Things to Come and Go

Bette Howland

• Publisher: A Public Space Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780998267562, 9780998267531
• eBook ISBN: 9781736370933
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Femmes dans la fiction

From the acclaimed author of Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage and the memoir W-3, a trio of novellas about three women's bold exploration of the desire for belonging as it comes into conflict with the fulfillment of our individual selves. With an introduction by Rumaan Alam.

Over the past several years, A Public Space has brought the work of Bette Howland back into print. First published in 1983, Things to Come and Go is her final book, and a showcase of her stunning talent—the razor-sharp observations, the elusive narrators, the language at once experimental and classical.

Nearly forty years later, it's writing that "feel[s] revelatory and imperative to the work we might all be trying to make next" (Lynn Steger Strong).

BIRDS OF A FEATHER

My father’s family look alike; they all take after their mother’s side. Abarbanel was her maiden name, and that’s what my mother calls them to this day—“the big brassy yak-yakking Abarbanels.” They have a creaturely resemblance. Large swarthy virilely pockmarked men; beard-blued cheeks, Persian hair, palpable noses. (That goes for Aunt Honey too; I guess that’s why she never married.) My grandfather must have wondered what he was doing in their midst. I know I did. Not in so many words; but even a child could see that the old man was not of the same make; and at our long noisy family dinners—all talking at once, shouting over the rest, getting louder and louder, like people carrying on in a foreign language—he used to fall asleep at the table; his head laid to the wine-stained cloth, his two hands under his cheek.

Not a bristle stirred in his mustache.

I would be lying if I said I remembered him well, but that much for sure; he had a mustache. A bundle of yellow straw on his lip. A bale; a broom. It tickled and scratched, it nibbled my cheek. What a fuss I put up when I had to kiss him, turning my face this way and that. His brows were of the same coarse stuff, but white, and so thick his eyes just glimmered.

For the rest, I seem to recall someone slight and stooping, his baldness patched by his satin skullcap. He never had much to say for himself. Except when he sneezed. Then he got violent:

Got-choo! Got-you!

That was a surprise. So he sneezed in English. I kept waiting for him to say something more; something else that I could understand. But he never did.

My grandfather’s name—our family name—was one of those Russian mouthfuls; you’d probably have a hard time pronouncing it, anyhow. In the old country (that would be Odessa, on the Black Sea; I thought of it as really black, rolling black, like Honey’s eyes) he had carried on the family trade—the manufacture of paint, putty, and varnish. Whatever it was they put in the stuff in those days, it sure must have been strong; the tips of his fingers were pink and shiny. Not that anyone knew or cared, until one time when he had to make application for some kind of license. Then lo and behold: my grandfather had no fingerprints.

This was Chicago, as I should have mentioned by now; and what’s more, Prohibition. So you know what that means. Mobsters. Machine guns. Rat-a-tat-tat. The cops (I suppose it was; this happened long before I was born) decided to have some fun with him; teasing the old man, threatening to lock him up and throw away the key. The nerve of these greenhorns! Coming over here without their fingerprints. They had him believing he had done something wrong, broken the law—a hoodlum, a gangster, worse than Al Capone. Guilty of the crime of No Fingerprints.

He was scared they were going to send him back where he came from.

My grandfather had had another family there. That first wife went off her head during a pogrom, smothered the children and herself. A son survived. The old man left him behind when he came to America—because what was a widower to do, with a small child on his hands?—meaning to send for the boy when he got settled. But other things happened instead; they lost touch. No one else in the family ever so much as laid eyes on this eldest son, their own half brother, until a couple of years after the war. Aunt Flor’s husband (that was the second one, the one they say made a killing on the black market) pulled some strings and brought him over. And by then the old man was dead.

Sometimes, when I had been put to bed on a heap of rough coats, listening to those voices at the table—still going at it (only I could never make out what the shouting was all about, or if the loudness was anger or laughter)—I would wake up in Honey’s room. What wonderful things could happen! So I had been carried off in my sleep, and didn’t even know it.

There would be the full-blown cabbage-rose wallpaper; the high white bed; the sheer curtains surging at the windows—the light itself battering its way in; and Honey’s large underwear all over the quilt and posts. Slips, stockings, bloomers, brassieres; puffed and puckered, as if with her flesh.

And there, right next to me, on a pile of pillows, would be Honey’s head, her smudge-black hair. Her great big nose, in profile; her trimmed eyelid; the twirl of a spit curl taped to her cheek.

I had to blink; so surprised I could hear my own eyes pop open.

And with that, quick as a wink, Honey would roll one gleaming globe of an eye at me, grinning at me sidewise and making a clicking noise in her cheek.

All the Abarbanels were cheek-clickers and cheek-pinchers. But Honey mostly clicked. I could see the hidden gold in her teeth.

Hiya, kiddo. (That was the way she talked.) How’s my little bright-eyes, huh? My besty little Esti? (That was my name.) Tee Gee. Another beautiful day. (Honey never spoke the name of the Lord; she used initials.)

