Marie Manilla Watchers

Watchers  

     Zany lies amid clutter on the floor beneath the dining room windows hugging her bandaged arm. She huffs loudly enough to reach the front porch where Mom and Aunt Vi imbibe scotch. Vi still isn’t used to afternoon drinking. They can’t hear Zany over the Krebbs’ crying baby on the other side of the duplex wall. Stupid baby. Plus Zany’s little sister overhead dancing to the transistor radio, rattling the light fixture dangling from the ceiling.  

     The fingertips on Zany’s bandaged arm are cold and maybe even blue. This is slightly alarming. She considers running to Mom but knows better. Take the damn thing off then, Mom will say.  

     There’s nothing wrong with Zany’s arm, but that isn’t the point. At breakfast, without preamble, she wound an Ace bandage from her palm to her armpit. The family no longer asks what she’s up to. Last week during Ed Sullivan she sat at her TV tray dripping candle wax over her fist. Aunt Vi blinked with every splat, but Mom only said: “If you get that on my rug I’ll take you across my knee. I don’t care how old you are.” Zany is thirteen.  

     Week before, Zany taped a string of two-inch penny nails around her throat at the kitchen table where Dad rewired one of Mom’s salvaged lamps. “Why don’t you do that in your room?”  Dad didn’t like sharing his workspace. Zany shrugged and the nail tips jabbed her collarbones.  She could have done it in her room, but doing the thing wasn’t the point. It was having someone watch that mattered. If no one watched, who would believe she could endure that much discomfort?  

     Nobody is watching now, so Zany grips a dining table leg and pulls it toward her, or tries to. It’s hard to budge through Mom’s junk piles, plus the weight of the extra leaf Dad inserted when Aunt Vi and Cousin Lester moved in after their apartment collapsed. Aunt Vi brought cans of flowery air freshener to hide the hoard smell—rotten food and cat piss. They don’t own a cat.  Lester, sixteen, bought a box of rubble-rescued books.  

     “You better be setting the table!” Mom calls through the screen.  

     Zany hates Mom’s manly haircut and has said so. “It’s Gig’s turn!”  

     Overhead, Gig stomps the floor in the bedroom they now share. Aunt Vi got Zany’s attic where Mom’s hoard had been disallowed, but it’s begun trickling up. “No, it’s not!” Gig’s transistor blares louder.  

     “Zany!” Mom calls. “I swear to God! And close those drapes!”  

     Mom can’t stand looking at the neighbor’s wall she could reach across and touch, but Zany craves fresh air, as fresh as Pittsburgh air can be. Plus, she likes counting the yellow bricks Andy Warhol surely counted when this was his childhood home, the dining room his make-shift sickroom when he suffered St. Vitus Dance. Zany is certain his bed would have been right here by the window where he could see a hint of sky if he cricked his neck just right. She lies in his echo and imagines the day she’ll appear at his Factory door in New York City and say: “I used to live in your house.” Andy will enfold her in his translucent arms before ushering her inside, not to act in his films or screen print his designs, but to be his equal. Partner, even. Zany just has to determine her own art form. It sure won’t be cutting fruit cans into flowers like Warhol’s mother did for chump change.  

     Zany’s legs start the herky-jerky Vitus dance as if she’s running toward that Factory dream. Her pelvis and hips quake. The one free arm. The back of her head jitters against the floor. It’s a familiar thrum even Aunt Vi and Lester are accustomed to now. Mom yells: “Stop that racket!” She mutters to Vi: “We never should have bought this place.” 

     A kitchen timer dings and Aunt Vi comes in to disarm it. Her cooking is better than Mom’s, and Vi wears an apron and dime store lipstick while she does it. Fresh peas instead of canned. Real mashed potatoes instead of instant. Vi is a better housekeeper, too, organizing Mom’s trash into four-foot piles that line the walls. Every day Mom trolls back alleys and neighbors’ garbage in dingy clothes that make her look like a hobo. That’s what the kids say:  Your mom looks like a hobo. She pulls a rickety cart and loads it with moldy linens, rolled-up rugs, dented wastebaskets. Zany wonders if Dad regrets marrying the wrong sister. She knows he regrets not having a son, a boy who could have been Lester if Dad had a different heart. Instead, Dad got Lester on at the blast furnace, because “No one sleeps under my roof for free.” Who needs a high school diploma?  

     In the kitchen, Aunt Vi lets out one of her sobs. She only does that in private after Mom’s third scolding: “He’s dead, Vi. Crying won’t bring him back.”  

     Zany misses Uncle Mo, too. His pocketful of peppermints. The trick coin he always plucked from Zany’s ear. The last time Zany’s family visited, she walked through their decrepit Franklin Arms apartment with its spongy floors and clanking pipes, but no maze of debris to negotiate. No cat piss smell or sister blaring the radio. She found Lester in his room at a child’s desk he’d outgrown, doughy boy that he then was, doing homework without being nagged.  Astounding. His room was spartan, plenty of space for a second bed if Zany asked Aunt Vi sweetly enough. But no. Zany couldn’t abandon Andy in his Dawson Street sickbed. Lester’s only wall decoration was a world map strung with red yarn radiating from Pittsburgh to France, China, the South Pole. She wanted to ask why those destinations, but didn’t, entranced as she was by all that fresh-aired openness, plus his feverishly scribbling hand. 

