Some of Her Friends That Year

Excerpt

Some of Her Friends That Year

I.
One wrote a bestseller. She had no husband-no lover-until the book did so well that hundreds of men wrote her love letters with offers of marriage. She met one man in Paris, one in Costa Rica. Neither was that engaging, but she felt such confidence that it seemed she might be able to transform one with less work than it had taken to write the book.

II.
One went to her mother's sixtieth high school reunion in lieu of her mother, who was too ill to attend. There were few survivors, but a couple nearing one hundred, who'd been her mother's teachers, were in attendance. They still took walks together and traveled when they could. The woman wore braids wrapped around her head-to keep her looking young, she said.

III.
One friend's children all moved back: one married with a husband, and one single. Her father-in-law moved in after his wife passed away. Every room in the house became a bedroom. The bathtub in front contained her daughter's turtles. The cleaning service left a note. "Should we clean them too?" Raccoons lived under the floor of her wine cellar. They brought their babies to her glass dining room door every night at 9 p.m. Having no more available bedrooms, she was slow to respond when her own mother got sick that summer. There's always the hammock on the patio, the son-in-law suggested.

IV.
One took classes in Chinese cooking, in wild plants of the West, and in fiction. She called with questions like, "Who does good epiphanies?" She suggested her friend read Joyce. "Someone not quite so good," her friend replied. "I'm new to this, you know."

V.
One of her friends got nominated for in Oscar is short subjects. She got to choose from a fleet of dresses reserved for Oscar nominees. "I'll need two to fit me," she said, until a designer, hearing of her trouble, called to give her a long velvet gown. Everyone waited and wondered if they'd be thanked in her acceptance speech, but she didn't win.

VI.
One of her friends canceled her vacation to give her cat, now sixteen, two shots of insulin a day, and chemotherapy when he slept. She found a baby bird and wrapped him in a winter watch cap and fed him with a dropper, but he died a few days later.

VII.
One left her husband of many years after finding him snorting cocaine with a junior partner in his firm. She had known about his habit for a long time but somehow seeing him engaged in the process created a vividness she couldn't endure.

VIII.
One took her partner on a train ride to Vancouver as soon as the school year let out. Before getting her degrees and becoming a professor, she'd been a truck driver and driven big rigs in the Pacific Northwest. It was the first good vacation they'd taken in twenty years. Before finding this woman, she'd been married to a "small man with a large head." The train was filled with geriatric travelers, who wouldn't let the other passengers open a window. It felt like the train from Kosovo.

IX.
One took in her niece after her husband's sister was murdered in Greece by a famous lawyer who didn't want to pay child support. Her sons fought about having to share a bedroom but soon made peace with each other.

X.
One's daughter finished college and went to Ecuador, where her friend's friend got kidnapped by revolutionaries. Her parents went to Ecuador to bring her home but she refused to leave.

XI.
One friend's cancer came back, and though she was still fighting, things didn't look good. "I hoped to get thin from this," her friend told her when they went to a sale at a Flax outlet. She bought a pretty patterned scarf. They spent the afternoon experimenting with turban designs. "We need an architect," her friend said, "or a Sufi."

XII.
One had her first baby at forty-nine, a beautiful round-faced creature named Nellie. "I got in just under the wire," her friend said as she hummed and nursed her miracle baby.

XIII.
Her teenage daughter stayed depressed that year, and she thought of ways to help her. She got her a flute, new watercolors, a kitten, a telescope.
"Will I ever feel better?" her daughter asked, repeating the question throughout the day like someone tossing out crumbs to mark a trail.

"Look at the sky," the mother said, pointing to the cloudless blue.

"We've lost the ozone layer."

"Look at those leaves," the mother said of the Japanese maple shaking in the wind.

"They look like blood."

"How can I cheer you up?"

"Why do you think you can make me happy?"

"Why do I write if not to make people happy?" the mother asked.

"I don't read your stories."

"Maybe if you did, you'd be happier."

"You write about old people with pathetic lives. How could that help me?"

"I need to think I can make her happy," she told her friends. She wanted to tell her daughter that she knew how everyone felt, that their lives were somehow hers, her daughter's life even more, that she wasn't happy as long as someone else was suffering. But then she sounded like Jesus or some martyr. Her daughter wouldn't fall for it, but that was how the mother felt.

