MARY: Hear that? What did I tell you?
PARROT: Oy vey! Oy vey!
(The parrot, a surrealist collage of green and yellow and orange moulting feathers, is esconced on a mahogany perch in the relentlessly formal parlor of Mr. and Mrs. Berkowitz, a room suggesting that it had been entirely made of mahogany: the parquet floors, the wall paneling, and the furniture, all of it costly reproductions of grandiose period-piece furniture—though God knows what period, perhaps early Grand Concourse.
Straight-back chairs; settees that would have tested the endurance of a posture professor. Mulberry velvet draperies swathed the windows, which were incongruously covered with mustard-brown venetian blinds. Above a carved mahogany mantelpiece a mahogany-framed portrait of a jowly, sallow-skinned Mr. Berkowitz depicted him as a country squire outfitted for a fox hunt: scarlet coat, silk cravat, a bugle tucked under one arm, a riding crop under the other. I don’t know what the remainder of this rambling abode looked like, for I never saw any of it except the kitchen.)
MARY: What’s so funny? What you laughing at?
TC: Nothing. It’s just this Peruvian tobacco, my cherub. I take it Mr. Berkowitz is an equestrian?
PARROT: Oy vey! Oy vey!
MARY: Shut up! Before I wring your damn neck.
TC: Now, if we’re going to curse … (Mary mumbles; crosses herself) Does the critter have a name?
MARY: Uh-huh. Try and guess.
TC: Polly.
MARY (truly surprised): How’d you know that?
TC: So she’s a female.
MARY: That’s a girl’s name, so she must be a girl. Whatever she is, she’s a bitch. Just look at all that crap on the floor. All for me to clean it up.
TC: Language, language.
POLLY: Holy cow!
MARY: My nerves. Maybe we better have a little lift. (Out comes the tin box, the roaches, the roach-holder, matches) And let’s see what we can locate in the kitchen. I’m feeling real munchie.
(The interior of the Berkowitz refrigerator is a glutton’s fantasy, a cornucopia of fattening goodies. Small wonder the master of the house has such jowls. “Oh yes,” confirms Mary, “they’re both hogs. Her stomach. She looks like she’s about to drop the Dionne quintuplets. And all his suits are tailor-made: nothing store-bought could fit him. Hmm, yummy, I sure do feel munchie. Those coconut cupcakes look desirable. And that mocha cake, I wouldn’t mind a hunk of that. We could dump some ice cream on it.” Huge soup bowls are found, and Mary masses them with cupcakes and mocha cake and fist-sized scoops of pistachio ice cream. We return to the parlor with this banquet and fall upon it like abused orphans. There’s nothing like grass to grow an appetite. After finishing off the first helping, and fueling ourselves with more roaches, Mary refills the bowls with even heftier portions.)
MARY: How you feel?
TC: I feel good.
MARY: How good?
TC: Real good.
MARY: Tell me exactly how you feel.
TC: I’m in Australia.
MARY: Ever been to Austria?
TC: Not Austria. Australia. No, but that’s where I am now. And everybody always said what a dull place it is. Shows what they know! Greatest surfing in the world. I’m out in the ocean on a surfboard riding a wave high as a, as a—
MARY: High as you. Ha-ha.
TC: It’s made of melting emeralds. The wave. The sun is hot on my back, and the spray is salting my face, and there are hungry sharks all around me. Blue Water, White Death. Wasn’t that a terrific movie? Hungry white man-eaters everywhere, but they don’t worry me—frankly, I don’t give a fuck …
MARY (eyes wide with fear): Watch for the sharks! They got killer teeth. You’ll be crippled for life. You’ll be begging on street corners.
TC: Music!
MARY: Music! That’s the ticket.
(She weaves like a groggy wrestler toward a gargoyle object that had heretofore happily escaped my attention: a mahogany console combining television, phonograph, and a radio. She fiddles with the radio until she finds a station booming music with a Latin beat.
Her hips maneuver, her fingers snap, she is elegant yet smoothly abandoned, as if recalling a sensuous youthful night, and dancing with a phantom partner some remembered choreography. And it is magic, how her now-ageless body responds to the drums and guitars, contours itself to the subtlest rhythm: she is in a trance, the state of grace saints supposedly achieve when experiencing visions.
