Alan Sincic

Thick as it ever was, Maggie’s hair, but scored by the years, oxidized into an alloy of pewter and steel. Never did she mellow, not Maggie, never softened in the glow of the local boys who wooed her. Not for Maggie the Easter bonnet and the Permalift girdle and the Maybelline iridescent eye shadow stick. Not for Maggie the nosegay pressed in the pages of the album, or the dance cards in the shoebox under the bed, or the white linen envelop sprinkled with rose water and sealed with a button of wax and whispered away in the morning post.

But what about the seasoned men who circled her, who tried to win her, not with the weightless fire of the word of love, but with a bounty of tangible things? The bungalow bought and paid for, the larder full, the vineyard and the orchard and the bob of the orange at the edge of the grove, pluckable there, or so the suitors told her – Taylor and Pritchard and leathery Tomacetti with the broken smile and the nicotine stain at the tip of the nail – you reach up and it’s yours.

Behold. An ocean of oranges, behold, behold, and all for the taking if only she – could she would she – bring herself to – but no. Never for Maggie, no, to bend her will to any man. Not the preacher, not the druggist, not the neighbor with the cobbler shop and the backwater still and the Cross of the Order of the Knights of Malta glue-gunned onto the pommel of his sword. No. No. No neither did she ever did she take up with the truckers or the bikers or the pirates pitched up onto her doorstep by the wind, not even the broker with the red blazer and the manicure and the money clip aglow with a nobbet of blue sapphire the size of a hickory nut, the great Roger Babson of Wall Street renown, who stepped off the train en route to Miami that day and, inspired by the sight of her, the eyes ripe and the bosom firm and the landscape of the lips a provocation, bought the whole stock of her pies with a single bill.

         “Keep the change,” he said as he pressed the bill down on the counter, slid away his hand to show the number, smiled. “Tell you what. Spare me a kiss and…” He waited for her to look up at him. “Spare me a kiss and you can keep the pie.”

         “Got my fill of pie already.”

         “But you missing the one ingredient.”

         “Pie is pie.”

         “Secret ingredient.”

         “Now don’t tell me.”

         “The kiss.”

         “The kiss.” She looked him up and down. Not the look you give the pie you eat, no, no, but the look you give the tin you gotta – Christ Almighty – scrub. “Such a winning recipe, this kiss of yours?”

         “I don’t mean to brag.”

         “No. I should say not. Can’t be much of a kiss, you gotta bolster it with a bill.”

         “Hunnert dollar bill.”

         “Now you got me curious,” she said. She scooped up the bill. Stepped away from the table. Clip-clop, clip-clop, she – in that exaggerated limp she reserved for the most ardent of suitors – circled round to meet him face to face. The hundred she held between her fingers, rolled like a cigarette, like ladies when they solicit a light. She reached up to tap him on the chest, to slide the bill back into the vest pocket he’d pulled it from, then dropped back to take him all in. “What kind of a man are you, Mr. Babson?”

         He laughed.

         Calm as could be, like a tailor trimming a pleat, she looked down at his crotch. “Half a man?”

         “I don’t know what you – ”

         “Half. I figure half. Else why would you bring with you, in bed with you, a Ben Franklin to make up the difference?”

         A thing of beauty, that. And that pivot of hers, brisk, back behind the counter. That slow turn of his, back. Back up onto the train platform. That flush above the white band of the collar, that buffed-by-a-ten-dollar-barber pink of the cheeks parboiled now, red as a rotisserie ham. Damn.

         They say the polio scarred her, marred in her the image of God we all of us carry, the birthmark we ferry from mirror to mirror. May be. Could be. What becomes of a soul without a vision, vision of perfection to sing to itself in the dark? Submit? Surrender? Render unto God a breath already broken? Or harden the hand to make a fist, to – up under the bootheel of heaven -- a pebble?

         So what’ll it be, Maggie? What gives? Is it that love is a killer? So angry at the Maker – so full of fury – she sees in the face of the lover the face of God and (can you blame her?) strikes? Bitter beauty, that’s what they call it.  Oaken heart.

         But then how do you figure, come the dawn, at the sill of the window she pauses, gathers her hair and, as if the light were a lover, turns her face to the east? Morning after morning we – from up the road, from out the dark, and long the trek, and in the moment of passing catch her, the glance of her there, in a moment of wonder.

         Out the march I stumble or kneel or eddy – shoulder a sledge, cinch a bootlace, shaker up a smoke. In the shade of the oak I pause. Watch without her knowing.

         Up into the frame she flowers. How tender the flesh, in the moment of wonder, how innocent. Just so she tilts the curve of the cheek to catch, to parry, from away off yonder, the blush, the fire, as if to offer to that brute of a sun the best of herself, as if to surrender the flesh to (mercy) the red blade of another day.