Bop

The machine would not cooperate. It photographed his original, but when Oleg looked in the metal pan, the duplicate was zebra-striped and wordless. Three more times he inserted the grocery ad. He got back stripes leaning toward each other and crossing in the middle like insane skate blades.

"Please, if you will."

It was obvious that the woman wasn't interested in her job. You could tell by the way she handled the paper. Her nails tore the pleasant green wrapping that reminded him of larger American money. Her eyes never met the machine that perhaps needed ink, fluid, straightening, or encouragement. Her behavior wouldn't be tolerated if he ran the place.

"Can I ask you something?" she asked.

"It is free country. One may ask what one wishes."
"You come here every day with something different. I know I'm not supposed to look, but here you are again xeroxing garbage and your machine is acting up. Why do you make me so busy?"

"Please, I will tell you. The duplication of materials is of great interest to me. Since I came to this country, for three years now, I make copies of everything, If I could, I would copy my hair, my clothing, my food, and my bowels."

She had walked away. He left the office carrying the perfect finished copies of the grocery ads. These went into the large books stamped Souvenirs purchased from Woolworth's. He had filled fourteen already.

Now he was back in his small apartment, whose attitude toward America was one of total acceptance. Plastic-molded coral and gold-flecked seats blended with torn leather. A portrait of a sailboat edged up to a Degas dancer. A Cubs schedule followed. Family photos marched along in the parade. A wall clock resembling an owl's face kept the beat. And leading the line was a caricature that a street artist had done at a fair. Since he already thought he resembled a red-haired Pinocchio, the artist didn't need to use much imagination. His eyes were blue points, his mouth a slit, his ears question marks, and his nose pointed aggressively, like a blind man's white cane. His hair was unruly. He was never going to get on a beauty pageant, but maybe his odd array of features would not be discouraged on the quiz shows he loved to watch.

"Please," he'd say to the checkout girl, "what city has the highest ratio of pets to people?" If she didn't know it was Los Angeles, he'd tell her right out. But he wouldn't embarrass her. He'd say it gently, as if he were providing her with a blessing. One checkout woman, whose badge read Marta, seemed especially eager to see him on market days. "There's Mr. Know-It-All," she remarked to her bag boy. They both laughed. Americans were very pleasant.

Upstairs the jesters were at it again. That's not what they were called, but he could never remember the name for what they were. How could two men practicing the art of silence make so much noise? Was it the rope pull or the human washing machine they were doing? Were they sizzling down to the floor like angry bacon, or were they sentimental clowns on an invisible tightrope? He hated what they did. It reminded him of loneliness, of which he already had enough evidence. He had taken to tapping the ceiling with a broom lately. The jesters had taken to giving him free tickets to their performances.
He went to the kitchen, poured lukewarm tea into a Star Wars glass, and went back to the letter he'd left that morning. "I am sorry to say," he continued, "that there is proliferation of bad ideas here. It reminds one, if you please, of the duplication industry. For a nickel, which is very small, a man can copy anything, including his ears. However, who is it that needs four ears? The same with ideas. Everyone in America has the opinions. I read a paper and there is opinion on where dogs should leave their excrement, there is opinion on homosexuals adopting infants, there is opinion on facial hair and robins. There is opinion on cooking cabbage without odor. A child even has opinions. He thinks the governor is fat. Here is large black cat in ad choosing one cat food. If you please, why is every goddamned thing discussed in America?"

He would leave the "goddamned" out when he sent it to the "Personal View" column of the paper. If it was printed, which it wouldn't be with cursing, he'd receive five hundred dollars. But for now it exhilarated him to curse. He pounded the table for emphasis. The red Formica was unresponsive.

He worked every night from nine until five in the morning. His job was to sit at a switchboard that was hooked into store alarms. If an alarm rang, his switchboard would wail, and he would call the police, giving them a code, and call the store owner with the news. In his eleven months of employment, there'd been only twenty-seven alarms, and most of those were due to faulty wiring. He was able to spend most of his time sleeping, just as Mr. Kaplan had suggested upon hiring him. Mr. Kaplan had been insanely happy to give him a job. Just sixty years ago, Mr. Kaplan's own father had come over here, untrained, illiterate, and if it weren't for a landsman, he would have perished. Mr. Kaplan got very emotional then and swiped at his eyes with a big hankie and hugged Oleg Lum stiffly and told him, "Welcome, brother." Oleg thought Kaplan might burst into song, an American spiritual. Although his job paid minimum wage, he had his days free to do as he wished. Usually he wished to go to the library.

