Tropic of Night by Michael Gruber Page B

thought and pulled out his notebook and, stopped for the light on Douglas, he made a note to ask Lydia Herrera if she knew why the thing had a little hole drilled in either end.

FOUR
    It’s peanut butter and jelly for lunch today in the Bert and Ernie lunch box and a banana and four Fig Newtons and orange juice in the little thermos bottle. Luz has discovered her appetite and is looking a little less peaky now, a little less like a starveling sparrow. Her hair is glossy and held by two pink plastic barrettes in the shape of bows. It reaches down to the small of her back. I’ve dressed her in a navy T-shirt, denim shorts, and red sneakers. If this is ever over and we survive, I’ll buy her something pretty, I swear it. I’m wearing my office costume, which today is a shapeless cotton bag printed with vomit-colored picturesque ruins, a degraded Piranesi effect. My legs are bare and stuck into what we used to call health shoes, the precise color and near the shape of horse droppings. It took me a while, but I believe I have found the most unattractive hairstyle for the shape of my face, which is angular, with what my mom always called good cheekbones. I have taken much of the good out of them by choosing blue plastic harlequin eyeglasses, with lenses that tint themselves automatically in sunlight. The lenses tend also to obscure my eyes, which are pale gray-green in color. I try not to look people in the eye in any case, and I don’t imagine there are many at my place of work who know what color they are. The hairdo and glasses make me look ten years older, and quite retired from the sexual sweepstakes. Which I am.
    We leave the apartment, after a brief altercation about bringing her bird book to day care. They frown on personal items at day care, as it causes quarreling, a lesson we should all take from preschool and apply to our lives. Actually, I am pleased that she objects. It is a good sign, she having spent her little life so far as a terrorized punching bag. She loves that bird book, especially the section on the care and feeding of young birds. The mother bird shoves food down the gaping maw of the baby bird. She gets it. The other night I fed her with bits of cookie as we read, and it made her giggle. I’m the mother and you’re the baby. Then she wanted to feed me. I let her and she said her first full sentence, in my presence at least, “Now I’m the mother and you’re the baby,” and we laughed, and I thank Saint Agnes, patroness of young girls, that the grammar engine is still intact in there under my quick kiss.
    She calls me Mother, now, curiously formal, but I don’t mind at all, except she says it “Muffa,” and it sounds to me like the Olo m’fa, which literally means support, or pedestal, and signifies the squat wicker pedestal on which the babandolé places his zanzoul, the ritual container in which magic elements are put to blend and generate power, ashe as they say. Figuratively, it is the world?material reality, the web of nature, upon which God has placed the Olo, and which supports them.
    We leave the bird book and go out into the typically damp south Floridian morning, thickened air hanging in quasi-visible streamers from the canary allamander, the blushing oleander, the crotons colored like plastic toys, and the gray-barked fig with its insidious brown tendrils strung with beads of moisture. We climb into the Buick and I have to run the wipers because the window is covered with dew. I crank it up, and Luz turns the radio on, always set to WTMI, classical music. I dislike drums now, I do not wish to feel the beat. They are playing some passacaglia for violin, Paganini, perhaps. I turn it down. I like Mozart, Haydn, Vivaldi. And Bach best of all, the intricate order and the illusion of rules, the ghosts of protection. Quite drumless.
    It is a short hop down Hibiscus to Providence Congregational Church, which dispenses, besides an unstressful vanilla religion, the best day care in Miami.