As if she was the one who had waked up first; as if the whole time she had been dying for me to wake up too, lying in wait, only pretending to be asleep—I thought grownups only pretended to sleep—just so she could spring her surprise on me. She put her legs over the side of the bed, and the springs rose with her.

I must have been a sourpuss. That’s what I think. People were forever teasing me, making faces, popping eyes and poking out chins. It was a long time before I caught on; they were imitating me staring at them.

On the dressing table with the tipping mirror I sniffed her powder boxes and cold-cream jars and little blue bottles of Evening in Paris; they came from the dime store. That’s what everyone gave Honey for presents, the same way they gave me puzzles and games. When I got old enough to save money, that’s what I got for her too. She showed me a pin in the shape of a battleship, set with white beads, and held it up so the light could shine through. It read (she said): Remember Pearl Harbor.

An upright piano stood in the dining room, and a bench so stuffed with sheet music you had to sit on it to shut it. When the sisters, Honey and Flor, sidled up—side by side—it shut. You bet. Flor played; Honey turned the pages. They sang Yiddish songs in quavering voices, and they sang The Latest; their shoulders rocking, Flor pumping pedals.

Flor was big, like all the Abarbanels, but her skin was smooth and dead white—scalp white—white as the part that drove up the middle of her wiry black hair. Her brows grew together over her nose; it plunged between them, straight to the hilt, her eyes on either side wide and divided.

Hard red nails clacked the keys.

O the stars at night

Are big and bright

(Clap clap clap clap)

Deep in the heaaart of Texxx-asss

O the prai-ree moon

Is like per-fume

(Clap clap clap clap)

Deep in the heart of Tex-as.

Honey cracked her gum; she flashed her fillings. Her eyes flashed too. And something in the way she tossed her head, slapping the music sheets—something rich in her throat and keen in her glance—made me fear she was fighting back tears.

My father had a falling out with the rest of his family, and we didn’t go to that house anymore. Flor’s husband—that was the first one, the dentist; he was away in the war—had set up an office at the front of the flat. The padded chair, the drooling sink, the name in decal letters backwards on the window; all was gloomy with preservation. And the living room as well: Venetian blinds drawn to keep carpets from fading; bedsheets protecting sofas and chairs; knickknacks on shelves safe behind glass. A pair of large dolls sat propped on cushions, in dusty velvet dresses and brittle nests of wigs: doll-lashes rigid, doll-gazes unblinking.

Once, when my mother was dragging me along, shopping on Twelfth Street, she gave my arm a yank; we stopped short. She had seen them coming. —The mother, the two daughters, their pocketbooks over their arms. The old woman—my grandmother —had all the Abarbanel characteristics in their original, proudest, most forceful form. The coarse powerful nose; the forbidding scrolls of the nostrils; two great slabs of breasts slung to her belt. Their slope was formidable. All her authority seemed vested in them.

Her head had turned iron gray, but her brows and her moles were still black-haired.

They looked at us and we looked at them and then my grandmother nudged Flor on one side of her, and Honey on the other, and all three turned right about—arms linking, purses swinging. If you think there was a family resemblance from the front, I wish you could have seen them, just then, from the back. You couldn’t tell them apart. The three sets of hips bolstered their skirts like the sofas under the bedsheets. I wondered if they were lifting and sticking out their behinds at us.

What makes you think they weren’t? my mother said. I wouldn’t put it past them. What else can you expect? From a bunch of Abarbanels?

All this time, my grandfather had never stopped coming to our house. He was a house painter; my father often helped him out. I liked to watch them slicing up curly strips of wallpaper, smoothing on clear sweet-smelling paste. (It tasted sweet too.) I don’t need to tell you what the brushes reminded me of. The old man had never talked before and he didn’t start now; but there he would be, in our kitchen, elbows on the table, stirring his tea with a long tinkling spoon. Lemon swirled in the glass; yellow motes; sedimented sunlight. He smoked the cigarettes he rolled for himself with a flick and a lick—it was the tobacco that made his mustache straw color—the twisted ends lighting up in a blaze.

I was sure his mustache was going to catch fire, go up in smoke. Maybe it didn’t; but his eyebrows did.

One day I happened to look up and see Uncle Reuben standing on our front porch, putting something into the mailbox. It was summer; the screen was on the hook. I went and peered out.

Reuben was the baby of the family; he had just been called up for the army. He was in uniform. Under the button flaps of his cardboard khaki shirt pockets he had something like breasts, and his face was still lumpy and purplish with acne.

He brought it close and spoke through the screen.

Tell my brother Sammy his father died, will you? Reuben said—and turned and ran down the stairs. They sounded as if he was trampling on them.

At the bottom he stopped and looked back.

Esti? Hey, Esti?

He waited. I kept looking. He shook his head.

Aw, forget it, Reuben said.

The raised lid of the box was padded in puff...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Birds of a Feather
• The Old Wheeze
• The Life You Gave Me
• About the Author