Big Wheel
Toni Mirosevich
The door looks like any number of doors you find on this street, unpainted, kicked in, unsecured but secure enough to provide a thin barrier between life on the street—with its junkies and pushers and weekend hipsters looking for a little taste—and life inside, home sweet goddamned home, embroidered needlepoint in a frame, the tiny crosshatch of stitches like the crosshatch of blue marks on an arm. Home, where you might expect to find doilies on an overstuffed chair, china tea cups with hand-painted roses or four-leaf clovers, a family sharing dinner around the dining table, with nothin’ says lovin’ like somethin’ from the oven. Where there’s safety and quiet and peace. A heaven. A haven.
Well, this is not quite like that.
I fit my key in the door, the scratched on, written on, sprayed on door. Without that embroidery this door would be blank like the blank walls of the hotel rooms where they find dead rock stars and Hollywood starlets. I turn my key in the lock, walk inside, enter a narrow passageway, dark and close and damp and get hit with the smell of someone who found relief. I know to hold my breath for soon I’ll be past the smell, will come out of the tunnel into the garbage-strewn yard where no grass grows, just weeds, yellow weeds, brown weeds, weeds with spindly arms, weeds with stickers that scratch and bite. And over there in the weeds, a broken squirt gun, and there a broken tricycle, there a black plastic bag full of who knows what, and never a lawn to lay down on, to stretch out on, dig your toes into the soft grass, pull up a single blade, place it between your lips and taste that sweet taste.
Rising up out of the weeds, looming up, a wooden building, three stories high with a rickety flight of stairs going from the ground floor to the second, from the second floor to the third. An unkempt building, a falling down building, sitting in the middle of the vacant lots, broken down lots, ease-ways with no ease, all the unintended, untended backyards that form a graveyard of old stoves and tires and bags of garbage, where yarrow and stinkweed and dandelions grow and creatures of all kinds roam in the underbrush. A world you’d never see from the street. You’d never know that all this was behind the locked door on the street that people have peed against.
A building like a ship on a sea of trash. And above it all the quilt of night stars.
Three flights up lives a family, a grandmother with two grandchildren she’s raising for her daughter, the crack addict. The last time the mother fell off the wagon she was told to leave and never come back, but sometimes she still comes back. You can find her there in the doorway, on the street, for she’s forgotten her key or eaten it or given it to someone for a toke—here, here’s the key to my house, she says. When her daughters ask their grandmother, “Where did our mother go?” she replies, “Your mother is gone from this world. She just drifted away.”
The girls have a game they play. They take an empty plastic milk jug and throw it down the outside stairs, where it bangs its plastic fall and makes the hollowed out sound an empty milk jug makes on a flight of stairs. “Bombs away!” they shout, then one of them tromps down the stairs, picks up the jug and tromps back up, yelling all the way, “I got it! I got it!”
And then they throw it down again.
On the ground floor lives another family, a single mother with three children, twin toddlers, and a six-year-old girl. You can hear the mother scream at her children all day long. She screams the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. The twins run around half-naked and pee and poop wherever they want. The six year old keeps her clothes on. Sometimes I hear the mother yelling, “Pack your bags! I never want to see your face again!” The girl keeps an overnight kit in a paper bag by the front door. Just in case.
Once, a woman who lives in a nearby storefront decided to intervene. She is French, very French. Though she lives in a hovel, she has style. She wears a little jaunty scarf tied around her neck and I can picture her in Marseille. This Frenchy-looking one came out of her ramshackle, broken down, messed up storefront, walked across the dead lawn that isn’t a lawn and knocked on the mother’s door. In her sweetest voice, she said, “Listen to me. You should change your tune. Sing to your children, instead of scream. Sing!”
On the second floor, sandwiched between the upstairs and the downstairs is where I live. I’m trying to study. In the middle of all this. In the middle.
I am studying Chinese, trying to get each word’s musical inflection right, trying to pronounce “How are you?”—Ni hao ma— but I can’t quite hit the right high note, or the low. The answer to the question is much easier: Hao hao! Good, good!
With all the noise, the upstairs and the downstairs, I can’t hear myself think so I wait until nighttime, for the children to go to bed, for the mother downstairs to stop screaming, for the grandmother upstairs, who is nearly deaf, to turn the TV down.
But at midnight it’s time for Showtime at the Apollo. Grandma turns up the TV full blast. The granddaughters put on roller skates and skate back and forth to the music, back and forth across the uncarpeted floor. The rolling, bowling sound cascades onto my head. Even with all that noise I can still make out who’s on tonight. It’s Al Green singing “Love and Happiness.” Tonight there will be no sleep, there’s never any sleep, and “Tell me,” I want to yell up at the ceiling, “who’s playing at the Apollo tomorrow night?”
