Tiffany Days

Mickey was a thinker. She thought about a lot of things, and then she went and made herself a tunafish sandwich. She set her alarm an hour earlier than she planned to rise so she could have some thinking time. It was her brother’s opinion that she thought entirely too much, but he wore bowling shoes to school, so his opinion was generally disregarded.

Mickey didn’t have time to think on Mondays, and this perturbed her greatly. One particular Monday she slept through her thinking hour as usual and hauled ass to work without her make-up. The usual small crowd of hum drummers around the coffee vending machine was absent. The scene out the breakroom window was rusty and grey. Mickey dove for her headset and began making calls. Her interest in living wore thin as the morning wore on.

The Blessed Hour of Noon.

She left silver footprints on her way out the corporate door. Lunch was accomplished at a small, mock New York deli. The sun came from behind the clouds long enough to give her a spotlight where she sat Indian style at the counter. She was about to think when--

“That space for me?” A dark haired boy had pulled out the stool next to hers and was leaning over her crab salad sub. Mickey was taken by his dreamy eyes. She complied graciously and the Boy of Dark Curls took a seat at her side. He didn’t talk to her, but naturally she was prevented from thinking for the remainder of the half hour. Once his leg almost touched hers.

From the deli she high-tailed it to Job Number Two, where her presence was only required on Mondays. Job Number Two had not been her idea, and she resented it perpetually. It had been arranged by her supervisor at Job Number One, and at the time she had felt distinctly that her standing at the first job depended greatly upon her acceptance of the second. So it was now that she arrived to tend her supervisor’s sister’s three copper-skinned children.

Her golden hair floated around her head after she removed her knit cap. The children thought it hilarious. Mickey could not deny a certain fondness for the long-legged, dark-eyed trio. She had brought them battleship and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe today. But there was a certain indignity about being twenty-two years old and a regular babysitter.

The October day was appropriately cold. Leaves moved about the damp streets in crisp pirouettes that made Mickey think of music boxes. She also thought of Mr. Tumnus, and asked the children to gather round if they wanted to hear more about Lucy and her adventures in Narnia. The children were always up for stories.

Mr. Kabal across the street could see her through the window, and the black heads of the children. He had a dream of her, whirling slowly in his direction through a sheet of rain. He was a peculiarly idealistic man, despite the fact that the Fates had kicked him in the teeth more than once in his lifetime. He was forty years old and had lost a wife and two children in a train tragedy. His beautiful mother had died when he was sixteen, and he had broken his wrist in the same spot four times. Mickey was his angel. Tiny drops of white ice began to fly in little circles between his window and hers.

“A perfect day for orange blossom tea,” Mr. Kabal said. The walls stared back at him without agreeing or disagreeing. He put the kettle on.

The children remained enchanted with the Snow Queen and such for exactly forty-two minutes, at which time Nisa, the youngest, sighed and went to find a coloring book. Mickey was glad for the chance to rest her voice. She sent the other two off with a set of prisma pencils and flung herself into a red bean-bag chair. Thought descended upon her. Cold air drifted over her ears and face from the naked glass of the window. She half-dreamed that an Asian man was forcing a silver wire whisk down her throat.

“Mickey?” the oldest child said from the kitchen doorway. Her name was Tasine, and it suited her.

“Did you finish your pictures?” Mickey said.

“There’s something wrong with Nisa. I think she’s dead,” Tasine said. The calm over the room had not been disturbed. Mickey inhaled deeply once and let the air out, felt her rib cage shrinking and dropping. She speculated that the Asian man might be behind it. Tasine’s face came closer. “She’s lying under the card table. Won’t you come?”

The waking world crashed in upon Mickey and she got herself to the kitchen as fast as she could. Nisa’s face was pale. Mickey saw her amber eyes glimmering through the tiny slits in her eyelids. The middle child, a boy almost as girlish as his sisters, was leaning over Nisa. His name was Zezel, but he answered only to Z. “Z, how did this happen?” Mickey’s fingers had found a pulse along the slim neck of the child.

“I don’t know,” Z said, “I was in the other room.” He shifted his long legs across the linoleum. “Tasine, did a lobster do this? Was it a pink snake?”