The influx of Russian immigrants to the Rogers Park area had altered its environment. Russian shoemakers hung shingles on every block. Several Russian delicatessens displayed gleaming samovars next to pickled fish in windows, and the library had begun to carry a good amount of Russian language books but mostly the classics. He had already read those books in Russian, which he had once taught. Now he wanted to read American books rich in history: Sacco and Vanzetti, Sally Rand, Nat Turner, and Howard Hughes. And when he flashed his neat green library card at the girl, who even in summer required a sweater, she always smiled at him. Maybe she, like Mr. Kaplan, assumed he was uneducated, a pretender to the American shelves. She never spoke, but once when he'd asked for a book on the process of photocopying, she had looked worried, as if her patron might be a spy.

He liked sitting at the blonde wooden tables with the other patrons. Though protocol barred speech, there was good spirit to share in silent reading. He liked watching the old men who moved their lips as they read. Maybe their false teeth read words differently, trying to trick them. And children, he noticed, read in the same way. For the last week he'd observed a girl about eleven years old who had been sitting across from him. She always used encyclopedias and took notes. She was plump and had hair that wouldn't cooperate. It deserted its braids and bristled in front like a cactus. Maybe even American plants had opinions, he suddenly thought.
"Have a pen? Mine's outta ink."

"Please, for you to keep." He handed a ballpoint to the girl. Americans were generous, and so he wished to practice in small ways. He kept pens and paper clips and rubber bands and note paper in his pockets for such occasions.

"Thanks," she said and began copying again.
He was rereading the part in The Grapes of Wrath in which the turtle slowly, slowly crosses the road. The passage is marked by adversity, he'd have told a classroom of students. At one point the turtle is intentionally hit by a sadistic driver, yet it survives. In fact, the driver speeds the turtle across the road with the force of his cruelty. Oleg had arrived in America in the same way: the crueler his government had become, the more reason he had to leave. He would write an article entitled "The Cruel Kick," as soon as he had a chance.

"What's your name?" she was asking.
"I am Oleg Lum."
"Nice to meet you, Mr. Glum. I'm Carrie Remm. Where're you from?"

The other people at the table were eyeing them. He suggested with a nod that they move outside. Taking her spiral, she followed.
"I am from Moscow," he said, once outside. "And you?"

"Chicago. I'm ten years old, and my parents are divorced. My mother always looks sad because she had an operation. Now she can't have children, but since she's divorced, I'm not sure it matters that she can't have children. I just think the operation was the last straw. Anyway, I like to get out of the house. She makes me nervous."

"Please, what means last straw?"
"It means curtains, cut, that's it, I've had it."
"And your mother is alone then all the time?"
"Oh, she calls her friends. But she never goes out. When my dad comes to pick me up on Sundays, she looks a little better."

Cars whizzed by, as Lum smoked a cigarette. He liked the bold bull's-eye of Lucky Strikes.

"You would like a cigarette?" He kept an extra pack at all times for his generosity training.

"No thanks. Kids don't smoke here."
"You would like maybe ice cream?"
They walked silently to the Thirty-One Flavors, took a corner booth, and talked all afternoon. They decided on dinner for Saturday night, his night off. On Saturday night Mr. Kaplan's son Denny answered the phones for time and a half. Once when Denny had had a tooth extracted, Oleg had taken his place.

Oleg was worried about Mrs. Remm's grief. Losing one's reproductive ability, he imagined, was tragic for a thirty-four-year-old woman. He might buy her a get-well card, but he didn't know that she was really ill. Maybe a sympathy card was in order, and flowers, but they'd have to wait for Saturday.

"Please, if you may help," he asked a small wizened woman who looked like a lemur he'd seen at the Brookfield Zoo. When one got old, hair and face turned gray together, and fine down started growing everywhere. The woman's cheeks, chin, and ears were furry. She looked as if someone had spun a web over her.
"Yes?"
"If you please, a dozen flowers."

"We have roses, carnations, combos, mixed in-season, zinnias, peonies, Hawaiian, birds-of-paradise, honeymoon bouquets, orchids, the woodsy spray, and dried. Can you be more specific?"

"The woman has lost her reproductive abilities. I wish to supply her with flowers."
"How about roses?"