And I am hearing the music, too; it is speeding through me like amphetamine—each note ringing with the separate clarity of cathedral chimings on a silent winter Sunday. I move toward her, and into her arms, and we match each other step for step, laughing, undulating, and even when the music is interrupted by an announcer speaking Spanish as rapid as the rattle of castanets, we continue dancing, for the guitars are locked in our heads now, as we are locked in our laughter, our embrace: louder and louder, so loud that we are unaware of a key clicking, a door opening and shutting. But the parrot hears it.)
POLLY: Holy cow!
WOMAN’S VOICE: What is this? What’s happening here?
POLLY: Oy vey! Oy vey!
MARY: Why, hello there, Mrs. Berkowitz. Mr. Berkowitz. How ya doin’?
(And there they are, hovering in view like the Mickey and Minnie Mouse balloons in a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Not that there’s anything mousey about this twosome. Their infuriated eyes, hers hot behind harlequin spectacles with sequined frames, absorb the scene: our naughty ice-cream mustaches, the pungent roach smoke polluting the premises. Mr. Berkowitz stalks over and stops the radio.)
MRS. BERKOWITZ: Who is this man?
MARY: I din’t think you was home.
MRS. BERKOWITZ: Obviously. I asked you: Who is this man?
MARY: He’s just a friend of mine. Helping me out. I got so much work today.
MR. BERKOWITZ: You’re drunk, woman.
MARY (deceptively sweet): How’s that you say?
MRS. BERKOWITZ: He said you’re drunk. I’m shocked. Truly.
MARY: Since we’re speaking truly, what I have truly to say to you is: today is my last day of playing nigger around here—I’m giving you notice.
MRS. BERKOWITZ: You are giving me notice?
MR. BERKOWITZ: Get out of here! Before we call the police.
(Without ado, we gather our belongings. Mary waves at the parrot: “So long, Polly. You’re okay. You’re good girl. I was only kidding.” And at the front door, where her former employers have sternly stationed themselves, she announces: “Just for the record, I’ve never touched a drop in my life.”
Downstairs, the rain is still going. We trudge along Park Avenue, then cut across to Lexington.)
MARY: Didn’t I tell you they were stuffy.
TC: Belong in a museum.
(But most of our buoyancy has departed; the power of the Peruvian foliage recedes, a letdown has set in, my surfboard is sinking, and any sharks sighted now would scare the piss out of me.)
MARY: I still got Mrs. Kronkite to do. But she’s nice; she’ll forgive me if I don’t come till tomorrow. Maybe I’ll head on home.
TC: Let me catch you a cab.
MARY: I hate to give them my business. Those taxi people don’t like coloreds. Even when they’re colored themselves. No, I can get the subway down here at Lex and Eighty-sixth.
(Mary lives in a rent-controlled apartment near Yankee Stadium; she says it was cramped when she had a family living with her, but now that she’s by herself, it seems immense and dangerous: “I’ve got three locks on every door, and all the windows nailed down. I’d buy me a police dog if it didn’t mean leaving him by himself so much. I know what it is to be alone, and I wouldn’t wish it on a dog.”)
TC: Please, Mary, let me treat you to a taxi.
MARY: The subway’s a lot quicker. But there’s someplace I want to stop. It’s just down here a ways.
(The place is a narrow church pinched between broad buildings on a side street. Inside, there are two brief rows of pews, and a small altar with a plaster figure of a crucified Jesus suspended above it. An odor of incense and candle wax dominates the gloom. At the altar a woman is lighting a candle, its light fluttering like the sleep of a fitful spirit; otherwise, we are the only supplicants present. We kneel together in the last pew, and from the satchel Mary produces a pair of rosary beads—“I always carry a couple extra”—one for herself, the other for me, though I don’t know quite how to handle it, never having used one before. Mary’s lips move whisperingly.)
MARY: Dear Lord, in your mercy. Please, Lord, help Mr. Trask to stop boozing and get his job back. Please, Lord, don’t leave Miss Shaw a bookworm and an old maid; she ought to bring your children into this world. And, Lord, I beg you to remember my sons and daughter and my grandchildren, each and every one. And please don’t let Mr. Smith’s family send him to that retirement home; he don’t want to go, he cries all the time …
(Her list of names is more numerous than the beads on her rosary, and her requests in their behalf have the earnest shine of the altar’s candle-flame. She pauses to glance at me.)
MARY: Are you praying?
TC: Yes.
MARY: I can’t hear you.
TC: I’m praying for you, Mary. I want you to live forever.
MARY: Don’t pray for me. I’m already saved. (She takes my hand and holds it) Pray for your mother. Pray for all those souls lost out there in the dark. Pedro. Pedro.
The End
