them.
“Hello,” Gwen said, and they laughed as if she had said something stupid or as if she herself were stupid regardless of what she might say. They were among those who had cheered and taken great pleasure in Gwen’s public argument with Dr. Lazar. The pregnant one smoked, inhaling in that strange impatient way, and studied Gwen as if the sight of her confirmed some long-held theory.
“You a midwife?” the pregnant woman said.
Gwen nodded, trying to look proud and competent, a credit to her profession and her people. The pregnant woman dropped the burning cigarette and stepped on it, and then she and her companion turned to walk back to the emergency room, the pregnant woman’s flip-flops scraping and slapping against the soles of her feet.
“See, now,” she told her companion, “don’t want to be messing with that country shit.”
A round the time when Baby Frankenthaler was bundled from her mother’s belly red and headlong into the world, Archy came rolling out of his front door for the second time that day and stood on the topmost step of his porch, freshly showered, toweled, and eau-de-cologned, dressed in a crisp shirt of seafoam-green linen and a linen suit of dulce-de-leche brown. Only to his pride did there still cling, perhaps, the faintest whiff of sesame. He reached up and out with both arms to shoot his cuffs, and for an instant he might have served to illustrate the crucial step in a manual on the seizing of days. He had already seized this particular day once, but he was prepared, if need be, to go ahead and seize the motherfucker all over again.
It was a pretty day for seizing, that much was certain: the prettiest that Oakland, California, had to offer. The fog had burned off, leaving only a softness, as tender as a memory from childhood, to blur the sunlight that warmed the sprawl of rosemary and purple salvia along the fragrant sidewalk and fell in shifting shafts through the branches of the monkey-puzzle tree. This whimsical evergreen, mammoth and spiky, dominated the front yard of Archy and Gwen’s sagging 1918 bungalow, formerly the home of a mean old Portuguese man named Oliveira. Reputed, when Archy was a kid, to contain an extensive collection of shrunken heads gathered during Mr. Oliveira’s career as a merchant seaman, the house had been a reliable source of neighborhood legend, especially at Halloween, and the mythic memory of those leering heads gave Archy pause sometimes when he came home on an autumn evening, a ring-and-run thrill. He had to this day never forgotten the strange horror of glimpsing one of Mr. Oliveira’s many tattoos, like something out of Nathaniel Hawthorne, consisting of a ragged rectangle, a bar of black ink scrawled across the cordovan hide of the old sailor’s upper arm in order to blot out, like the pen of a censor, some underlying name or image whose memory, for mysterious reasons, was abhorrent.
Archy patted the hip pocket of his jacket, checking for The Meditations , coming down the front steps with his sense of resignation stiffened, in best Stoic fashion, to a kind of resolve. Knowing he had done wrong, prepared to make amends, settle his business. Determined to return to Brokeland, open the doors wide to the angel of retail death, and run the place into the ground all by himself, if that was what it took—but to fail calmly, to fail with style, to fail above all with that true dignity, unknown to his wife or his partner, which lay in never tripping out, never showing offense or hurt to those who had offended or hurt you.
He heard the grumbling of a vintage Detroit engine, inadequately muffled, and watched with dull foreboding as a 1970 Oldsmobile Toronado, recurrent as a bad dream, turned onto Sixty-first Street. The vehicle was in awful shape: formerly green and bleached to a glaucous white, rusted in long streaks and patches so that the side visible resembled a strip of rancid bacon.
Archy was a compulsive admirer of American muscle cars
“Hello,” Gwen said, and they laughed as if she had said something stupid or as if she herself were stupid regardless of what she might say. They were among those who had cheered and taken great pleasure in Gwen’s public argument with Dr. Lazar. The pregnant one smoked, inhaling in that strange impatient way, and studied Gwen as if the sight of her confirmed some long-held theory.
“You a midwife?” the pregnant woman said.
Gwen nodded, trying to look proud and competent, a credit to her profession and her people. The pregnant woman dropped the burning cigarette and stepped on it, and then she and her companion turned to walk back to the emergency room, the pregnant woman’s flip-flops scraping and slapping against the soles of her feet.
“See, now,” she told her companion, “don’t want to be messing with that country shit.”
A round the time when Baby Frankenthaler was bundled from her mother’s belly red and headlong into the world, Archy came rolling out of his front door for the second time that day and stood on the topmost step of his porch, freshly showered, toweled, and eau-de-cologned, dressed in a crisp shirt of seafoam-green linen and a linen suit of dulce-de-leche brown. Only to his pride did there still cling, perhaps, the faintest whiff of sesame. He reached up and out with both arms to shoot his cuffs, and for an instant he might have served to illustrate the crucial step in a manual on the seizing of days. He had already seized this particular day once, but he was prepared, if need be, to go ahead and seize the motherfucker all over again.
It was a pretty day for seizing, that much was certain: the prettiest that Oakland, California, had to offer. The fog had burned off, leaving only a softness, as tender as a memory from childhood, to blur the sunlight that warmed the sprawl of rosemary and purple salvia along the fragrant sidewalk and fell in shifting shafts through the branches of the monkey-puzzle tree. This whimsical evergreen, mammoth and spiky, dominated the front yard of Archy and Gwen’s sagging 1918 bungalow, formerly the home of a mean old Portuguese man named Oliveira. Reputed, when Archy was a kid, to contain an extensive collection of shrunken heads gathered during Mr. Oliveira’s career as a merchant seaman, the house had been a reliable source of neighborhood legend, especially at Halloween, and the mythic memory of those leering heads gave Archy pause sometimes when he came home on an autumn evening, a ring-and-run thrill. He had to this day never forgotten the strange horror of glimpsing one of Mr. Oliveira’s many tattoos, like something out of Nathaniel Hawthorne, consisting of a ragged rectangle, a bar of black ink scrawled across the cordovan hide of the old sailor’s upper arm in order to blot out, like the pen of a censor, some underlying name or image whose memory, for mysterious reasons, was abhorrent.
Archy patted the hip pocket of his jacket, checking for The Meditations , coming down the front steps with his sense of resignation stiffened, in best Stoic fashion, to a kind of resolve. Knowing he had done wrong, prepared to make amends, settle his business. Determined to return to Brokeland, open the doors wide to the angel of retail death, and run the place into the ground all by himself, if that was what it took—but to fail calmly, to fail with style, to fail above all with that true dignity, unknown to his wife or his partner, which lay in never tripping out, never showing offense or hurt to those who had offended or hurt you.
He heard the grumbling of a vintage Detroit engine, inadequately muffled, and watched with dull foreboding as a 1970 Oldsmobile Toronado, recurrent as a bad dream, turned onto Sixty-first Street. The vehicle was in awful shape: formerly green and bleached to a glaucous white, rusted in long streaks and patches so that the side visible resembled a strip of rancid bacon.
Archy was a compulsive admirer of American muscle cars
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