peaches looped over one arm. Aunt Alice. Lena has conjured her countless times from the one photo she’s seen: young Alice standing beside a train, eyes expressing both longing and fear. Lena dresses her in clothes she’d found in the trunk at the foot of Edmund’s bed: a yellow tea dress and pointy gray hat with a limp feather. Lena straightens the feather. Alice strides up the street nodding at pedestrians and shopkeepers, eyes no longer fearful. She passes the jewelry store where Mr. Bokor arranges his window display. He waves to draw Alice’s attention and extends a necklace. No, Lena imagines Alice saying. Bokor holds an earring to his lobe. I couldn’t, Alice surely says. Bokor jangles the earring, and it works. Oh, all right, Alice says, going inside. She can do that. Purchase goods on a whim. Never peeling off her tea dress to pluck nickels from a sweaty boy’s palm. No Edmund allowance to painstakingly account for when it didn’t last the week. He didn’t want Lena working at the diner. “It’s beneath you,” he’d said. “I’ll take care of you both.” But it was Alice’s pie money providing for them all. And there she is coming from the jeweler’s, necklace and earrings glinting. A familiar grind in Lena’s belly at the lost possibility of being responsible only for herself. Alice reaches the end of the block and disappears around the corner, taking Lena’s lost possibility with her.

Doddy exits the record store, album pressed to her chest, and the pansies once again turn toward their sun. She walks by them, oblivious. And there’s Edmund coming from the barber’s, already scouring for the next thing. This is the day Lena first saw it, or thinks she saw it. Edmund strutting along the sidewalk unaware of Doddy ahead of him. His beams landed on her, roved over her straight spine, bare except for the knot of her halter top, up and down, up and down. The way his long shadow crawled up her body as he closed the distance between them.

And Doddy felt it, or must have, because she turned around so abruptly they nearly collided. She held out the album Edmund fussed over for too long. But they had that in common, didn’t they, a love of music? And vintage postcards. Arthouse movies.

That’s how quickly Lena’s tallying began.

How Edmund brushed his hand along Doddy’s waist whenever they scootched past each other in the hall.

How he always doled out to her the choicest porkchop, the last parslied potato.

The little surprises he left on her placemat: a piece of river glass, a trilobite, art books to begin her education. He left Lena gifts, too, but they seemed inferior now. The smaller piece of river glass, the broken fossil. No art books.

Even worse was the night Lena heard muttering from Doddy’s bedroom. She padded toward the open door just as Edmund tucked money into Doddy’s palm. The way her fingers curled over the bills as if she deserved them. Earned them, even.

A queasiness in Lena’s gut that she carried to bed. Hard-edged words tumbled around her mouth, cracking her teeth. She was sure Edmund heard it as he snapped the newspaper’s spine beside her. How closely she watched his eyes scan left-right, left-right, as she waited for the right moment. The right pause. And there it was as he snuffed out his final cigarette. Thorny words tumbled from Lena’s mouth: “What did she do for the money?”

Edmund nestled his shoulders into his pillow. “What did who do?”

“Doddy. What did she do for the money?”

Edmund’s guileless face. “What are you talking about?”

There was no recanting. “I see how you look at her.”

His head angled toward her.

“I see how you touch her.”

His audible gasp as if he were fully seeing her at last.

And perhaps Lena was at last seeing him. “I see how you touch her.”

How quickly his hand gripped her jaw. “You’re spinning fiction.”

Lena could only blink.

“I won’t hear of this again.” He thrust her jaw away as if it were rotten fruit. “And if you utter one vile word of this to Doddy you’ll be back at the diner.”

He rolled over and clicked off the light, but she could still feel his grip. More alarming was his threat that did not include Doddy.

Lena did not utter another word, but the list-making continued. The little trinkets. The heady jokes. The shared looks. Edmund traded looks with Lena, too, warning shots whenever her eyes squinted at the sight of them laughing at the personals. Man seeks one-legged woman. Woman seeks man with glass eye. The drawing lessons, and Doddy was adequate, if not a natural. Small comfort to Lena as Edmund leaned over his pupil sitting at the table they’d set up beside the green settee where he’d arranged a cluster of fruit. A vase of flowers. And the day he folded Lena’s hands just so atop the table. The quietness as they both sketched her until Edmund stood to appraise Doddy’s work. “Your foreshortening isn’t quite right, but your shading here is lovely.”

Doddy absorbed his words, bathed as she was in his light. Neither noted the dark mass roiling inside Lena as she sat there, still as a bowl. But how the mass swelled and pulsed and wanted to shoot from her eyes, ears, nose. She envisioned corking herself with plugs and laughed at the image.

“What’s so funny?” Doddy said.

“Be still,” Edmund said, and Lena finished his thought: or it’s back to the diner.

