Song of a Dying Bedmaker
Elizabeth Walztoni
On Sunday my mother and I visited the flea market booth that sold dental tools so she could look over picks and plates and tiny mirrors. The man behind the table wore a piece of leather around his neck and asked her questions. Oh, I know, she said, You have got to ask the dentist for those fluoride treatments, they aren’t just a part of things like they used to be. His face was dark in the curves below his eyes where the sun had collected on his cheekbones.
She pushed her lip up into her face so he could squint at her gums. She turned to give me five dollars of pocket money and waved me away.
I just still have this feeling, she said, leaning over the table with the hand still in her mouth as I walked off, that there’s something wrong in here.
The market tents filled half of an abandoned racetrack parking lot, shadowed by the gap-planked rise of empty stadium stands. My mother and I often came after church, even though it was the Sabbath and we should not have been purchasing things. I never pointed this out because I still wanted to go, and if neither of us said that we were doing something wrong I could pretend we understood each other in the act. Although it wasn’t the Sabbath anymore because my mother had an epiphany in reverse last Sunday night and now we didn’t believe in God.
At one tent, I picked over a pile of board games and a rack of military coats and a table of mostly quilts. Behind the quilts a man looked down at me from a white straw hat that ringed his hound-dog face and cast his skin pale. I felt sudden and visible, smiled halfway at him and he nodded. He watched me put my hand over a Snoopy doll.
Okay, he said with a sad little smile. Two dollars.
The tag read five. One of the man’s canine teeth jutted sideways from his mouth, brown and shiny, like a polished rock. A woman stopped and asked a question about the quilts and he turned to her. I slid Snoopy over by the ear and sidled away with it.
The back of the parking lot behind the tents was usually empty and I thought I’d wait there until I could figure out what I had stolen this doll for.
Sometimes I just took things to see if I could, or because I wanted to cry for a reason I didn’t understand, and afterwards I didn’t know what to do.
It was like shopping on the Sabbath.
I didn’t think about this habit as a sin because I had a loophole. Usually I put the things back and no one saw me. I was worried more about other, more immediate problems, like the feeling that I had a sadness so big in me it was physically forcing itself out, that I wasn’t a real person.
Once I asked my mother about it, why I felt that way. She was washing her hair in the sink before a date. You are bearing the suffering and sorrows of all the world, she said. She waved for me to bring her the conditioner, Like our mother Mary, and that’s why you feel like you’re on the outside.
People inched by and bumped me with their elbows while I made my way to the back of the parking lot. Sometimes I worried that if my mother did not believe in God anymore, this understanding of sadness no longer applied either. You bear his suffering, I said to myself, thinking about the kind quilt seller, and you’re not here at all.
Behind the candy dispenser tent, the racetrack riser seats loomed over the bare lot. Strips of paint stirred with red dust under the dry wind. I thought of horses still running, sweating and alive, on the other side of the wall.
My feet hurt. I sat on the split rail fence along the lot, holding Snoopy by the ear. The people moving in the tents and the things they put their hands on shifted into shapes, loose and separate from me, which meant nothing and felt nothing for themselves. When I looked for a face to hold and focus on and bear, to suffer for, I thought that these were not people like me, would never be.
I did not want to feel this way or to understand it. The sunlight fell to the ground. I clenched my teeth, small but strong, and made them grind against each other.
The vendor I had taken Snoopy from appeared then, between the last row of white tents. He walked bent over his boots and his truck-shaped belt buckle. The angles of his arms came through his billowing shirt as he walked. I might have tried to run, but although it was already happening I could not somehow believe that he had followed me, had actually seen what I did and taken away my opportunity to undo it.
How old are you? he asked, stopping close to my knees. His brown tooth gleamed. He took off his cowboy hat.
Ten, I whispered.
I looked at him, only at the corner of his sad eye and not into it.
I have to go, I lied.
The vendor scratched behind his left ear, his elbow held high, pointed up. With his other hand, he held the cowboy hat to him and its brim nearly reached both of his shoulders.
You have something of mine, don't you? he said, with a mournful face.
I looked up at him.
I was going to put it back, I said. I'll pay you for it now.
He lowered his arm and brought both hands to the hat over his chest. Maybe, I thought, I got caught this time because we didn’t believe in God now. I noticed a freckle on the white of his left eye.
My mom's waiting for me, I said, although I had no idea where she was or if she was ready for me. I really have to go.
I tried to give you a good deal, he said, with a look on his face like I’d kicked him.
I felt then the thing stirring, that grief I couldn't swallow rising up, and I pushed the doll at him.
He rocked backwards and his arms came up to hold it, dropping his hat. I was afraid to run away.
Do you believe in Jesus Christ? he asked me, sounding even more sad than before, holding onto Snoopy around the neck like a baby. He had not bent to pick up his hat and it skated across the asphalt in the dusty breeze.
I thought I shouldn’t tell him that I did because it was the only way to understand sadness, but also didn’t because I had been told that I shouldn’t, and regardless was certain it made no difference since everyone else could change their minds so easily. He had a tear welling up in his freckled eye. I said:
Sure I do.
He sniffed in a way that sounded like it went all the way up into his brain and he wiped his eye.
Then he started talking to me about the Bible, and I leaned against the fence to look around the tents towards the visible corner of the parking lot but my mother was not there. For a while last year, when she had been away, I’d stayed with our older neighbor. She liked to play this song that went, He might be a prophet, and then Jesus gonna make up my dying bed, and told me He would do the same for me. I hadn’t felt anything when she said it other than a little bit of sadness at the singer’s mourning voice.
The vendor was still talking, holding Snoopy tighter to himself so the stuffing bulged, as if he’d lost sight of me after all and could not tell that I wasn’t listening to him anymore. He might be a prophet, I thought, and in that case I didn’t have to be afraid of him. I figured he’d be used to getting ignored.
I pushed off the fence and walked away, across the parking lot and into the tent. He called after me and took a few sad steps but did not follow. My boots hit the ground and creaked against my unfamiliar skin. Everything moved very slowly and, I thought, in a sort of eternal way.
I bit at the inside of my mouth with the strength of my teeth and it hurt. The air still smelled of barbecue and the tents were still busy and I slipped right back into it all like nothing had happened. The things around me would not turn loose, I would see them, I would have something to suffer for.
Elizabeth Walztoni's work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Schuylkill Valley Journal, scissors & spackle, HELL IS REAL: A Midwest Gothic Anthology, Roi Faineant, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize.