Tasine had retreated into a corner of the kitchen and appeared to be praying. One slender brown hand grasped her opposite shoulder, and from the crown of her head her dark hair had slid over her lowered face. Her voice floated across the still air of the kitchen. “I dared her to drink it.” The kitchen smelled faintly of basil and tarragon and rose petals. Mickey’s eyes fell upon the empty bottle, blunt and reflecting softly the overhead light from under Nisa’s right hand.

“Z, call poison control,” Mickey said. She took up the bottle and turned it round in her palm. “What was it, Tasine?”

The girl was silent.

“Tasine? Tasine!” Mickey flew across the room and lifted Tasine’s head. Water trembled in the pink rim of her right eye.

“I don’t know what it was. Something of mother’s. I don’t know what it was.”

Z lifted his mouth from the receiver and said, “The lady wants to know what Baby took.” Mickey took the telephone from Z’s hand and placed it in its cradle. She scooped Nisa up and headed for her car.

“Lock the door on your way out, Z.”

Mr. Kabal watched Mickey moving about in the white flurries with the dark child in her bare, pale arms. The snow crystals began to collect in her golden curls. The thought occurred to him that she might be poetry, and not a girl at all. He remained at the window for four minutes after her silver Rabbit had pulled away. He sipped orange blossom tea thoughtfully, with his index finger hooked over the rim of the red china so that its pink tip rested in the tea.

“I wonder what’s wrong with that child.” Mr. Kabal’s voice was medium-pitched and particularly pleasant. Not musical, but kind to the ear. It lay flatly on the air in the emptiness of his sitting room. Mr. Kabal was not meant to be alone. He was meant to be a leader. He had dreams and visions that would have shocked and amazed any person with the intelligence to have recognized their genius. His head was not like everyone else’s. His brain was smooth, like marble. His thoughts came with ringing clarity. His sense of smell was extraordinary. The most extraordinary sense of smell yet to exist, if it had ever been tested.

He removed himself from the eight-paned window to his writing desk and began writing Mickey a letter.

Mickey returned just before dark with the children. Nisa had swallowed a bottle of rose oil and was put immediately to bed. Tasine had recovered from whatever sulk she had been in and taken it into her head to teach Z the Russian alphabet out of her notebook on the way home. Z was not interested. Tasine continued her new career until dinner was ready, scribbling the letters over and over in blue ink and becoming irritated each time Z refused to try them.

Mickey steamed brussel sprouts over the black surface of the range and chopped slippery pieces of boneless chicken with a delightfully sharp paring knife. The snow had been at rest for a good hour. A light sprinkling glittered under the streetlight. Her eyelids had begun to droop by the time her employers returned. The chicken was not burned, however. The chicken came out shining and perfect, speckled with yellow-gold clusters of lemon pepper.

The month of October faded into blackness, drifted away on the red-grey chimney smoke from the middle-class housing neighborhoods. Noon on the first Monday in November found Mickey tripping over the silver door stop as she left the office. The silver paint left a moon-shaped scuff on her patent leather loafers. She hurried to the supermarket to pick up some tulip bulbs for the children instead of stopping for lunch.

Mr. Years ran the little net bags through the checkout and brushed a tiny white feather from Mickey’s dark sweater.

“Tulips are the Polky Dotty’s flower,” he said.

“What?” Mickey said.

“Are you going to grant Mr. Kabal’s wish, little one?” Mr. Years placed the bulbs in a beige plastic grocery sack. It rustled and shimmered like satin under his hands. Mickey had been “little one” to Mr. Years for as long as she could remember. But--

“Who is Mr. Kabal?” she said.

“The Egg Gentleman. He asked me about you yesterday.” Mickey heard keys jangling behind her in line somewhere.

She said, “I’d better go now, dear. I’ll visit you on Saturday when I do my shopping.”