Pressure inside her grew as weeks passed, aching her lungs, her gut. It became impossible to sleep, to eat. How Edmund greedily painted her protruding hipbones, her spiny ribs.

And that winter day they were alone together, Doddy and Lena. Lena straightened the studio after one of Edmund’s frantic sessions. Doddy tended the Franklin stove. It was snowing. Lena remembers that. Fat flakes so weighty they tick-ticked against the plate glass.

Doddy paused to appraise the room bathed in light. “It’s a Dutch painting.”

“A Vermeer,” Lena added, wishing Edmund were there to remember she was clever too.

Glinting on Doddy’s forefinger, the moonstone big as a nickel. “Where’d you get the ring?” Lena asked.

Doddy twisted it around her finger, sheepishly, it appeared to Lena. “A boy at school.”

Lena believes her now but didn’t then. “What boy?”

“You don’t know him.” Doddy jabbed the poker into the stove’s open mouth to jiggle logs, the flames trembling.

Lena trembled too. “What boy?”

The exasperated sigh. “You don’t know him.”

“You’re right about that.” Lena assumed the reference was to Edmund, which made Doddy’s irritation more unnerving. What might Edmund confide in her? A conjured image of Edmund and Doddy in bed, he stroking Doddy’s face, awed by perfection. Their shared laughter at Lena’s gullibility. She doesn’t suspect a thing, Edmund might have said before the tallying. Thick as a board, said Doddy.

If only they’d been in the kitchen. Or Doddy’s bedroom. The back alley. Anywhere but the front room with that pickle jar of mineral spirits Edmund used to clean brushes, a half inch of oil sediment lining the bottom. Why did it fit so perfectly in Lena’s grip? She can feel the weight of it now, hear the sloshing. If her physiology were true, her aim might have been better. She never intended to make contact. At least she didn’t think so. Smashing it against the wall would have been enough to scare Doddy, and Edmund when he returned and saw the splatter dripped down the wall. But the jar arced straight for Doddy, who ducked out of the way, but not far enough as the jar shattered against the stove. The fumes ignited with a roar, enveloping Doddy in a short-lived ball of flames. The blast knocked her backward into the wall, that horrifying thud that not even Doddy’s screams could drown out.

◊

Sirens pull Lena back upstairs to the window overlooking Carson, but it’s not Carson. It’s Mary Street below the hospital where Lena is sequestered behind a stack of boxes, a plant stand, rolls of bubble wrap. She doesn’t question the debris, happy to be hidden from Doddy, in bed, moaning even with the good drugs as a nurse dabs ointment onto the charred side of Doddy’s face, the crisped ear. The smell of burnt flesh and hair.

The nurse leaves and Lena calls out for the thousandth time: “I’m sorry.” The words bounce off the suncatcher in the window, the stack of packing crates. “I’m so sorry.”

In blusters Edmund, found at last. Lena can already feel the grip of his fingers around her jaw: What did you do!

He doesn’t see her, or maybe he does, but his eyes land on Doddy. He leans in more closely to appraise her, his chest heaving, his breathing as erratic as Doddy’s, her eyes so very round. Edmund offers no consoling words as he just stands there, assessing, until his chest settles. Suddenly he drags the visitor’s chair beside Doddy and sits, plops his knapsack on his lap, and starts digging.

“You’re stunning,” he says as the light enveloping Doddy swells. “I must draw you.”

◊

“You can’t be here.”

The nurse has entered and wends her way through boxes to Lena. Her white cap gleams.

Lena points to the luna moths hovering over the woman’s cap. “How do you get them to stay?”

Nurse scowls and cups Lena’s elbow. “You can’t be here.” She steers Lena past Edmund and Doddy.

“What about him?”

Nurse follows Lena’s gaze but only says: “Careful on the stairs.”

So many ebullient people in the lobby to visit family. Lena is escorted quickly through them to the door, then the sidewalk, where she’s left to fend for herself, once again, and she feels the curt slam of Mother’s door.

Lena is back on Carson, the right street if not the right year. A suitcase weighs her down, packed with a vengeance. She glances up at the bedroom where she imagines Doddy will convalesce under Edmund’s scouring eyes.

Her chest aches for Doddy, a portion for Edmund, but beneath that, something else burbles. Lena strides away from the ascending ambivalence. Or maybe she’s striding toward the notion it carries: perhaps now she’ll be responsible only for herself.

As she turns the corner, a tangle of words gathers in the bowl of her tongue, words she hasn’t uttered aloud in years. She opens her mouth to let them rush skyward to roost with a row of tutting pigeons: “My Doddy. My Dodder. My daughter.”

Marie Manilla is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her novel, The Patron Saint of Ugly, received the Weatherford Award. Shrapnel received the Fred Bonnie Award for Best First Novel. Stories in her collection, Still Life with Plums, first appeared in Chicago Tribune, Mississippi Review, Prairie Schooner, Cleaver, and elsewhere.