They cost him fourteen dollars and ninety-five cents, and accompanying them was a card with etched blue hands folded in prayer. Inside, the card read, "With extreme sympathy upon your loss." He signed it Oleg, hoping for the intimacy of first names. No one called him Oleg anymore, except an old friend from Moscow he saw now and then at The Washing Well. Sometimes it was hard to remember that Oleg was his name. "In extreme sympathy," he repeated, liking especially how the word extreme looked in italics. They were a marvelous invention. He hoped for an entire evening of wavy italic emotion. When he caught his reflection in shop windows, his nose appeared optimistically upturned, and the bouquet he held, wrapped in paper depicting a trellis of ivy and roses, waved like a banner.

"Get the door," he heard through the wood after he'd been buzzed into Claire Remm's apartment-building hallway. Claire was a lovely name. It reminded him of water.

When Carrie opened the door, she appeared cross. "You're on time. I thought you were the pizza. I was hoping it'd come first."

"I am not pizza. However, it is good to be here." He hoped she wouldn't assume the flowers were for her. He hid them behind his back. Since she didn't ask what he was holding, he knew she understood.
"Mom, it's Mr. Glum."

"Who?" She sounded confused, but her voice was melodic, a song, a tribute.

"My friend, Mr. Glum."

Never, he thought, had so much natural beauty been wasted on such a negligent caretaker. Not on the American side of Niagara Falls, not in those Tennessee caves where stalagmites and stalactites are overwhelmed by tepees and imitation Indian blankets. Claire Remm had blue eyes, shiny black hair one usually saw on Japanese women, and a complexion somewhere in the range of infant pink. She wore furry slippers, blue jeans, a sweatshirt that said speedwagon, and no makeup. Her hair wasn't combed but stuck over one ear as if it had been glued there. Her eyes looked dried up, like African drinking holes.

"For you, Mrs. Remm, with thanks." Oleg extended the flowers in a shaky hand.

"Who are you?" she asked, peering over the flowers. She had the look of someone who doesn't care she's being observed, a look he'd seen on sleepers and drunks.

"I am Oleg Lum, friend of Carrie."
"I thought . . . Well, I'm sorry, Mr. Lum. I thought Carrie had invited a child."

"It is no problem. I eat very little. Like a child." He smiled so hard he thought his face might crumble.
"You don't understand, Mr. Lum. I've ordered a pizza. I assumed you two would eat and watch tv while I read a book." Her thin neck wobbled.
"The plans can exist. And may I ask, what book is engaging you?"

"Pride and Prejudice. I haven't read it since college."
"Is tale of civil rights or of women's movement?"
Claire laughed and called Carrie. "Why didn't you explain, Care?" Carrie shrugged her shoulders and left the room again.

He pointed the flowers in Claire's direction, and she finally took them. "Please," he said, "if problem, I can exit."

"No, Mr. Lum. The pizza should arrive soon. Would you like a beer?" She had put the flowers on a silver radiator.
"May we plant the flowers?" Oleg asked.

"Oh," she said and told Carrie to get a vase and water. Lum wasn't certain, but he thought maybe she was smiling ever so slightly like someone who is trying not to laugh at a joke.

While Carrie and Claire sat on the couch, Lum sat in an oversized tan corduroy chair that made him feel fat. He assumed that the chair was Mr. Remm's and that Mr. Remm was a large man with bristly hair like Carrie's. He wondered if it made Carrie sad that he was sitting in her father's chair. He would have asked, but Claire and Carrie were watching Dance Fever. They concentrated on it like scholars at the Moscow Institute of Technology.

"Is good for fashion education."
"You bet," Carrie assured him. Claire watched the television and absentmindedly dissected the pizza, which sat in the middle of the floor. Carrie had placed the roses next to the pizza in a green vase that hid their stems. He wondered whether Claire might reach for pizza and come up with a rose. The room appeared freshly painted, meaning that everything had been taken down and the walls whitewashed. No decorations had been rehung where picture hooks and curtain rods waited. It looked as if a civilization had perished there. The place made him feel foolish. It was not the first American home he'd visited. Mrs. Kaplan's was, with its plastic-covered everything and miniature dog statues and candelabra. But hers could have been the aberration. Suppose Americans were more like Danes in character than he'd imagined: melancholic, spare, and joyless.
During a commercial he spoke. "Mrs. Remm, your daughter is very clever girl and hard worker at library. She tells me about you. She is sorry for you."
"She is?" The voice was shrill, a verbal grimace.
"She is sad that you are not able, may I say, to reproduce."