*
Today I wake up to a cold morning, white with fog. Upstairs, a rumbling. Someone’s getting up, feet pounding across the floor. Downstairs, the sound of kids laughing, shrieking, the mother screaming. A plastic jug comes bang, bang, banging down the stairs.
A Christmas morning, just like any other.
Where is Santa? I wonder. Where are the candy canes? The lights on the Christmas tree? The tree? Where is the new red wagon? Who has fallen off the wagon again?
A new commotion down below. The kids are pounding on something. I decide to leave the building, to go for a walk on the quiet Christmas streets, and start down the stairs. On their front porch, the children have gathered around a big box, kicking at it then staring at it, as if waiting for someone to pop out. One of the toddlers is holding on to his little penis as if he cannot tear himself away, even for a second, to go.
Someone from the neighborhood, who knows who, must have left the box on the doorstep. A big box with a picture of happy kids on the front, riding their Big Wheel tricycles. Maybe the toddlers think those children are inside the box having fun. Maybe they picture the children wheeling around the tight corners, banking off the cardboard walls. The mother can’t assemble the thing, or won’t, so all the parts remain within, the wheel, the seat, the high handlebars. All that pretty plastic.
I forget about the walk. “Let’s find out what’s in here,” I say and drag the box through their front door, find a kitchen knife, slit open the cardboard top. The children gather round me on the dirty living room rug. No one says a word as I remove each part, the red seat, yellow handlebars, blue pedals, the big black Big Wheel. I pick up the plastic tool that came with the instructions and put the trike together while the mother is screaming in another room.
Late that evening I hear the sound of the Big Wheel slamming into furniture, careening off walls. It’s now way past the toddlers’ bedtime, way past. Before I turn the light off I whisper down through the floorboards, “Sleep tight, little ones, sleep tight,” then wonder: What does that mean, to sleep tight?
It’s the middle of the night and I’m awake. Somewhere people are sleeping. Somewhere they are far away in their dreams, in the clouds or on an island, in a meadow or by a stream. Somewhere it’s so quiet you can hear the breeze or hear the breath of someone lying next to you, that rhythm of in and out and in. Wherever those people are I want to join them, to sleep, to slumber. Slumber. How soft, how lovely the word. Let’s go slumming, slumming off to slumber.
I sit up in bed, look out the bedroom window. The sky is empty of planes, jets. There are no moving gnats of light. The sky is as clean as a slate, a blank, a swept path, empty but for the moon, a nightlight with no dimmer, casting light on a dark sea. I, too, am cast out from any chance of dreaming. If I stay on watch, I’ll never sleep again. I’ll be awake forever. I’ll toss and turn as this building tosses and turns, a ship on the high seas, and who will save me from this tossing and turning, who will toss out a life ring to catch me and all the others floating out here in the dark, Grandma and the granddaughters, the mother and the toddlers, the six year old, Frenchy, the one who drifted away, the children in the box?
All of us are lost at sea. All of us on this ship on a sea of trash.
I hear a noise from down below. A child crying out in his sleep, a cry that slips out of the cracks in the wall, the crack in the window, past the newsprint stuffed in the cracks to keep the cold from blowing in. What were the stories in the newspaper that day? Something about the cost of heating going up? A ferry that went down in a storm off the coast of Spain? The cry goes out into the surrounding field and the wild dogs, recognizing another animal, howl in return.
I stop. Listen. There’s another sound. Another reply. Then another. And another. Are they coming from the field or the street? Is it the high wire buzz of the crickets or a tire’s screech? The booming bass of the frogs or the bass beat of a boom box? Is he singing, the drunk on a tear, singing, his bottle’s high shatter, singing, the woman on the stoop, singing, the addict in the tunnel? Upstairs, the girls put on their skates and start to roll back and forth, back and forth. Tonight’s Apollo show is a rerun. Once again, Al Green is singing about love and happiness. In the field, the mice, the rabbits, the raccoons are singing. On the street, the sirens singing. If I listen close I can hear the song from an aerosol can, each sprayed letter’s high note, singing, singing.
Out on the street, I hear the night crowd slumming. Someone shouts, “Hey, what’s happening, man? How you doin’?”
I know the answer. “Hao hao,” I whisper.
Above us the stars whirl, across the great big wheel of the night sky. The wheel goes round and round. I lie my head back down on the pillow, pull the covers up. Amid the crying and the yelling, the singing and the screaming, we’re home, yes, home sweet goddamned home, and everyone on the ship falls deeply asleep. Together, we all just drift away.