     Now, Aunt Vi leans in the dining room dabbing her face with a dishtowel. She’s aged a decade since moving here and it isn’t all due to grief. She targets Zany on the floor. “Everything all right in here?”  

     Zany has stopped breathing. Her eyes are glazed and her tongue lolls from her mouth.  She’s getting better at playing dead.  

     “All right then.” Aunt Vi is getting better at not reacting. The screen door slams behind her.  

     Zany pulls in her tongue and inhales. She starts counting bricks again until Aunt Vi calls: “There they are!” as she does every workday.  

     Zany pictures Dad and Lester padding up Dawson. Wet hair slicked back because they shower off the stench before coming home. Zany appreciates that. Their boots scrape the steps to the porch where Aunt Vi will take their lunchpails. And there she is coming through the door and dashing to rinse their thermoses at the kitchen sink. Mom will stay put and pour Dad a finger of scotch.  

     Lester bangs inside and pauses in the dining room entryway. He’s leaner now on account of the physical labor. Taller too. He eyes Zany’s bandaged arm, not with Aunt Vi’s alarm, but with the kind of baffled wonder Zany has always been after. Their eyes meet and it’s the same look he gave her the day she walked backward all the way to the Eliza Number Two—not  because Dad and Lester worked there, but because it was lunchtime, and a gaggle of men would  be eating beneath that pin oak by the furnace entrance. And there they were, her father among them, not easy to see having to crane her neck as Zany picked her way over the railroad tracks.  

     “What the hell is she doing?” said Tom Folsom. Zany recognized her neighbor’s voice.  “She’s off her nut,” said another worker. 

     Zany twisted fully around to see if her father would defend her, but he was already hustling back to the furnace.  

     “Something’s not right with that girl,” said Folsom.  

     “Nothing wrong with her,” said Lester from beneath a different tree where he ate his cheese sandwich alone.  

     Folsom spit in the grass. “Shut up, fairy boy.”  

     Lester wasn’t a fairy boy, Zany knew.  

     Today, leaning in the dining room, Lester looks as if he can see inside Zany’s skull to the conjured Factory room she and Andy will one day share: walls scrubbed clean and painted white.  Her drawings or paintings lining the walls in tidy rows. Maybe sculptures aligned on shelves. Or mobiles overhead spinning in the breeze. Lester nods at her fantasy as if it’s a good one. He has his own escapism. Zany knows that too, and she looks away first so her eyes won’t let him know that she knows.  

     Lester heads to the cellar where he spends most of his time. Mom partitioned off the back corner for him with clothesline and a bed sheet. Installed an army cot and gooseneck lamp on a crate. Andy Warhol holed up in the cellar when he was a kid developing film in a jerry-rigged darkroom. Zany constructed one from an oversized cardboard box she wedged into that shadowy space beneath the stairs. She cut a closable door in the box and regularly folds herself inside to catalogue her achievements in a notebook. Stood barefoot on a hot tar patch on Frazier Street for seventy-two seconds. Mr. Braddock called me a dolt, but I said: You’re the dolt!  

     From below, the sound of Lester falling onto his cot followed by a sigh so deep Zany’s lungs exhale, too. Whatever dreams he had got buried under apartment rubble along with Uncle Mo. 

     Outside, Dad has taken Aunt Vi’s creaky rocker. “He’s a strange one,” he says about Lester. “What’s he up to down there?”  

     Mom says, “Who the hell knows?”  

     Zany clamps her unbandaged hand over her mouth to keep that knowledge from spilling.  She saw what he was up to the day she was tucked in her box and forgot time until footsteps pounded the stairs above her. She peeked through the peephole she’d punched into her cardboard door as Lester peeled off his shirt, his pants. He left on his boxers and socks. Didn’t bother to draw his sheet curtain, just plopped on the cot and lit a cigarette. His smoking still surprised her. The boy he once was was also buried under rubble. Zany regretted not making her presence known, but then it was too late with Lester in his underwear, and all. Plus, she was captivated by his fingers pulling the cigarette to his lips. The little smoke rings he sent up to the floor joists. She wondered if he was dreaming of China or the South Pole, or just sitting quietly at his too-small desk back in his apartment inhaling all that fresh air. Finally, he snubbed out the cigarette in an empty tuna can. Zany hoped he would roll over for sleep, but he slid a much-abused magazine from beneath his pillow and turned pages. Even in the scant light Zany made out the naked lady on the cover. Zany’s heart thudded, even more so when Lester’s hand slipped beneath his waistband and started moving up and down, up and down. She told her eyes to close but they wouldn’t, both entranced and nauseated by what she shouldn’t be seeing. She knew what he was up to, having done her own exploring when she had her own room. She’d conjure Andy Warhol’s face and mouth and delicate hands—because those rumors weren’t true. They just weren’t. Harder to explore in the bed she now shared with Gig. Stupid Aunt Vi, and stupid collapsed Franklin Arms. 