"Carrie, why did you tell him that?" The entire room vibrated with new energy. He imagined lamps crashing to the floor. Carrie shrugged her nonchalant shoulders.
"I am sorry, Mrs. Remm, to cause this trouble. She is loving you and wanting to be of help."

Now Claire was smiling and Carrie exhaling. It couldn't have been his explanation. Some signals, he imagined, like those baseball coaches use to coax on their runners, must have been exchanged in the blink of an eye. The blink must have been invented for such a purpose. What had happened in the invisible moment was a détente. Finally Carrie spoke.

"Mom, he's okay to tell things to. Who do you think he knows?"

Lum smiled. He knew he'd been insulted, but the insult was harmless. Besides, it had made Claire smile again.
"Mr. Lum," she began, "I expected a little Russian boy. You know. Pointy ears. Fat cheeks. Shorts. Sandals. Instead, you walk in knowing everything about me, bringing me flowers. I guess I must be very glum!"
They all laughed. It was a moment of joy, one he'd recall along with his first erection and leaving Russia. A triptych of pleasure. Claire kept laughing even after he and Carrie had finished. Quacking and quacking like a beautiful blue-eyed duck until she said, "I haven't read the card. Let's read the card." She opened it with high drama and stared at Oleg's hopeful smile. More signals were exchanged with Carrie, who, after reading the card aloud, stared at him too. Mother and daughter then slapped hands palm to palm, and Claire suggested that they all take a walk.

"Better yet," Oleg said, "a trick is up the sleeve. I have procured tickets for an event of pantomime to begin in twenty minutes. We should begin our arrival now."
Claire excused herself. He and Carrie stood in the doorway at nervous attention. He could look beyond Carrie and see down the hallway to the roses opening in the vase next to the pizza cardboard. "Let's go," Claire was saying as she joined them, "or we'll be late." She was dressed as an Indian princess.

Dear Readers of Chicago:

It strikes me as new American that much is made of largeness in your country. Examine, if you please, the Mount Rushmore. Here are the great stone faces of the profound leaders of men. But here is a man also. He is cleaning the stone faces. Up the nostril of Abraham Lincoln, freer of slaves, the cleaner climbs, as a fly, without notice. Or, let us say, a family on vacation takes his photo. There is the great stone Lincoln. There is the tiny man with huge brush for nostril cleaning. Thus is humor because the size of man is made small by large design of beauty.

In America I hear many jokes. Some are about women whose husbands cannot meet their desires, which are too large. In others, several members of Polish nation are trying to accomplish small goal, the removing of light bulb. Their effort is too large for smallness of task.
On a certain Sunday I was driving with American acquaintance down the Madison Street. My American said, "You'll never believe what we waste our money on here," and it is true that in Soviet Union largeness is always minor premise of grandeur. There are large monuments to workers, huge squares to fill with people cheering for politics, heads of Lenin the size of cathedrals, and many women with large breasts, who are called stately by Russian men. Now on American Sunday I look to right, and there stands a huge bat of metal. It stands, perhaps, fifty feet tall like apartment building. I say to my friend, "The baseball is grand American entertainment. The baseball is your Lenin."
"No," says American friend, "the bat is joke about wasting money. It has nothing to do with baseball."
The bat is then humorous. I believe words of my friend, who is businessman. In poor or undemocratic countries there is no humorous public art. History is the only public art. The huge stone pyramids are not meant as joke. In America the bat of abundance is cynic's joke. Same cynic points at huge genitals of corpse. He makes public monument to frozen bat. The lover of art points to the living genitals or makes the beautiful statue like Michelangelo's David.

As the huge Gulliver was tied down by the little citizens for possible harm done, so the public shows the disdain for size, even with its power. Thus is opposite, humor from largeness. The bully is, yes, strong, but he is also fool. He is laborer digging in dirt. His brain is mushroom producing no truths. Largeness is victory and also defeat. To largeness we prostrate ourselves and then up our sleeves die laughing.

Thank you,
Oleg Lum

Since it was Sunday and Carrie would be away, he thought of calling Claire and arranging a private visit. The evening before had been a success, the pantomimists having done a version of Antony and Cleopatra in which the larger, bearded Cleopatra swooned into the compact Antony's arms. Carrie quacked like her mother. Claire cried when she was happy. Both mother and daughter had walked him home, kissed him good night, and said they'd treat him to lunch on Monday.