The streets glowed bronze in the peculiar gold of winter sunlight. Tasine was sitting Indian style on the red bean bag when Mickey entered the house, cutting snowflakes out of aluminum foil. Z stood a few feet away with a book closed over one hand. He said, “You’re going to rip them. I’ll make you a tiara that won’t rip.” Tasine handed him the box of foil. Her long face was very pretty in the yellow light. Tasine sometimes needed to wear a tiara, aluminum foil or no.

“I don’t see Baby,” Mickey said. A light wind was blowing through the house. It was precisely half way between cold and hot in temperature. Tasine’s hair moved slightly away from her forehead.

Tasine said, “She had the chills again. Mama took her to the city this morning.” Z worked his brown hands around a few crumpled lengths of foil.

He said, “Now Tasine is Queen of the Fishes. She gets to drink starfish blood and pour glitter all over her tail.” Tasine looked at him. Her eyes were very dark. Z’s hands moved deftly over the silver strips until he had constructed a glittering, skeletal frame and twisted it around his sister’s ears and gleaming, blue-black hair.

“Don’t talk nonsense, Z,” Mickey said. She tucked the bulbs away in her rainslicker pocket. Nisa was the one who liked flowers. Z’s head snapped upward.

He said, “Mickey. We found some letters for you. Between the doors on Sunday. His eyes looked especially liquid as his slim hands pushed and molded more strips of foil. “You should have one, too,” he said. “You are the Countess of Featherquilt. It is your privelege to rain nickels and read letters.” Z secured the crown in her curls and disappeared into the dining room. He returned with a neat packet of four letters and placed it in her open palm. Each was addressed to her name in a fine, smooth hand across the front.

Z turned on all the lamps in the house while Mickey read the letters. They were long and personal. The sentences were so tight Mickey thought they might shatter into little bits of colored glass if they were not read gently. The signature that met her eyes at the end of each last ivory page was that of a Mr. Jaret Kabal. “The Egg Gentleman ... “ Mickey said.

Toward the end of dusk time Mickey noticed the man sitting on a porch across the street. He was old. The coolness of the day seemed to set him off in a way that was favorable. He looked well in it. She thought she might like to meet him, this man.

December came with icicles, running all up and down the copper shingles like stalactites. The sidewalks grew slick with dark ice. Mickey walked slowly to the door where Z’s face could be seen dimly through the stained glass. He handed her a letter as she entered. She looked it over and then put it in her slicker pocket. The envelope was covered all over in writing. Every sentence had significance--every curve of every letter spoke of its author. It was the kind of note that had to be read twice or more. Not because it was not understood on the first reading, but simply because it needed to be read again.

Nisa sat upright on a dining room chair. Her hair was pulled away from her face with a plethora of bobby pins. Tasine was at the head of the table, her glossy head bent over a book. She glanced up momentarily as Mickey entered. Mickey had come to enjoy her time with the children. And she had come to enjoy her letters. When the childrens’ father had left she extracted the thin paper and began to read. A pencil fell from behind Tasine’s ear and clattered on the table.

Tasine said, “Mr. Kabal doesn’t have any fingernails.” Z stood in the shadow of the door, a rainbow pattern etched on the white highlights of his hair. He didn’t say anything. Mickey wondered if it was true. She had never been face to face with him.

“Don’t talk nonsense,” she said.

“Ask Z. He saw.”

“I don’t care what--” Mickey began.

“He doesn’t,” Z said.

The Egg Gentleman.

Mickey put her letter away without finishing it and scooted the children into the game room to watch a dolphin movie.

Mr. Kabal had his finger in his tea again. He was walking about the kitchen on fire. He was having ideas. He had been so intent on them that he had missed Mickey’s coming. There was a building in his mind--a rounded monstrosity all covered in irregular shadows that haunted him. He looked at the walls around his kitchen. The white walls no longer comforted him. He needed them to be ice blue. He needed them to be ice blue immediately. He paced and paced and thought perhaps he ought to write Mickey a second letter for the day. He wanted her to know about the building. No--he wanted her to build it. He could smell basil coming from the house across the street.

“Mickey,” he heard himself say. The building roared and flared in his head. It no longer felt smooth inside to him.

The children didn’t take to the movie well. They had already started moving when they smelled the smoke from Mr. Kabal’s house.