     What Lester was up to looked angry. Violent, even. A jittery burn galloped beneath Zany’s skin and she bit her lip, drawing blood. But she couldn’t look away from Lester’s furious hand, his eyes ogling that magazine until they squeezed shut and his mouth pressed into a grimace that did not look like joy. The magazine collapsed onto his chest and his belly shuddered. Only then did Zany close her eyes as the burn leaked through her skin. When Lester’s snores came, she tiptoed upstairs to collapse on Andy’s echo. She caught Lester seven more times, if caught is the right word, lying in wait as she was, hoping to see, hoping not to.  “You better be setting the table!” Mom yells now from the porch.  

     Zany grunts and makes her way to the kitchen where Aunt Vi pulls a roast from the oven.  Zany heaves a stack of plates to the dining room and deals them out like playing cards.  “Don’t break my dishes!” Mom calls. I hate your hair, Zany wants to say.  There is a crash, but it’s not dishes. It comes from overhead where Gig screams.  Thumping on the stairs as she thunders down, transistor in hand. “Zany!”  Gig rushes into the dining room, ponytail swaying, eyes landing on her sister. “He’s been shot!”  

     Zany’s mind hurtles back two months to when Martin Luther King was killed. Riots erupted in Pittsburgh’s Black neighborhoods: The Hill District and Homewood and Manchester.  “Who?” Zany says, conjuring possibilities: LBJ, Sidney Portier. But to Zany, it’s much worse.  

     “Andy Warhol!”  

     Zany counts this as the meanest lie Gig’s ever told. “He was not.”  

     “Yes, he was!” Gig turns up the radio and the announcer confirms it: a crazed woman shot Warhol in his Factory. 

     Aunt Vi comes at Zany with her arms wide, because she understands loss. “Oh, honey.”  Zany bats her hands away. “It’s not true.”  

     Vi backs into Mom’s hoard. “Is he dead?”  

     Gig says: “They don’t know.”  

     Zany can’t stomach the smug look on Gig’s face, as if she holds Andy’s life or death between her teeth. Zany wants to slap that look off, so she does.  

     Gig screams.  

     “What the hell’s going on in there?” Mom calls.  

     “Zany hit me!” Gig says at the very moment Aunt Vi says: “Andy Warhol’s been shot!”  “No he wasn’t!” Zany says again, wanting to slap them both.  

     Mom and Dad hustle inside where Gig cups her reddening cheek and bawls louder.  “It’s nothing,” Mom says at the sight of her sniveling daughter, but Dad enfolds Gig in his arms. “There, there.”  

     “Don’t coddle that child,” says Mom, and for once Zany agrees.  

     “Now, Mae.” Dad cups the back of Gig’s head and there’s a different look on her face.  Triumph, maybe.  

     Pounding on the shared duplex wall, Evie Krebbs, who never could shush that wailing baby. “Andy Warhol’s been shot!” she calls to them. “Did you all hear?”  

     “We heard,” Mom answers as the baby cries louder, and so does Gig, who won’t be upstaged. Mom says: “That’s the price of fame I guess.”  

     “Being shot?” says Aunt Vi.  

     “Put yourself in the public eye and anything’s liable to happen. Lotta kooks in this world.” 

     The neighbor kids’ chant sounds in Zany’s head: Your mother’s a hobo.  

     “I’d rather be shot than a hobo,” says Zany.  

     Mom’s head snaps back. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”  

     Zany doesn’t fully know what she means, or maybe she does.  

     Dad says, “Turn up the radio and see if he’s dead.”  

     Zany doesn’t want to know the answer, and to keep him alive she runs to the basement where Andy will always be a sickly boy developing film. Never mind Lester in his bed sending smoke rings up to the floor joists. Never mind her family still jabbering overhead. 

     Zany dashes to her cardboard box and closes the door, her body shaking, but not from any disease. Andy can’t be dead. He just can’t, because if he is Zany will never make it to New York. Will never pound on his Factory door. She will never be famous enough for someone to shoot.  

     She doesn’t know she’s sobbing until Lester’s voice drifts over. “Zany?”  

     It’s hard to speak with that hand gripping her throat and her father overhead still babbling: “Turn it up, Gig.” All Zany eeks out is a sob.  

     Lester’s skinny voice slips through that slit in her door. “Zany?”  

     The grip loosens and Zany puts her eye to the peephole.  

     There he is, Lester, on his narrow cot in the windowless cellar where he now lives. He slides his hand into his waistband and he tilts his head toward her. “Are you watching?”  Zany’s breathing settles, and the overhead voices disappear taking with them the possibility of Andy’s death. Her eyes widens so she can take it all in, the violent strokes, his contorting face, because she won’t look away from Lester’s pain, or hers.  Finally, she answers him: “Yes.”