If he called her now, the spell might be broken. She'd infer the obscene length of his nose in his altered phone voice. She'd laugh at his misuse of articles. He'd not flirt with ruin. The beach beckoned with its Sunday collage of summer bodies.

"What is your name, little boy?" Lum asked the child who sat next to his towel squeezing sand between his toes. He wore a seersucker sunsuit and a bulging diaper. His cheeks were fat, but he was not tan. In fact, he was pale and resembled Nikita Khrushchev with his spikes of just emerging white-blonde hair. He was no older than a year and a half, though Lum might be wrong, having had no experience with babies.
"Do you know your name?" Lum asked again. The sun was behind them, and he felt his skin radiating heat. He'd fallen asleep in the afternoon, and, judging by the sun's angle, he'd slept two or three hours. It was evening. People were beginning to pack up for the day. The lifeguard, who had made a white triangle of cream on his nose, looked bored. Not enough people were swimming, Lum observed, much less drowning, to give his life definition.

Lum offered the child a piece of banana, which he greedily accepted. He mashed it in his hand and pressed pieces slowly into his mouth.

"Bop," said the boy.
"Pleased to meet you. I am Oleg Lum." The child looked at Oleg's extended hand.

"Of course, babies do not understand the handshake," he explained. "Tell me, little Bop, is your mama here?"
Bop stood on tiptoe in the sand, wobbled, and tumbled to Lum's towel. A cascade of sand followed him.
Lum pointed at a young couple loading cans of Coke into a cooler. "Do you know these people, little Bop?"
Bop ignored all questions, sharing Lum's blanket, kicking his feet in the air, and humming, "Gee-dah, Gee-dah."

After an hour of Bop's company, Oleg thought of asking the lifeguard about a lost-and-found service. He was afraid, though, that the lifeguard would call the police and scare the boy, who looked at Lum with such peaceful eyes, who joyously accepted crackers, and who laughed at the seagulls' w-shaped assaults, at bugs he found in the sand, and at Oleg cooing, "little Bop, little Bop."

Bop had fallen asleep at the edge of Lum's towel, sucking the corner he held in his fist. Oleg folded another triangle over his back to protect it from the waning sun.

When the lifeguard was tying up his boat and the sun had changed to a forgiving twilight, in which couples twisted together on blankets or faced each other with their legs folded Indian-style to share a joint, Oleg realized there were no families left to step forward and claim Bop. It was clear in this instant that he would either have to call the authorities, men whose hands shot lead at robbers, who poked sticks into kidneys, or keep the child with him. The law would not recommend that decision, he was sure, but parents who'd forgotten a child at the beach, in the way he might leave an umbrella on a bench, weren't worthy of a search.
He'd carry the child home with him. In the morning he'd read the paper, hoping for news. And if news didn't materialize, there was Claire waiting, arms open, bereft of the ability to reproduce. She had said the night before, admiring Carrie's impressions of the mimes, that she'd have liked to have had one more child, a son. Then she'd wrinkled her nose, frowned, smiled, looked away, asked for a cigarette, and shrugged. Every emotion could be observed as it changed direction like a sailboat wobbling to shore in cross winds. She'd thank him for the child. It was clear the police weren't needed.
The lifeguard had left the beach, surrendering the safety of its inhabitants to Oleg. He'd not disappoint the lifeguard.

He put his book and wallet and keys in his back pockets, slid into his sandals, gathered the child up in his towel, and began walking, Bop snoring soundly in his arms.

He'd never thought of having a child himself. He had spent his years getting out of Russia, while other men searched for lovers or wives. Now, diapering the boy with the clean supplies he had bought at midnight last night when the need presented itself, it seemed he had never done anything more natural. Oleg soothed Bop's rash with Vaseline, powdered his plump half-moons, and watched in awe as Bop cooed and pulled his pink penis, doubling over it, snail-like, and curling around his softer part. At least the parents had fed the poor child and not in any way hurt him. He was mottled pink, plump, and clean in all places but the creases, which were easy to overlook even if one was diligent.
The seersucker sunsuit was drying in the washroom. The child had eaten crackers, cheese, a peach, and milk already. Bop pronounced "milk," "shoe," "dog," and "bird."

Oleg pronounced, "Little Bop is very clever." Bop pointed at Oleg, wordless. The morning passed quickly.
Walking to Claire's, he hoped that Bop would not soil himself on Oleg's new shirt. He had even given Bop a bath for the occasion and combed his sparse hair so it stood in neat little rows, like toy farm crops. He wanted to meet Claire upstairs with the child rather than on the street, where her reaction might be too private for display. Suppose she thanked him with tears or fell into his arms, a crest of emotion filling her chest. Suppose she suggested marriage on the spot, Oleg Lum the father of little Bop, she the mother, Carrie the big sister, a home on a quiet street, maybe a dog, lots of American television to cool his rapid-fire brain. He carried Bop, who mostly smiled. Oleg smiled too. It might be his wedding day.

"Just a minute," he heard through the door. As he'd hoped, Claire answered. But she didn't meet him with sobs or whispers of praise.
"What, Oleg!"

"Is boy I found at beach. Is he not handsome?"
"You found him at the beach? Didn't he have parents?"
"Parents could not be located. I wait until beach closes and only drug takers remain. Then I take him home."
"He spent the night with you? You didn't call the police?"

"I do not want government thug with stick in belt to take child and frighten him. I want you to take him."
"Me, Oleg?"

Lum looked hopeful. Bop offered Claire a sucked-on cracker.

"Oleg, let's sit down." They walked into the front room. Carrie was not home. Bop sat on the floor and busied himself by dismembering a magazine. "I know you mean well, Oleg, but laws are strict. If a child is lost, he must be given to the authorities. They'll find his parents."
"Parents dump child on beach like trash. They leave him there. Why should such parents have themselves found?"

"It's true, Oleg, but there are laws. I wouldn't be surprised if his damned Easter picture weren't being flashed on every newscast."

"Is no damned flashing. I watch last night and news today."

"Oleg," Claire continued, "you could be considered a criminal."

"Is no crime to help little Bop and to hope that you will also help."

"How do you know his name?"

"I ask him, 'Baby, what is your name?' He says, 'Bop."'
"Oleg, Bop isn't an American name. Bop isn't any kind of name. Babies make sounds."

"Bop is not name. Parents are not caring. Police are not called. What should I do? Take baby back to beach? Leave him in rowboat like Moses?"

"No, Oleg. I'll call the police. They'll come for him and find his parents or relatives. You were very kind to care for him. Bop is lucky to have found you, Oleg." She kissed the crown of his head.

"Please, before police, let us sit together and watch Bop."

Claire sat down next to him and took his hand. Bop was pretending to water some violets with an empty watering can. Then he sat down opposite Oleg and insisted, plainly, on milk. Claire got a small glass and offered it to Bop.

"He is needing help," Oleg suggested and held the glass for him.

They sat hand in hand for an hour, Oleg enjoying the most mundane fantasy. They were at an American pediatrician's, taking their child for a checkup. She was the bride he'd met in college, and she still wore her modest wedding ring, though he'd have liked to have been more extravagant. She didn't have to talk, his wife of many years, just sit and admire their little son.
"Police are not needing to be called."

"I'll call them now, Oleg. I'll explain. You go home, and I'll phone you after they've left."

Oleg felt large tears forming under his lids. He watched Bop shredding the interior-design magazine. The blurry room lost its sofa, its draperies, its rug. Everything was in pieces. This was not to be his wedding day.

Dear Personal View:

Everything in America gets lost, sometimes stolen. I lose my umbrella on el train. It is never returned. Meanwhile, baby is left on beach to weather, danger, criminals, drug takers, God knows. Parents come to police. Say they are sorry, so baby is returned. Why in America is easier to find lost baby than umbrella costing nine dollars? But I worry most for sandy American baby who is found on beach like walking rubbish heap called Bop. He is dirty, hungry little immigrant. I give him new life visa, which police revoke.

The switchboard was howling. An alarm had gone off at Cusper Motors, but Oleg closed his eyes and listened as the howling continued. He was not going to call the police. Let the thieves do as they wished to Cusper's Fords. The police were worse than criminals. They were blind men, liars, fools. He disconnected the phone, and in the sudden silence, he willed his eyes closed and tried to fall asleep. He would sleep until his shift ended, until all Mr. Cusper's Fords were taken, until the police were running over the whole city in search of car thieves and drug takers and lost babies.